Shoveling Smoke

Mazzarella William Mazzarella

Description

A leading Bombay advertising agency justifies as traditionally Indian the highly eroticized images it produces to promote the KamaSutra condom brand. Another agency struggles to reconcile the global ambitions of a cellular-phone service provider with the ambivalently local connotations of the client's corporate brand. When the dream of the 250 million-strong "Indian middle class" goes sour, Indian advertising and marketing professionals search for new ways to market "the Indian consumer"-now with added cultural difference-to multinational clients.An examination of the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace, Shoveling Smoke is a pathbreaking and detailed ethnography of the contemporary Indian advertising industry. It is also a critical and innovative intervention into current theoretical debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and visual culture. William Mazzarella traces the rise in India during the 1980s of mass consumption as a self-consciously sensuous challenge to the austerities of state-led developmentalism. He shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship between the local and the global and, ironically, turned advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Development studies
• Biological anthropology
• Advertising
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 août 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385196
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SHOVELING SMOKE

SHOVELING SMOKE

Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India

w i l l i a m m a z z a r e l l a

duke uni versi ty press

durham and london 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Rebecca M. Giménez

Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Typeset in Sabon by

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1. Locations: Advertising and the New Swadeshi 2. Elaborations: The Commodity Image 37

3

Part One 3. Citizens Have Sex, Consumers Make Love: KamaSutra I 4. The Aesthetic Politics of Aspiration: KamaSutra II 99

Part Two 5. Bombay Global: Mobility and Locality I 6. Bombay Local: Mobility and Locality II

149 185

59

Part Three 7. Indian Fun: Constructing ‘‘the Indian Consumer’’ I 215 8. Close Distance: Constructing ‘‘the Indian Consumer’’ II 250

Notes 289 Works Cited Index 351

331

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Tamilnad Mercantile Bank. Swadeshi in an age of globalization.

2. India Non Stop. Indian soul, international feel.

15

3. Lintas:India. The cult of creativity given civilizational legitimation. 29

4. KamaSutra. From the launch campaign, 1991.

62

5. Amul Butter. Political insatiability reworked in a consumerist register. 67

6. Hindustan Thompson Associates. Advertising: A public service? 94

7. Taj Mahal Inter-Continental. Urbanely loquacious Churchgate Set advertising. 113

8. KamaSutra in 1996: Pornography or erotica?

136

9. Heritage. Auto-orientalism: Woman mediates cultural self- discovery. 142

7

10. Park Avenue by Raymond. World-class Indianness?

11. Vicco. Globalization as wishful thinking.

12. Zenith. Valorizing screwdriver technology.

152

155

13.ocmSuitings. Global dominance on Mama’s terms.

151

209

14. Johnson and Johnson Acuvue. Modernity as perspicacity.

15. Hindustan Petroleum. ‘‘Indian fun.’’

240

16. Indian Terrain. Consumerism as bulwark of cultural difference. 277

219

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first of all like to thank the members of my dissertation com- mittee, Lawrence Cohen, Nelson Graburn, Allan Pred, and Brian Moeran, for their advice and unstinting support throughout the some- times turbulent times that saw the gestation and production of the Ph.D. thesis that was the firstavataraof this book. During the last few years, several others have also offered me the privilege of their direct critical engagement with the ideas and materials presented in the following pages, and I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to them: Kalman Applbaum, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jennifer Cole, Michael Cole, John Comaroff, Vikram Doctor, Wendy Doniger, Robert Foster, Susan Gal, Keith Hart, Raminder Kaur, Tanya Luhr- mann, Merete Mazzarella, Rebecca McLennan, Jennifer Moore, Chris- tian Novetzke, Peter Phipps, Arvind Rajagopal, Peter Redfield, Dani- lyn Rutherford, Kathleen Stewart, James Watson, Kimberly Wright, and two anonymous readers for Duke University Press. More generally, my colleagues at the University of Chicago Department of Anthropol- ogy have, during the latter stages of writing this book, provided me with an incomparably stimulating intellectual environment. Christian Hellman and Jan Åkerwall were crucially involved in the very earliest stages of conceiving and facilitating the project. Raminder Kaur and Shoma Munshi provided me with invaluable leads at a time when I still had only the vaguest notions of what and whom I was