Over the past decade, a new kind of restaurant has appeared in the Kathmandu Valley – the dance bar or, similarly, the 'cabin restaurant'. These places cater to an all-male crowd who come to drink local spirits, eat snacks and ogle girls dancing suggestively to Hindi and Nepali pop songs. Such establishments appear to have done a roaring trade even during the most fraught years of the Maoist 'people's war', and can now be found throughout the valley, from the backpacker district of Thamel to respectable suburbs. It is not sex tourists that are being catered to here, but a new kind of customer altogether – the middle-class Nepali male.
The emergence of the dance bar is one of the most immediately striking of a variety of cultural transformations taking place in the Kathmandu Valley, which are the subject matter of this new collection of essays. Liechty's focus on urban cultural practices marks a departure from the existing body of anthropological writing about Nepal, which has been dominated by studies of rural societies. These essays deal exclusively with Kathmandu, since the city is a place where Nepalis are feeling the impact of globalisation in a unique way. The dance bar is significant because it takes food and sex (both traditionally controlled by strict ideas about 'purity' and 'contamination' among Nepal's predominantly Hindu middle class), and repackages them as commodities for the free market.
This is not the only area of middle-class life where such a process is occurring. Other forms of consumerism, such as viewing of English- and Hindi-language videos, eating in restaurants, wearing make-up and even watching 'blue' movies have similarly brought the most intimate aspects of Nepali life out of the recesses of the home and into newly constructed public spaces. Out Here in Kathmandu explores a city where new, enticing foods, goods and services, ranging from momos and apple pie to Chinese electronics and sexual favours, are appearing on nearly every corner.
On first glance, the consumer choices of Kathmandu's middle class might seem like a frivolous subject given that Nepal continues to struggle amidst massive poverty and rampant food insecurity. However, the country's middle class has become a subject of growing interest over the past year for a variety of reasons. In May 2010, members of the urban middle classes were instrumental in pressuring the Maoists to abandon their 'indefinite shutdown' of the country, called as a means to bring down the 22-member coalition government. Small-scale business owners and urban professionals formed the bulk of the counter-demonstrators, who gathered in the capital to vent their anger at the strike, which had brought daily life to a crippling standstill for six days. Less than 24 hours after their protest, the Maoists backed down.