| In this dissertation, I argue that mobility, both social and geographical, is a useful way of thinking about social distinction in a context that has been continually produced as unstable. The variability that has been described in terms of instability and unpredictability poses a challenge to narratives of class reproduction, but thereby serves to complement models of embodied inequality and social relationality developed by theorists of stratification, foremost among them sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi, Pakistan, at the core of the research is a neighborhood known, as many Karachi neighborhoods are, as the turf or heartland of a political organization. I maintain that focusing on ordinary middle-class Urdu speaking residents, rather than institutional politics and party workers, can help us better understand the modalities of social distinction in which radicalized actors are enmeshed.;The first chapter provides an historical overview tracing watershed moments of social mobility in postcolonial Karachi, which contributed both to an imaginary of class as malleable, and the discursive emergence of becoming middle-class among Urdu speakers. The second chapter explores how structural conditions are articulated in the symbolic capital operationalized through neighborhood monikers and the semiotic transference between Karachi residents and their places of residence. In the third chapter, the trajectories of residential mobility of three families elaborate how and in what ways the urban landscape has been reshaped by the movements of its residents. Through optical narrative tropes, discussed in the fourth chapter, Karachi residents perceive distinction through performative display, aspirational consumption and practices of respectability. The fifth chapter examines the tactics by which Urdu speakers living on the turf of the MQM avoid both formal involvement in party politics, and the call to identify with identity politics. |
