“Rosita Armytage has compiled a fascinating ethnography of elite businessmen and their families in Pakistan…[Her] work is a carefully constructed and nuanced picture of elites in Pakistan, enlivened by her rich ethnographic content which is used skilfully to illustrate wider findings… a nuanced and thoroughly contextualised piece of research.” • Bloomsbury Pakistan
“A rich, very insightful and highly engaging biography of Pakistan’s business and industrial elite.” • Nafisa Shah, Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan.
“An entertaining, surprising, and lively account of the secret life of the global elite in their particular parochial Pakistani setting. Scholars of Pakistan, of economic and political anthropology, and of development, will all surely look forward to this book with eager anticipation.” • Caroline Schuster, Australian National University
Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.
Rosita Armytage is an anthropologist specialising in elites, social class, capitalism, and global development. Her recent publications include ‘Elite ethnography in an insecure place: The methodological implications of “studying up” in Pakistan’, Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2018).
LC: HC440.5.Z9 A76 2020
BISAC: SOC050000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Social Classes; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural
BIC: KCP Political economy; JHMC Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
