Sony Tv India

William Mazzarella. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. 364, references, index. US$22.95 (Pb.), ISBN 0-8223-3145-4; US$79.95 (Hc.), ISBN 0-8223-3109-8.

Watching cable TV in a sweetshop in Sydney, I am as thoroughly seduced by the unique visual style of Indian media as by the milky rasmalai I am devouring. I am dumbly entranced by what appears to be an increasing fusion of images of Indian tradition and global modernity, in the flow of advertising, music clips and movie sequences. From my external and externalising position, it all looks seamless, a free-floating bricolage of commodity images entirely separated from social use and everyday experience. It's not, of course.

William Mazzarella's Shoveling Smoke examines these rapidly changing aesthetic productions by focusing historically and ethnographically on the Indian advertising industry. The title of the book alludes to the elusive nature of advertising and its task of merchandising the 'evanescent substance' of commodity desires (p.35). Nevertheless, Mazzarella is concerned to circumvent totalising narratives of commodified culture, whether emanating from the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard or Sahlins. Rather than reading commodity images as fabulously seductive texts on the one hand, or as a pernicious projection of false consciousness on the other, Mazzarella locates the advertising industry within an evolving field of cultural production that is strongly conditioned by a complex history of strategic compromise and complicity, with both the modernising strategies of the state, and with local and international capital. Advertising firms have negotiated the postcolonial shifts from the Nehruvian development state to the liberalised economy, the emergence of new cultural nationalisms, and the strong emergence of middle class values which have nevertheless failed to establish a general hegemony. An aesthetic fusion of imaginings of 'Indian tradition' and of transcendent commodity desires is generated in the context of the Indian public's sense of 'being behind' in the contest of global development and a modernity largely defined from without. Advertising practice negotiates these temporal ambiguities, simultaneously attempting to present the possibility of instant gratification (arrival of modernity) and the everyday awareness of a lagging or delay of modernity.

Mazzarella presents three well-targeted case studies of advertising campaigns of the 1990s. The aesthetic practices of marketing condoms, mobile phones and colas bring out the tensions between imaginings of Indian 'tradition' and globalising modernity. For instance, the branding of Kama Sutra condoms utilised the association with a stereotypical Indian cultural text, while drawing on a 'global', i.e. Western, erotic repertoire. Mazzarella shows how the controversial Kama Sutra campaign had to combine a 'public service' role with aspirational fantasies of sexual freedom. Kama sutra condoms were constructed as 'doing social good' in the realms of population control and sate sex. At the same time the ads contained an implied critique of the 'propaganda' style of government family planning, presenting a glamorous 'world class product' tar removed from the 'government' condom. Mazzarella argues that the Kama Sutra condom campaigns were faced with the need to 'eroticize not simply consumer goods, but public speech in general' (p. 95). We also see the balancing act of projecting good taste in an environment of moral conservatism: presenting 'the pleasure of making love' without being vulgar; producing airbrushed images of women that were classy and sophisticated without being too foreign and distant from the Indian public.

The case studies serve to illustrate the practical negotiation of the contradictory aspects of India's accelerated insertion into the global commodity world in the 1990s. Advertisers tried to walk a line between too localised an image (too provincial), too global and removed from everyday life, or combat the spectre of Indian products not being good enough i.e. sexing up locally produced products in the climate of aspirations for Nokia or Sony. On the other hand they had to deal with fantasies of 'resistance' to global brands, for instance the persistence of local products such as Thums Up cola versus Coca Cola, which was for a long time banned in India. While advertising professionals were shown to have a interest in developing a wider understanding of their audience, we also get a sense of the limitations of their social perspectives, typically Bombay based, male, and steeped in contending advertising philosophies with origins in Britain or America. The ethnography provides a glimpse of the structural division of labour within advertising agencies, borne out in the tensions between the 'creative' habitus of copywriters and the more careful judgments of account executives attunement to 'market realities'.

The ethnographic picture is sometimes frustratingly slow in emerging, amidst the book's tangle of theoretical ruminations. Nevertheless, I found it worthwhile grappling with Mazzarella's theoretical synthesis of Marxist aesthetic theory, postcolonial analysis and a reworking of anthropological tropes (for instance a reworking of gift exchange theory to apply to branding practices). Shoveling Smoke is a valuable contribution to the anthropological analysis of commodity relations and aesthetic practices, demonstrating how advertising practice is good to think the multiple contradictions at play within globalising consumer economies.

Phillip Mar

Anthropology, University of Sydney

COPYRIGHT 2005 Australian Anthropological Society
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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