Readings: Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke

1. Mazzarella writes, "Indeed, one of the underlying assumptions of this book is that it is only in the flow of pratice that the duality of the commodity form becomes properly apparent" (45). What is this duality, and how does it stem from Marxist analysis? What role does advertising play as a form of practice illuminating this duality?

2. What is the totalization narrative of globalization, and how does Mazzarella claim his ethnography disputes it? Do you find his examples and analysis convincing? What understandings of globalization emerge in place of the totalization narrative?

3. What does Mazzarella mean by the commodity image? How does the Kama Sutra ad campaign illustrate the gap between concretion and abstraction that Mazzarella sees as central to commodities?

4. How does advertising in India present visions of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern? How, in each of the examples Mazzarella provides, do advertising professionals become defenders of cultural integrity and avatars of world-class identities and aspirational consumption? With what consequences?

5. While Mazzarella examines sex in advertising, he only briefly explores the gendered aspects of the commodity image. How might greater attention to gender alter his analysis of advertising and globalization?

 

Question for Response Paper #8 (optional): Global and Local Consumerism

In recent years, theorists of globalization have turned their attention away from the global spread of modes of production and begun to focus on the implications of the worldwide spread of certain forms of consumerism. This in turn has raised the specter of a loss of local culture in the face of increasingly global or Americanized forms of consumer culture. Picking one concrete exampple from Mazzarella's book, analyze how he depicts advertising in India as navigating between "local" and "global" dimensions of consumerism. How does he use this example to complicate the totalization narrative of globalization? Are you persuaded by his claims? Why or why not?

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