India

Kerala

S15

S11

S12

Slide 5

• Lecture 5: Globalisation

• As Miller wrote, the entry into cash economies and capitalist system “may be as much the foundation for new diversities as for the elimination of old ones (1995a:286).”

• Wilk and Miller raise questions about the views from “World Systems Theory” (Emmanuel Wallerstein), which posed a grinding down of local cultures by Western materialism.

• Both Miller and Wilk have more recently come to a middle position: “At that time (in Marxist and World Systems theories) there was little sympathy for any approach to consumption that refused to regard it as other than merely the final outcome and a symptom of capitalism. By contrast, today the problem is to rescue consumption from being seen as a mode for the free expression of the creative subject.”

• Lecture 6

Shiva (2002) wrote that “Kerala has been chosen as the state to implement the

‘Washing Hands’ project in India even though Kerala has the highest hygiene standards, lowest diarrhoeal deaths, highest awareness on prevention of diarrhoeal diseases, lowest childhood mortality, highest female literacy...The World Bank project is an insult to Kerala's knowledge regarding health and hygiene. It is in fact Kerala from where cleanliness and hygiene should be exported to the rest of the world. People of Kerala do not need a World Bank loan for being taught cleanliness.”

• Falk (1997) sums up the purpose of advertisers this way: “There are various different ways to argue in favour of a product; you may say it is ‘useful’, ‘comfortable’, ‘healthy’, that it brings ‘social prestige’ or simply that it ‘makes you feel good’. The crucial thing is that an image is created of a ‘good object’ – that you do not yet have.”

Foster, in his analysis of international body and appearance-related advertising:

The body/person is (made) ultimately responsible for its own production and regulation, an individual responsible and accountable for its ‘own’ conduct. This responsibility is encouraged through continuous education and persuasion, rhetorical strategies – like those of advertisements – undertaken to cause the person/body to produce, regulate, and/or reproduce itself in particular fashion…Failure to behave “normally” or “properly” thus becomes a matter of individual deviance, of petulance, of ‘not caring’ or insouciance.

Total sample

20 – 29 years

30 – 50 years

> 50 years

Facial cream

48 % 71 % 57 % 31 %

Perfume 45 % 61 % 55 % 30 % Shampoo 26 % 49 % 29 % 17 % Nail Polish 16 % 45 % 19 % 7 % Lipstick 13 % 26 % 18 % 4 % Table 4. Percentage of women using selected beauty or cosmetic products more than once a week (408 households in Trivandrum).