In his book, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society, published two decades ago, anthropologist Mark Liechty presented a compelling ethnography on the relationship between emerging cultures of consumerism, media, and youth in the context of social class formation in urban Nepal. Historically, it was situated at a point in time—during the 1990s—when Nepal had recently transitioned from authoritarian system of absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy, and when status hierarchies based on socio-economic standing were gradually becoming more manifest in an otherwise predominantly caste-based society. In line with observations from elsewhere in South Asia on the significance of education in class formation (Baviskar and Ray 2015; Jayadeva 2019; Radhakrishnan 2011), the ability to pay for education on the private market became an important way of negotiating and laying claim to middle-class status in a context of increasing commodification of education and a monetised economy (Liechty 2003: 213).

Liechty’s analysis offers a productive vantage point for a broader discussion of the class/education nexus in Nepal, as his argument is embedded in a set of oppositional categories, which are fundamental for understanding how class is produced. As noted, but not foregrounded, by Liechty, education as a consumer good becomes instrumental in the claim for social-class membership. Engaging and expanding Liecthy’s work, this paper argues that comparison operates as a logic endemic to processes of education and social-class formation in Nepal by stimulating desire for commodified forms of education, producing paired label divisions (rich/poor, developed/undeveloped, educated/uneducated, moral/immoral, etc.), and promoting an Enlightenment-based logic of aspiration for modern schooling. In the field of comparative and international education, the analytical tool of comparison has long been associated with Enlightenment modes of collecting, systematising, and ranking—an epistemology that was central to the production of colonial notions of difference (Sobe 2017). In recent efforts to rethink this methodology, scholars have increasingly sought to broaden comparative modes of understanding by incorporating the concepts of relationality and reflexivity (Sobe 2018). This paper engages and expands these developments by elucidating a reflexive anthropological approach to comparison. In this vein, and based on ethnographic projects on the education/social class nexus carried out independently by the authors, the paper engages in a reflexive and multi-layered comparative analysis through comparisons that we establish analytically across our research projects. This includes the comparisons that people we study make, the comparisons that we and our interlocutors make in the ethnographic encounter, and historically through the way in which we and other anthropologists narrate the field.