The book under review looks at the ongoing process of meaning making and self-representation of social groups that have remained outside the bounds of the dominant public sphere marked by formal politics and rational communicative action in contemporary Nepal. Graded social hierarchies in South Asia, along with circumscribed interaction between subaltern social groups have always posed a challenge for the emergence of a unified, standardised and rationalised public. The very modes of meaning making, self-representation of social groups, dialogic traditions, social interaction, mutuality and cooperative relations happen within a certain historical specificity. For long, postcolonial theory has not only attempted to make sense of these processes that stand outside the recognised liberal enlightenment traditions, including legality, rationality, constitutionality and formal electoral politics, but also foregrounded the need to frame such alternative practices in their own terms rather than in comparison to the established liberal modalities. The current book frames the question of public culture along the lines it was elaborated by Arjun Appadurai and Breckenridge, referring essentially to a process constituting identities through the ‘experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life’.

中文翻译：

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Michael J. Hutt和Pratyoush Onta编辑，《 1990年后尼泊尔的政治变革与公共文化》

本书正在审视中的社会群体不断发展的意义和自我代表的过程，这些过程仍处于当代尼泊尔尼泊尔以正式政治和理性交往为标志的公共领域之外的范围。南亚的等级社会等级制，以及次要社会群体之间的界限分明的互动，一直对统一，标准化和合理化的公众的出现构成挑战。含义的表达，社会群体的自我代表，对话传统，社会互动，相互关系和合作关系的特定模式发生在一定的历史特定性内。长期以来，后殖民理论不仅试图弄清公认的自由主义启蒙传统之外的这些过程，包括合法性，合理性，立宪和正式的选举政治，但也提出了需要以自己的方式而不是与已建立的自由主义模式进行比较来构架此类替代做法。当前的书是按照阿琼·阿帕杜赖（Arjun Appadurai）和布雷肯里奇（Breckenridge）阐述的路线来描述公共文化的问题，本质上是指通过“体验与日常生活实践有关的大众化形式来构成身份的过程”。