Mass Publicity Research Articles

Marketing Logics and the Politics of Public Spheres: On Discursive Engineering and Enclosure

Scholarship on publics has proliferated during the past two decades, especially in linguistic anthropology. Drawing on Michael Warner’s famous formulation, publics are now routinely theorized as a social form predicated on the reflexive circulation of discourse. This article, however, identifies a tension within Warner’s conception of publics. On the one hand, Warner levels a critique of liberal publicity, noting its exclusions and contradictions, but on the other hand, he models his own account of publics on the liberal public sphere and assumptions of voluntaristic, free speech. Working from ethnographic research on a government‐sponsored nation‐branding project undertaken in Macedonia, the article develops a different perspective on publics and their politics. It examines how practices of marketing and strategic communication now pervade public spheres and valorize not voluntaristic participation but discursive engineering, that is, concerted efforts to determine how discourse can and will circulate in some public. When tethered to projects of centralized political control, as happened in Macedonia during Nikola Gruevski’s prime ministership (2006‐2016), practices of discursive engineering can result in enclosed public spheres. Ultimately, the article asks, what can attention to elite efforts to engineer and enclose public spheres teach about struggles over participation in contemporary contexts of mass publicity?

Judicial Transparency as Judicial Centralization: Mass Publicity of Court Decisions in China

ABSTRACT The mass publicity of court decisions in China, this article argues, is part of the larger trend of the Chinese judiciary becoming increasingly centralized. The transparency reform enables the Supreme People’s Court to control the information reporting process within the judicial hierarchy and rein in local courts through public scrutiny. Interestingly, local courts responded strategically, making disclosure far poorer than required. Meanwhile, the central government has dispatched more cadres to local courts, and these cadres are associated with more than a 10 percent higher disclosure rate of judicial decisions, suggesting that centralization of personnel is adopted to effectively implement the centralized policy. The transparency reform, coinciding with reforms in other domains, embodies an important shift toward a more centralized judicial sector in China.

АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ ЭТНОПОЛИТИЧЕСКОЙ ЭКСПЕРТИЗЫ И МОНИТОРИНГА ЭТНОПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ПРОЦЕССОВ (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ КУБАНИ И КРЫМА)

The authors of this article clarify the subject of ethnopolitical expertise and monitoring of ethnopolitical processes, their main thematic topics, draw distinctions with related branches of scientific practice-oriented knowledge, assess the current status of ethnopolitical expertise and monitoring of ethnopolitical processes in Russia in the context of improving federal legislation. The authors argues that it is unacceptable to narrow the subject of ethnopolitical expertise. The authors evaluate the experience of ethnopolitical expertise implementation and monitoring of interethnic and confessional relations, ethnic policy in the Krasnodar territory, the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol city (2014-2020). Factors and indicators of monitoring of interethnic and confessional relations are evaluated on the example of the studied regions. Measures are proposed to improve the quality of ethnopolitical expertise in the aspects of organizing its interaction with state authorities and mass media, providing evidence and publicity. The authors argue the need to create permanent expert structures and networks of interaction between professionals and the state authorities, the education system, political parties and public organizations, and the mass media.

"Not Just Tea Drinking": The Red Teahouse and the Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan

"Not Just Tea Drinking"The Red Teahouse and the Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan Claire Roosien (bio) In April 1928, speaking at the Third Convention of Uzbekistan's Communist Youth League (Komsomol), a young activist registered a serious critique of the Red Teahouse. Red Teahouses were the foremost institution for Marxist-Leninist instruction in Uzbekistan.1 By all accounts, Red Teahouses enjoyed a great deal of popularity, in part because ordinary, "black" teahouses had already been a fixture of Central Asian social life for centuries. But the activist complained that in some Red Teahouses, Uzbekistan's youth were not studying the books that had been sent to them for political education. Instead, the books had been hung from the ceiling with ropes—dusty, torn, and unread.2 To be sure, he added, some Komsomol activists had managed to attract popular participation through other entertainments: he specifically mentioned donkey races and competitions among players of the dutar, a local stringed [End Page 479] instrument. But if teahouses were to become properly Soviet, they needed both to remain popular and to align themselves with party agendas. There is no way of knowing why those communist books ended up on ropes rather than on shelves—or, even better, in the hands of readers. Perhaps teahouse administrators felt the books would be better appreciated as decorations than as reading material. Perhaps, as Komsomol activists complained elsewhere, the books' pages were being used as wrappings for food, and hanging them from the ceiling kept the pages close at hand for patrons in need of a napkin.3 Whatever the reason, the dangling Marxist-Leninist tracts represent the central problem the Bolsheviks faced in creating state-sponsored mass institutions in Uzbekistan. On the one hand, the institutions functioned to assert state control: to promulgate Marxism-Leninism and, more importantly, to mobilize Uzbekistan's masses for collectivization and the cotton monoculture. On the other hand, mobilizing the masses required creating an institution that was truly popular: one that would get Central Asians in the door voluntarily and facilitate enthusiastic participation in state projects. The challenge facing Central Asian activists was to take advantage of the teahouse's popularity while also making the teahouse Red. In this article, I examine the institution of the Red Teahouse in the early Soviet period. Red Teahouses mushroomed in Uzbekistan's countryside especially during the years of the first two five-year plans, totaling more than 3,000 by 1934.4 I take seriously Soviet activists' claim that the Red Teahouse existed [End Page 480] to promote mass participation even as they sought to exert state control. I term this space for popular participation the "state public," foregrounding at once its comparability to the public spheres of interwar Western Europe in an age of mass politics, and the Soviet state's unprecedented aspirations to control. But by promoting participation, the Red Teahouse created the conditions of possibility for forms of public life that the state could neither predict nor control. In particular, the Red Teahouse provided harbor for modes of teahouse sociability that had roots in pre-Soviet practices. Sometimes, these off-label uses of the Red Teahouse supported state agendas; other times, they undermined those agendas. To make this dynamic clear, I begin with a discussion of teahouse culture before the Soviet period. I then proceed to examine the adoption of the Red Teahouse model in the Soviet period, the changing expectations for how Red Teahouses would function during the five-year plans, and the ways that popular participation both facilitated and undermined those expectations. In the conclusion, I pan out to a broadly comparative view, suggesting that the Red Teahouse should be considered neither a communist nor a Central Asian aberration but rather a case study of the tensions inherent in modern projects of mass publicity around the world.5 In examining the Red Teahouse as a Soviet institution, I draw on two main source bases. First, reports housed in the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI) and the Uzbekistan National State Archive (O'zMDA) offer the perspective of the primarily Russian-speaking administrators who supervised the construction and functioning of Red Teahouses. Archival sources provide indispensable statistical...

Buffalo Bill Goes to France

AbstractIn 1889 and 1905 William F. Cody, commonly known as Buffalo Bill, took his Wild West show on a tour of Europe, playing to sellout crowds on both trips. Although at first glance Buffalo Bill may appear to be a symbol of the vanishing American West, he also represented the power of the new American colossus, embodied by the conquest of the frontier through the technology of the rifle. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was a symbol of American invention and ingenuity, employing electric lights and mass publicity techniques. The show, however, was not simply a demonstration of modern American enterprise and technology; its very message of the westward march of civilization was modern. Examining the reception of Buffalo Bill in France on two visits offers us a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of the relationship of the “sister republics” at a key moment in French and American history.

The Scandal of a Black Ulysses: Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the Harlem Reception of Joyce

The Scandal of a Black Ulysses: Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the Harlem Reception of Joyce Jeremy Braddock i. intertexts Wallace Thurman’s 1932 novel Infants of the Spring is a Harlem Renaissance roman-à-clef focalized through Raymond Taylor, Thurman’s figure for himself. At the center of the novel, a disconsolate Ray agonizes over what he sees as his failure to produce a work that could justify what Langston Hughes famously named the national “vogue” for Negro art: The struggle to free himself from race consciousness had been hailed before actually accomplished. The effort to formulate a new attitude toward life had become a seeking for a red badge of courage. That which might have emerged normally, if given time, had been forcibly and prematurely exposed to the light. It now seemed as if the Caesarian operation was going to prove fatal both to the parent and to the child.1 Although this monologue in one sense reads as a reproach of his own literary writing, in a larger sense it represents Ray’s meditation both on his individual authorship and on the New Negro movement as such—a movement in which Thurman, and Thurman’s Ray, serve important organizing functions as writer, editor, promoter, impresario, conspirator. Ray is committed to the possibilities of “maneuvering . . . friends,” as one character describes it (77). In addition to its conspicuous employment of free indirect discourse—which both confirms and ironizes the connection between Ray and Thurman—this passage contains multiple literary references, which further emphasize the sociality of Ray’s monologue. Most obvious is the ostentatious citation of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), which figures the racialized cultural field as a zone of conflict. Slightly less obvious is a complex invocation of the passage in Hamlet from which Thurman draws the book’s title and epigraph: [End Page 741] “The canker galls the infants of the spring” Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent.2 These are Laertes’s lines warning Ophelia against the seductive praise of Prince Hamlet, praise which Laertes suggests is fundamentally corrupting, because it has at its root a political function.3 Part of the logic of Thurman’s reference consists in the way it connects Hamlet’s approving words with what Scott Herring has called the “conundrum of publicity” that involved black artists in the 1920s (Hughes’s “vogue for the Negro”).4 In Herring’s gloss “[w]hat should [have] open[ed] up avenues to artistic success” creates instead a “racial panopticon”; in Ray’s terms, a premature exposure to the “light” has hailed, but by the same token inhibited, an unrealized social and artistic freedom.5 Thurman’s interest in the Hamlet passage, however, is not only thematic but figural as well, and his improvisation on Laertes’s speech exemplifies the way Infants of the Spring represents a complex sociology of artistic production, in which flattering publicity is only one among many elements. In Shakespeare, the image “infants of the spring” conveys the fragility of Ophelia’s youth through its association with flower buds. Thurman evacuates the phrase of that association, and uses it instead to allude literally and garishly to an actual infant, whose untimely death in turn represents the fate of New Negro artworks, and the careers of their authors. In a figure that speaks as much about the internal functioning of the movement as it does about the light of mass publicity, the Caesarian section, stillbirth, and mother’s death describe the failure of Harlem Renaissance agents and institutions to have elicited a new literature and psychology (“attitude”). Thurman not only appropriates a figure from the English Renaissance to mourn the failure of the New Negro Renaissance, he explodes the figure to show how thoroughly it imbricates and overdetermines the larger project of the minority revival, renaissance, or rebirth. This obstetric metaphor, moreover, proves to be one of the most sustained devices in the novel. In its penultimate scene, Ray’s friend Lucille chooses to have an abortion, after which she and Ray together agree to sacrifice artistic ambition, and bohemian experimentation, for a...

Promoting physical activity interventions in communities with poor health and socio-economic profiles: A process evaluation of the implementation of a new walking group scheme

Walking groups have known health benefits but may not operate in communities with the greatest health needs, leading to the potential for increasing health inequity. This study examined the process of implementing a new volunteer led walking group scheme in a deprived community in England with poor physical activity, health and socio-economic indicators. Documentary evidence and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and volunteer walk leaders undertaken at the beginning and end of the funding period were analysed thematically. It was found that utilising community-based assets, forming collaborative partnerships with health and non-health organisations and ongoing sustainability issues were all factors that affected the scheme's effective implementation. Passive recruitment methods and mass publicity did not attract participants who were representative of their community. The findings firstly suggest the necessity of identifying and mobilising community based assets at the ‘grass roots’ in deprived communities during the preparatory stage to access those in greatest need and to plan and build capacity. Secondly, the findings highlight the key role that health professionals have in referring those in poorest health and the inactive into walking interventions. In the new era of fiscally constrained public health embedded within local authorities these findings are pertinent in supporting the utilisation of local assets to address entrenched physical inactivity and inequity within deprived communities.

Aesthetic dimension of political advertising

Political advertising is a form of aesthetic and political communication; it is encountered in election, addressed to electoral groups and aimed at electoral behavior perception management. Aesthetic and political communication has a lot of characteristics of political communication in general, that in its turn is a kind of public communication. Advertising nails down certain emotions in the person’s memory, which hereafter will determine his (her) behavior. Achieving of an objective is made by aesthetic images creation and advancement that facilitates aesthetic judgment of objective world, increases beauty sensitivity, uprears and develops cultural perception, the sense of taste. In the course of it, the didactic orientation of political advertising emerges. In a general sense, political advertising aesthetics is the aesthetics of personal behavior management technologies in social setting, the aesthetic of personal influence. Political events infer aesthetic expressiveness and legalization in response to mass media, publicity, popular art, word-picture and image. Internal action of political and aesthetic aspects turns the individual into spectator and recipient.

The Weft of Shanghai Fashion

Shanghai’s modern fashion industry developed between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the 1930s and was an important step in China’s industrialisation. The present article aims to define the relationship between production and consumption in Shanghai’s modern fashion industry. One of the main characteristics of modern fashion is its ability to innovate by creating new and distinct trends while absorbing different influences. Shanghai modern fashion was an original mix of Chinese and foreign styles. The second determinant of this phenomenon is its capacity to be distinctive and reproducible at the same time. Shanghai’s modern fashion therefore only emerged when the city was able to innovate and produce goods on a massive scale that were adapted to consumer tastes. To prove this relationship, the present article establishes concrete links between traders, industrialists, and retailers. The textile industry benefited from the outcome of a complex network that linked foreign trade, cotton mills, retail shops, and mass publicity. This paper analyses how this economic network was developed.

How to do mass media publicity for a neglected disease. Lessons from Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in Kenya

The prioritization of neglected diseases in the policy making framework requires heightened advocacy [WHO, 2006]. Mass media positive publicity is among approaches that can be used to achieve this. This paper discusses practical use of mass media to do publicity and advocacy for a neglected disease and its vector. It uniquely presents online links to the analyzed newspaper and television news and opinion articles on tsetse and Trypanosomiasis. The paper shares entry points into mass media advocacy from a lessons learned perspective and notes the importance of understanding how the mass media works in order to achieve advocacy of neglected diseases using sleeping sickness as a case study.

Aryas Unbound

This article analyzes a controversial book ban from the 1940s to trace the mutual determinations of print media, the legal regulation of communal sentiment, and the discourse of religious tolerance in late colonial India. Claimed as the Bible of the Arya Samaj, the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) was banned in the Muslim-majority province of Sindh because of its defamatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The result was a controversy of national proportions. Through theoretically informed close readings of texts from the controversy, Scott shows how the legal regulation of religious offense altered the economy of textual circulation in South Asia. Colonial law fueled a thriving extralegal legal culture that bureaucratized religious affect. It also reorganized the unbounded social imaginary associated with mass publicity. This allowed controversialists to exploit previously unrealized potentialities of the print medium in order to politicize the Hindu public.

Managing the Masses in Mass MediaCensorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. By William Mazzarella. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Managing the Masses in Mass Media<i>Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity</i>. By William Mazzarella. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Populist Publics

Some concept of mass publicity is foundational for a number of theories of democratic self-determination, but the subject of publicity is radically dependent on technologies of representation for its own self-identity. Research on newspapers and the public sphere is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life. Whereas liberal theories of the public sphere sought to distinguish a rational reading public forged through a dialectic self-abstraction from what Habermas once termed “pressure from the street,” recent work on the politics of the crowd and that of the reading public reveals a closer relationship. Drawing on research about the history of print capitalism in southern India, Cody’s essay seeks to come to theoretical terms with a democratic public sphere where physical force is deeply intertwined with the printed word.

The role of the military in combating the terrorist activities

While terrorism is formally condemned worldwide, it is confirmed in practice that terrorism represents an effective weapon for certain ethnic communities to help them achieve their specific political objectives. History reminds us that the UN organization has formally condemned the activity of many terrorist organizations in the world, but some great powers have not always respected the international law, but supported and strengthened these organizations at some point of time. In some cases, these powers illegally treat terrorist organization as liberation ones, along with providing them mass publicity, which creates a distorted public opinion in the world. In this way, terrorist organizations are provided with actual assistance, and the country that is the victim of violence is proclaimed the creator of terror. Thus it is denied legal and legitimate right to fight against terrorism on its own territory. This is the case with the KLA and ANA in Kosovo and Metohija. If this trend of double standards continues, the threat of contemporary terror will grow dramatically in many countries of the world. Countries play a very important role in preventive, repressive and, eventually, combat anti-terrorist activities, and so does the UN organization. Therefore, it is important that the UN General Assembly adopts universally acceptable definition of terrorism, without which there is no successful counterterrorist struggle. While the police is the main exponent of the fight against terrorism, in certain situations the military also has to become involved in anti-terror activity.

Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella (review)

William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and Open Edge of Mass Publicity Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 304 pp.Censorium is a rich, multi-layered narrative of in India and a fine work of critical theory. It is not a history of Indian censorship, but rather analysis of discourse on censorship-or, in author's own words, an immanent critique of Indian film censorship (223). This is William Mazzarella's second book, and like his first, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003), it centers on issues of production in Mumbai.In Censorium, author draws on his numerous interviews and archival research into and obscenity laws in British colonial India and postcolonial India while also engaging with thinkers such as Michael Warner, Emile Durkheim, Roland Barthes, and Immanuel Kant to first compound and then try to unravel complexities of his material. Mazzarella's interviews, mostly undertaken in Mumbai in 2003-2004, are with former censor board directors Anupam Kher and Vijay Anand, film directors such as Shekhar Kapur and Shyam Senegal, writers such as Vijay Tendulkar, and actors such as Shabana Azmi, as well as other figures in city's film and political worlds.Censorium departs from idea that is not merely about trying not to offend morals by deciding which image-objects may circulate, but that it is rather about control of publics and hence censor's ability to quell violence and stop spread of chaos-what Mazzarella describes as the problem of affect management visa-vis modern mass media (12). He focuses on two periods-the 1910s through 1920s, and 1990s-to make his case, persuasively linking colonial and postcolonial states in regard to question of how authority is justified and administered.This book is not, like Tejaswini Ganti's Producing Bollywood: Inside Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (2012), ethnography of filmmakers. It has both a larger and less tangible object of inquiry-the field of mass publicity itself. At root is illusive question that censors and, according to Mazzarella, society must reckon with: How are intensities of images absorbed by different kinds of people? In this regard, book is also very much about questions of anonymity and community, as well as relationship between elites (filmmakers, elite audiences, and state actors) and their understanding (and stereotyping) of common who in Mazzarella's framing becomes figure of the pissing man, cinema's howling, uncouth, and hence incontinent front-bencher. It is this tension-between a colonial-post-colonial, patriarchal-patronizing state and its own democratic claims-that animates many of book's discussions. Censorship, as Mazzarella explains, is not about issue of offending morals and sensibilities (the fear that films will have a bad effect, 21), it is about very definition of who belongs to the public (measured, reasonable) and who the are (whose unlettered emotions are thought to be out of control and in need of management).The justification for itself, we learn, is predicated on this divide (as are so many things in Indian society), of uneducated masses needing to catch up, which in world of cinema-watching means being able to understand and contextualize violent or sex-laden imagery they see-the difference between being a film spectator versus a consumer-citizen. At times, while reading this book, I was reminded of American car commercials that caution viewers that what they are seeing (cars at high speeds, flipping over, etc.) is a fantasy not to be tried at home. Of course, those disclaimers are about legal protections for car manufacturers rather than policing morals; in addition, images themselves are not censored, and disclaimers depend on notion that viewer will read fine print and understand it. …

Glamour in a golden age: movie stars of the 1930s

Shirley Temple, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, and Gary Cooper-Glamour in a Golden Age presents original essays from eminent film scholars that analyse movie stars of the 1930s against the background of contemporary American cultural history.Stardom is approached as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled these actors and actresses to be discovered, featured in films, publicised, and to become recognised and admired-sometimes even notorious-parts of the cultural landscape. Using archival and popular material, including fan and mass market magazines, other promotional and publicity material, and of course films themselves, contributors also discuss other artists who were incredibly popular at the time, among them Ann Harding, Ruth Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, and Constance Bennett.

Breaking down social stereotypes: the case of the Fundación Secretariado Gitano in Spain

Over the last few years the Fundación Secretariado Gitano has organised several awareness campaigns aimed at improving the public image of the gypsy community, breaking down the stereotypes and providing a more credible concept of the Spanish gypsy community. These campaigns are intended to guarantee equal treatment and opportunities for this group. One of its first activities was a mass publicity campaign aimed at making the general public aware of how unfair it is to generalize. In this way the origins of the social image problem suffered by gypsies was tackled. The campaign titled ‘Get to know them before you judge them’ is the objective study of this case in which elements are analysed and decision‐making steps are followed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson: Consistent critics of American 'politics of genocide'

Argumentation of the two distinguished American authors E. Herman and D. Petersen is analyzed in the text with reference to the American duplicity regarding the politics of human rights protection, so-called 'humanitarian interventions' and the question of qualifying war events and crimes as 'genocide'. Even in 1973 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman designed a 'typology of bloodshed', based on interests of the Government of USA. Therefore, they point out the difference between 'good and bad bloodsheds', where the former should be ignored and the latter judged in maximal extent. The following is ranked among the 'good bloodsheds': a) constructive, which are made by the USA or which contribute to their direct and strategic interests, and b) benign, which are made by American allies and clients. Chomsky and Herman included among bad bloodsheds the following: c) criminal, made by the states that are opposed to the USA, and d) mythological bloodsheds, as a subvariety of criminal bloodshed, to which a mass publicity is given in media and public in general, regardless the relevant evidence that they had happened at all. On basis of applied methods for quantitative analysis of text contents in the most important American written media and on comparative method, with regard to the typology of bloodshed made by N. Chomsky and E. Herman even in 1973, almost four decades later Herman and Peterson have made a classification of crimes performed throughout the world, which at the same time has the role of verificatory research of Chomsky-Herman typology. Their research shows existence of a significant prejudice regarding qualifying different events as 'genocide', which is conditioned by the American interests and in full extent confirms the Chomsky-Herman typology, while Herman and Peterson find in their research that the number of such cases has been increased considerably in the meantime. Therefore, in the case of the crime that was performed in Kongo, it was required more than 317 thousand of dead Kongos to appear in the American mainstream media that the 'genocide' is in question, while at the same time it was required 12 killed Albanians from Kosovo to appear the qualification of 'genocide'. Their finding on racism in qualifications is based on this and other facts put in proportion: it never has happened that ''guardians' of the international justice' managed to find evidences for a single crime made by 'great white northern powers, which exceeds the threshold of tolerance'. In other words, in such a situation it never has happened that bloodshed was judged as genocide. A conclusion is made on connection of high American officials with media from the behavior of media, which in that way create propaganda and creation of such public opinion that support the course of the official American politics uncritically, without any doubts regarding the authenticity of given qualification of certain event.

Quem ri por último ri melhor? Uma análise do humor na hipermodernidade a partir do programa “Custe o que Custar”

Estudiosos do humor e do riso como Lipovetsky (2004) e Minois (2003) afirmam que o riso moderno, ligado ao pensamento iluminista, apresentava-se como esclarecedor e crítico levando as pessoas a refletirem e a buscarem mudar o mundo em que viviam. Por outro lado, o riso atual, capturado pelos meios de comunicação de massa e pela publicidade, apresenta-se como vazio de significado, descompromissado, objetivando somente ser lúdico e estimular o consumo. Até que ponto é possível corroborar com tais opiniões? Não seriam apressadas essas conclusões sobre o humor dos meios de comunicação? Será que na atualidade não somos capazes de produzir um humor com pretensões além do divertimento? Partindo da análise do programa de televisão “Custe o que custar”, o CQC, exibido pela Rede Bandeirantes de Televisão, a Band, e através da realização de um trabalho de pesquisa com grupo focal, pretendemos investigar até que ponto estas hipóteses são ou não comprováveis.

BRANDING THE MAHATMA: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity

This essay is an exploration of the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi as a contested figure in present-day Indian public culture and Gandhi as himself an innovative technician of mass publicity. I begin with an analysis of the scandal that erupted in early 2002 when one of the Mahatma's descendants appeared to have signed a deal with a U.S. corporation to license Gandhi's name and image for use in consumer goods advertising. I proceed to situate that controversy within the larger field of recent Gandhian reference in India, focusing on the complex connections between his iconization and his demonization. The second half of the essay turns the analysis around to inquire into what I call “Gandhian publicity.” I show that although Gandhi's thinking on communicative efficacy is nowadays often assimilated into a commercial brand logic, Gandhian publicity remains irreducible to such appropriation. Ultimately, I argue that the scandal of “branding Gandhi” has less to do with any violation of his supposed saintly otherwordliness than with the “untimely” provocation posed to consumerist publicity by his understanding of the intimate relationship between the management of corporeal energies and socially transformative mass communication.