University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Summer 2010 Youth and Status in Tamil Nadu, India Constantine V. Nakassis University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Nakassis, Constantine V., "Youth and Status in Tamil Nadu, India" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 227. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/227 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/227 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Youth and Status in Tamil Nadu, India Abstract This sociocultural anthropological study looks at youth culture in Tamil Nadu, India, focusing on college- age youth in Madurai and Chennai. The dissertation first shows how outhy experience their position in the larger Tamil society as “being outside of.” This exteriority is manifest in youth concepts of status and gender, the signs and activities which express such status and gender, and the social spaces in which such signs and activities are played out. In particular, the dissertation focuses on how the youth peer group is dually shaped as an exterior space of youth status negotiation—as exterior to adult norms of authority (and thus a space of status-raising qua transgression) and as exterior to norms of hierarchical ranking (and thus an egalitarian space of status-leveling, intimacy, and reciprocity). It is this tension between status-raising and -lowering which the dissertation shows to be crucially at play in how youth engage with and deploy various status-ful signs.