Over the past decade, there has been a discernible rise in the number of wellness centers and fitness studios in urban cities in India. These centers are spatial manifestations of the rise in a particular type of "self-care" regimes and "body projects" in modern social imaginary prevalent in urban India, predominantly enabled by the rise of middle-class consumer culture. While the literature on fitness spaces and wellness clubs in Western contexts is instructive to a very large extent, the local particularities of consumption experiences in non-Western contexts require contextualized empirical research in order to better inform modern theories of consumption. This article is a study of a wellness center in the South Indian city of Chennai. Using ethnographic methods, I attempt to unpack the experience of consuming wellness in a space that ostensibly claims to remedy the ills of modern living while doing so in a culturally traditional and "Indian" manner. I show how the experiences of predominantly middle-class consumers here are dictated not by a sentimental attachment to tradition or locality, but by a vocabulary of speaking that primarily favors a language of consumer choice and rational decision-making. Whether or not that is the case, the way in which consumption of an "Indian" brand of wellness occurs demonstrates the stronghold of the language of consumer choice making the space at the wellness center a performative arena for self-identity formation to occur.
Last of the Summer Wine (BBC, 1973–2010) was filmed in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, UK, for 37 years. Consequently, it has affected collective memories of the space and place of the region. Summer Wine has become embedded into the area and exists as part of everyday communicative memory in which fictional representations, oral histories, embodied practices, sensory engagements and lived experiences collide. In examining Summer Wine’s continued presence in Holmfirth even after it has ceased production, we investigate how the series as a text, institution and brand serves to spatially inform Holmfirth and construct, embed and inform cultural memory.
This article explores indigenous Andean perspectives on the relationship between mining and mountains. It briefly elaborates on how, in Andean worlds, mountains are intentional agents that are crucial members of society. Paying central attention to the materiality of these beings, the article compares the different social logics at play in, on the one hand, contexts of underground mining and, on the other, those of the recent open-pit mines. Using ethnographic data from Cuzco and Ancash (Peru) as well as previous ethnographies of mining practices in Bolivia and Peru, the article analyses how underground mining involved indigenous workers and practices that engaged the mined earth-beings. In contrast, in recent open-pit mines, there are very few workers from the surrounding communities, and indigenous practices engaging earth-beings became invisible. Underground mining is assumed to damage and threaten the fertility of the mined earth-beings but it is not seen as endangering their existence. In contrast, recent open-pit mines are only made possible by destroying earth-beings and extracting metal from their corpses.