Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India

by William Mazzarella

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.

Genres: Anthropology, India, Ethnography

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting but not a page-turner Summer reading sort of thing.

[Lilly Irani · Rating 4 out of 5]

An awesome and pretty readable investigation of globalization, "culture clash," and the advertising design industry. The insights seem relevant to ux design, from a broad cultural perspective.

It does have the standard academic monograph format of introductory chapter that densely summarizes the book, a chapter that sets up the theorists he takes on, and then secitons that investigate different aspects of the topic. The book makes arguments against the mcworld homogenization of globalization. It also gives detailed accounts of how images get produced and designed in practice, challenging theorists of semiotics and visual studies to account for the messy, indirect ways ideas, stakeholder constraints, and even image production tools become the subjects of their analysis.

[Ггг Ггг · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent book. Maybe deserves 3 stars, but I try to rate books pretty harshly. Meaning my 5's are books that really stood out to me.

Most memorable point to this book for me and one that transcends the narrow focus of Mazzarella's discussion is his observation that the middle class concept used by researches and marketers to analyze India (and similar countries) is absolutely drained of its analytical value due to the specific class nature of underdeveloped capitalism.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting book that sheds light on advertising and globalization not only for India, but worlwide. i recommend this book for anthropologists and anyone who is interested in reading about or understanding the role advertising and globalization plays in their daily lives.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hated this book while I was reading it because of how tortuously slow the process was. However, the message behind this book is absolutely amazing and I learned so much on the process of globalization in the Indian culture by the time I'd finished it. All in all, worth the struggle

[Jamie Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book for my economic anthropology course

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is somewhat dorky, but I bought this because it's my professor's book.