Abstract
ABSTRACTHow do you sell a solar powered lamp to India's un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty. In the highlands of Orissa, India, a US company sells solar powered lights through a network of young male sales agents. The company and its products express empathy and proximity, attachment and connection to India's indigenous and low caste communities. Yet the company’s salesmen are often more concerned with maintaining forms of structural advantage and their sales practices articulate social differences based on caste, class and gender. Rather than see prejudice as a peripheral effect of expansion and growth in emerging markets this paper proposes that we see it as a constitutive feature of markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.
Highlights
How do you sell a solar powered lamp to India’s un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty
The ethnographic fieldwork that forms the basis for this paper began in 2012, during which I spent five months living with my family in Koraput district, returning to the area twice yearly until 2017. Over this period I have followed a small cohort of young, middle class, higher caste, Hindu men from their homes and hangouts to the market towns and villages where they were employed to sell Big Light Earth’s solar powered lamps
When the solar light’s switch, wires, or circuit board eventually broke down, perhaps after twelve or eighteen months, a buyer would discover that a warranty card alone could not guarantee the light would be fixed or replaced. If these transactions were structured by a moral economy, it was the moral economy of caste: highly localised, sometimes tacit, sometimes visible
Summary
To cite this article: Jamie Cross (2019) Selling with Prejudice: Social Enterprise and Caste at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India, Ethnos, 84:3, 458-479, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1561487 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1561487 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=retn20 ETHNOS 2019, VOL. 84, NO. 3, 458–479 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1561487
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