From ‘evil eye’ anxiety to the desirability of envy: Status,consumption and the politics of visibility in urban south India

Abstract

Competing motivations characterise consumption practices in contemporary south India. While status-conscious Tamils are desirous of displaying wealth so as to signal kauravam (‘prestige’), such public displays risk eliciting tiruṣṭi (‘evil eye’). Based on field research in urban Tamil Nadu, the article argues that this tension—between the desire to display wealth and signal social status, and the fear that such displays will invite supernatural attack—is being resolved through newfound practices of tiruṣṭi prophylaxis. Prophylactic amulets are used to manage and divert the tiruṣṭi-bearing gazes of onlookers from things of value. The newest amulets of the Tamil Nadu public sphere capitalise upon the eye-catching ability of the normative tiruṣṭi prophylactic to directly index, rather than mask, the social status that protective amulets are deployed to protect. Today, a range of expensive consumer goods are utilised as prophylactics. Because the need to protect oneself from tiruṣṭi can itself be a sign of status, such expensive amulets serve to simultaneously protect and project the prestige of their deployers. Lower-status individuals, however, are policed in their acts of tiruṣṭi prophylaxis. Here, a politics of visibility—with respect to caste, class, gender and skin colour—conditions the ‘appropriateness’ of acts of tiruṣṭi prophylaxis.