Description
Book SynopsisA detailed ethnography of the Indian advertising industry. This title is also a critical and innovative intervention into the theoretical debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics and visual culture. It is an examination of the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalised marketplace.
Trade Review"
Shoveling Smoke is an extremely rich ethnography. One of the first anthropological studies of advertising in India, it is a truly pioneering piece of work."—Purnima Mankekar, author of
Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India"Theoretically ambitious and yet firmly grounded in the concrete, William Mazzarella's brilliantly imaginative ethnography of advertising and consumer practices in India ranks among the very best of globalization studies. Students of global forms of modernity will have much to learn from this book."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of
Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern StudiesTable of ContentsIllustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
1. Locations: Advertising and the New Swadeshi 3
2. Elaborations: The Commodity Image 37
Part One
3. Citizens Have Sex, Consumers Make Love: KamaSutra I 59
4. The Aesthetic Politics of Aspiration: KamaSutra II 99
Part Two
5. Bombay Global: Mobility and Locality I 149
6. Bombay Local: Mobility and Locality II 185
Part Three
7. Indian Fun: Constructing "the Indian Consumer" I 215
8. Close Distance: Constructing "the Indian Consumer" II 250
Notes 289
Works Cited 331
Index 351
