Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach

Abstract

Capis An Edaphic Approadi. DANIEL MILLER New York: Be% 1997; x + 357 pp. On a first reading Capitalism appears scattered and confusing; on a second reading it is significant and provocative. The first reading stems from Capitalism's seemingly erratic jumps from one social context to another and from one agent's perspective to another's in its descriptions of commodity production in Trinidad, Capitalism's ethnographic site. A second reading clarifies Miller's major proposition: commodities are produced not only as objects with market by manufacturers, but also as of value, Miller's key concept, by brand owners, advertising executives (Capitalism's research foci, heretofore neglected by anthropologists), and even consumers. That reading also reveals how those projects generate social and cultural contradictions among and between such producers. For example, Trinidadian sweet drink manufacturers seek market share and profit through creating local and transnational brand name reputations, as well as through advertising agents' ads and promotions. Yet, brand names and products are also projects of value. Solo company's sweet drinks wear the oldest, indigenous brand name. Its brand, therefore, represents authentic Trinidadian nationalism; loyalty to the brand is loyalty to Trinidadian identity. But in other contexts Trinidadians identify as global consumers of higher quality foreign drinks. Coke, therefore, lends its reputation for quality to its local franchiser, Cannings. Local company executives face the problems of positioning the company in the market and of positioning themselves within larger global conglomerates. They represent themselves to conglomerates as having local expertise necessary to reinterpret or replace homogenized, global marketing campaigns by locally relevant, but for conglomerates more expensive, ones despite suspected lesser effectiveness. Conglomerates often accede so as to increase the local office's importance and because consumer reaction is unpredictable. of a local branch's nationalism, therefore, structurally contradicts that of its conglomerate's globalism. Profitability is not the only value at issue; material culture's logic cannot be reduced to market culture's commodities. Rather, commodities are complex symbolic formations (p. 4) produced and reproduced by multiple agents in a dynamic history of production, distribution, and consumption. Advertising agents create ads using their own models of consumer preferences as well as current aesthetic and professional models. The result is a genre of capitalist realism . . . a kind of hyperreal idealized world of (p. 191). It has its own self-referential standards and expectations about which Trinidadians are highly sophisticated, because for them the world of ads is similar to the world of cinema elsewhere. Consumers also have their own categories and discourses: red drinks stand for East Indians and black drinks for Africans. Yet, consumers in each ethnic group tend to drink and identify with a drink's other qualities in the opposed category, for example, Indians consume Coke, a black drink, because of its modernity. Commodities such as drinks become, therefore, objectifications, out of commerce's control, for projects of whereby each group appropriates imaginary aspects of the other's identity. Surprisingly, advertising executives tend to ignore consumers' categories for their own. Reactive fear of competitors, networks of social peers, and unpredictability of consumer reaction, more than profitability, motivate them. Miller concludes that cultures of consumption and production can operate separately, because assigning blame for advertising campaign failures is difficult. …