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Making of the Popular: Production of Culture and Discourses in Bangladesh by Manosh Chowdhury
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This book aims to illustrate how the 'popular' is not an arbitrary outcome as it is claimed to be, and how the project of constructing the popular functions as a web composed of different agents - governmental and state agencies, the media, corporate groups, development agencies, and the military with subtle nuances. Different agencies overlap in many aspects but work as a pact for making a national-popular. With specific references to Bangladesh, this book tends to illuminate how these agencies share similar missions and objectives, create spaces to collaborate with each other, and, regardless of specific disputes among them, maintain and manifest an oligarchic relationship. This is the flexible, yet definitive, location of the popularizing project - a 'cultural mission' of the ruling systems. It would deny a simplistic understanding of popular culture and posit the question of the popular within a complex web of social agencies in a particular space, at a specific historical juncture. Making popular here is integral to claiming populist credibility both as a cultural and political mission. It is cultural in the way the projects are launched and manifested and seek to reveal certain meanings. It is political in terms of configuring indoctrination over its subjects, mostly in the form of nationalist exhibitions. The project is becoming even more important for the corporate groups as it does not necessarily contest the state machinery but rather takes it as a 'de facto' ally.
Manosh Chowdhury is a professor of anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. Over the years, he has taught undergraduate courses in photojournalism, media studies, literature, architecture, and archaeology. He has also written extensively in academic, polemic, and popular forums and has authored many books in Bangla. In addition, he has published seven anthologies of short stories and served on the editorial board of 'Depart', Bangladesh's first art magazine.He earned a Master's in (social) anthropology from Bangladesh in 1990 before completing a PhD in cultural dynamics at Hiroshima University, Japan. However, his interests and work extend beyond disciplinary boundaries. While he has written many books in Bangla, he is best known in Bangladesh as an orator.
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