PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4
666
The proliferation in the market of global brands following the opening up of the
economy was touted as a major achievement. This was no accident as one of the
most commonly used justifications for liberalization was that the state control of the
economy, by stifling competition, had led to inefficient monopolies and consequently
the lack of “quality” products in the market. It is important, however, to consider
the meaning of quality in relational terms, rather than simply as a set of moreor-less
objective intrinsic product attributes. For instance, the country of origin of
commodities became a rallying point for quality concerns. The global power brands,
of which Coca-Cola and Pepsi are exemplars, came to be prized because of their
scarcity and for their alluring whiff of forbidden lifestyles in exotic locales. Products
from “abroad”—in the preliberalization era, mostly smuggled or procured through
social and family networks and, therefore, highly restricted in their availability—
were considered benchmarks of quality. Therefore, the liberalization of the economy
and the flooding in of the foreign MNCs were perceived as being synonymous with
the coming home of “abroad” (Fernandes 2000a:614) or, in other words, progress.
Local products in this scheme of thinking become proxies for provincialism,
whereas penetration by global brands indicates the desirable “global convergence
around Western values and consumption patterns” (Applbaum 2000:260). In this
narrative of empowerment, evolution in consumer taste is presented as being in
sync with “innate universal psychological tendencies that transcend local culture”
(Applbaum 2000:260). Brands thus become ideal vehicles for transcending the disabling
effects of historical legacies. The result is that the pathologies of place appear
surmountable through consumption and “the . . . boundaries between citizenship
and consumerism are blurred” (Mazzarella 2003:34).
The media, print and electronic, regularly hail the emergence of the “new”
middle classes as a radical and welcome departure from a socialist past of artificial
shortages, enforced austerity, and general dysfunctionality. Mass-mediated imaginaries
(Appadurai 1996; Favero 2003) comprising scripts and models transcend
national narratives and traditions, and play a constitutive role with respect to the
shifting middle-class identity. In this perspective, the “new” middle class, unencumbered
by the shibboleths of a dreary postcolonial past, has finally shrugged off the
contretemps to emerge as the catalyst for historical change. Miller’s insight from
his study of Trinidadian consumers is resonant here: “Their being Trinidadian is increasingly
linked to a sense of their being global, with similar rights and expectations
to those of any metropolitan area” (1997:335). One common example that is often
presented in the print media discussion of the vibrancy of postliberalization India
is the contrast between the current rates of GDP growth, pegged at 7–8 percent,