PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4
674
“foreign” cachet of Coca-Cola and Pepsi was turned on its head into a liability, is
provided by the mode of agitation, or “peformative aspects of protest” (Orlove
1997:235) organized by several cultural nationalist organizations that took to the
streets against the MNCs. The act of public destruction of Coca-Cola and Pepsi
bottles was a purposive allusion to Gandhi’s political strategy of economic boycott
of British (foreign) products, one of whose prominent techniques was to organize
bonfires of British mill-made cloth. 19 In one stroke, the appellation of “foreign” was
transmuted, from being an evocation of luxury and refinement, into a symbol of an
oppressive and alien political power bent on economic exploitation. The bonfire,
metaphorical in the case of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, is an intensely personal statement
as well. It implies the willingness and the resolve to renounce something that is
temporally important in the service of the greater good. “Alternatives” to Coca-
Cola and Pepsi, mainly indigenous products, such as buttermilk and homemade
lemonade, also gained ground, some of which had the same contaminated water, as
Coca-Cola and Pepsi, as their main ingredient. 20 In this instance, it is the equation
of “foreign” with “impure” and the “domestic” with “pure” that enables the symbolic
inversion of the meaning of quality, and manages to elide the issue of contamination
out of the picture. 21
CONSUMERISM AS ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST: LIMITATIONS
AND POSSIBILITIES
What does the Coca-Cola–Pepsi pesticide controversy, and the subsequent
policy response, tell us about the political possibilities of social consumerism? I
submit that it offers important insights into the ongoing realignment between the
state, society, and MNCs, and how public interest is conceptualized and contested in
the public arena. Consumerism, despite its deterritorialized discourse, universalist
pretensions, and unabashed narcissism can only be configured socially in fields
that are culturally and ideologically constituted. Brand images of pesticide-tainted
soft drinks being culturally mediated, the efforts of The Coca-Cola Company and
PepsiCo to mold public opinion, notwithstanding their massive advertising budgets,
were at best partially successful. Even the association with Bollywood glamour and
euphoric endorsements from cricket icons failed to neutralize the negative media
coverage. As the CSE said of the gyrating efforts of Bollywood stars in one of its
reports: “they danced and sang to seduce us to go back to colas. But that is their
job. They are paid actors.”
Marketing efforts of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo attempt to invoke
a symbolic community—a community of feeling—transnational and based on