PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4
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breaking bottles of Coca-Cola and Pepsi are efforts aimed at countercolonization,
using the cultural idiom of dishonor and rejection, of discursive space, which is
otherwise dominated by technoeconomic debates about pesticides, contamination,
and foreign investment.
The media coverage of the pesticides controversy also reveals the shifting
middle-class expectations of the state. The globalization-fueled trajectories of development
ascendant in many developing countries have in most cases exacerbated
the existing socioeconomic differences, with one of the outcomes being an intensified
demand for services traditionally provided by the state. The welfare state, in its
attenuated form has turned into a mere shadow of itself and is unwilling or unable
to fulfill its side of the social compact. Thus, there is a move toward privatization
of security, law enforcement, and provision of basic amenities, such as drinking
water and electricity. Cities like Mumbai and Delhi have seen gated communities
sprout, aimed ostensibly at affording their better-off residents higher levels of security
than what the state is able to provide. Economic changes beginning in the 1990s
in India ushered sections of its society into a postindustrial bubble, surrounded
by vast numbers of people living in industrial or even preindustrial conditions. A
peculiar combination of physical proximity and social distance is starting to emerge
in cities in developing countries, with the underlying social alienation leading to
the emergence of gated communities. The socioeconomic power differences, once
sedimented in caste-based segregated settlements, are now being reinscribed in
gated communities (Waldrop 2004).
It would therefore be partial and misleading to ascribe only inclusivity to the
practice of consumerism. Equally likely is the possibility of consumer choice being
expressed through esoteric and elitist lifestyle statements, aimed at constructing a
hierarchy of taste, instead of being exercised in the service of mitigating entrenched
structural constraints. A similar point is made when, following Bourdieu, Miller
challenges the liberatory premise of Fair Trade by noting that “purchase of exotic
foods from different parts of the world is a better sign of new strategies of social exclusion
than any evidence of empathetic social inclusion” (2001:118). Shoppers may
become “educated” and even adept in deploying up-to-date rhetoric, but practice
may remain largely unaffected, a phenomenon much in evidence, as the rampant
discrepancies between the discourse and the practice of environmentalism show.
Miller terms the equation of green values and practices to a mere choice of lifestyle
as the manifestation of “objectification of ethical consumption as a ‘sub-cultural’
lifestyle” (2001:129).