Isabella FassiDr. Jeff Bennett

ANTHRO 103Memo 86/12/11

In “Advertising and Global Culture,” Noreene Janus explains the emergence of “transnational culture” as intentionally brought about through the omnipresent and pre-cisely directed advertising undertaken by multinational corporations. Janus describes the use of certain themes, namely youthfulness, beauty, success, happiness, and white-ness, as the marketing tools that transmit the primary message of transnational corpora-tions: if you want the “good” life, i.e. the life we sell, consume - and then consume some more. Although the use of the same advertisements across the globe saves corpora-tions time and money, it has also seriously disrupted the identities of localized cultures. These ubiquitous advertising campaigns do the most damage in “developing” nations where the products being advertised are frequently desired and rarely obtained. On an economic level, this emphasis on the Western and the new has eroded the ability of de-veloping nations to sustain themselves, resulting in a new form of colonialism. On social and psychological levels, these advertisements have threatened the cultural and per-sonal identities of the people on which they are imposed. Janus ends by reinforcing the notion that the targets of transnational marketing, materially impoverished peoples, are those who make the strongest associations between consumption and happiness, and thus, are most likely to value Western goods over locally produced goods.

The film “Life and Debt” reflects much of Janus’s article, particularly the idea that economic self-reliance within “developing” nations is discouraged in a global free mar-ket. The film also comments on the philosophy of neoliberalism that has spawned neo-colonialism, which has, in turn, crippled many nations’ economies (with the example in the film being Jamaica). The case of imported milk powder overtaking the milk industry within Jamaica serves as the example par excellence of Janus’s insight that developing nations come to value industrialized goods over their locally produced ones. However, in the milk powder example, the foreign item was chosen over the locally produced one not due to the power of advertising, but due to the power of the government, in the form of subsidies that made the milk powder cheaper. Here the film acknowledges a piece of the globalization puzzle that Janus misses - the important role of not just transnational corporations, but of government (in cahoots with the World Bank and the IMF).