Overview

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 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.

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Reviews

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 Studies

"""Shoveling Smoke is a detailed case study serving a larger analysis of globalising consumerism and advertising. India provides the ethnographic material, and richly so, but the book clearly transcends Indian ethnography, and should also be read by students and scholars of advertising, culture, and globalisation.""--Contemporary South Asia, 14(1), March 2005 ""[A] pioneering ethnographic study of advertising in India... worth reading.""--Vinay Kumar Srivastava, The Hindu ""This is an interesting cross-cultural study that raises nearly as many questions as it seeks to answer-as pioneering works often do.""--Chris Sterling, Communication Booknotes Quarterly ""William Mazzarella's book is an incisive study of advertising and consumer practices in India in the immediate post-liberalization phase... A pioneering work, Mazzarella's book is a valuable contribution.""--India-West ""This wry and beautifully crafted account of advertising in Mumbai packs a subtle and heavy theoretical punch. Striving to 'inhabit' rather than present an overview of this life world, William Mazzarella draws the reader down a complex set of pathways in which several campaigns are described in great detail... [E]xcellent.""--Christopher Pinney, Journal of Asian Studies ""[A] theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically dense examination of the advertising industry in the post-liberalization period in India... Shoveling Smoke is a very solid work of scholarship and is recommended reading for those interested in the transformation of India in the late twentieth century.""--Richard Delacy, Chicago South Asia Newsletter ""Shoveling Smoke represents an interesting and insightful ethnographic study of the delicate mediation between global and local consumer culture. It will appeal to scholars of both the advertising and anthropological industries, but is also more universal in its scope. Mazzarella's conclusions are relevant to all scholars of contemporary culture and globalization, and shed new light on the fragile relationship between culture and consumerism.""--Zoe Yule, M/C Reviews ""Shoveling Smoke is a valuable contribution to the anthropological analysis of commodity relations and aesthetic practices, demonstrating how advertising practice is good to think the multiple contradictions at play within globalising consumer economies.""--Phillip Mar, The Australian Journal of Anthropology"

Shoveling Smoke is a detailed case study serving a larger analysis of globalising consumerism and advertising. India provides the ethnographic material, and richly so, but the book clearly transcends Indian ethnography, and should also be read by students and scholars of advertising, culture, and globalisation. --Contemporary South Asia, 14(1), March 2005 [A] pioneering ethnographic study of advertising in India... worth reading. --Vinay Kumar Srivastava, The Hindu This is an interesting cross-cultural study that raises nearly as many questions as it seeks to answer-as pioneering works often do. --Chris Sterling, Communication Booknotes Quarterly William Mazzarella's book is an incisive study of advertising and consumer practices in India in the immediate post-liberalization phase... A pioneering work, Mazzarella's book is a valuable contribution. --India-West This wry and beautifully crafted account of advertising in Mumbai packs a subtle and heavy theoretical punch. Striving to 'inhabit' rather than present an overview of this life world, William Mazzarella draws the reader down a complex set of pathways in which several campaigns are described in great detail... [E]xcellent. --Christopher Pinney, Journal of Asian Studies [A] theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically dense examination of the advertising industry in the post-liberalization period in India... Shoveling Smoke is a very solid work of scholarship and is recommended reading for those interested in the transformation of India in the late twentieth century. --Richard Delacy, Chicago South Asia Newsletter Shoveling Smoke represents an interesting and insightful ethnographic study of the delicate mediation between global and local consumer culture. It will appeal to scholars of both the advertising and anthropological industries, but is also more universal in its scope. Mazzarella's conclusions are relevant to all scholars of contemporary culture and globalization, and shed new light on the fragile relationship between culture and consumerism. --Zoe Yule, M/C Reviews Shoveling Smoke is a valuable contribution to the anthropological analysis of commodity relations and aesthetic practices, demonstrating how advertising practice is good to think the multiple contradictions at play within globalising consumer economies. --Phillip Mar, The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Author Information

William Mazzarella is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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