Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday

Author: Pramod K. Nayar

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Packaging Life

Packaging Life

Cultures of the Everyday

Pramod K. Nayar

Copyright © Pramod K. Nayar, 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2009 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Paciﬁc Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12.5 Adobe Garamond Pro by Tantla Composition Services Private Limited, Chandigarh and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978-81-321-0240-3 (Hb) The SAGE Team: Elina Majumdar, Anupam Choudhury, Mathew P.J. and Trinankur Banerjee

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Packaging Life 1. Life, the Low-calorie Edition: Cultures of Health The Medicalization of the Everyday The Culture of Care and Cure Managing Health, Promoting Wellness

vii ix xi 1

2. Life, the Deluxe Edition: Cultures of Comfort The Culture of Comfort The ‘Stylization of Life’ Itself The Culture of Luxury

46

3. Life, the Bubble-wrapped Edition: Cultures of Risk Risk Society Imagination and the Becoming-real Information and Risk ‘Emotional Imaging’ and Moral Panics The Culture of the Expert Risk Practices

94

4. Life, the High-speed Edition: Cultures of Mobility Mobile Connections Social Networking and Mobile Subjectivity Consuming Mobility Automobility Cultural Mobilities Cosmopolitanism

134

Conclusion: Unpacking Bibliography Index About the Author

190 196 217 219

Preface

T

his book is a study of four aspects of everyday life and the ways in which these are ‘packaged’ for us. ‘Packaging’ refers to the processes that construct particular meanings in public culture’s many genres—promotional material, news reports, advice columns, product literature—and in various media such as magazines, TV shows, newspapers and cinema. ‘Packaging’ is a method of constructing meanings, assigning values and building opinions around a particular issue, commodity, service or condition of life. On many occasions, these meanings and opinions translate into the sale of products and services, and thus, become integral to consumer culture. Packaging Life: Cultures of the Everyday is a study of the cultural politics of health, comfort, risk and mobilities. Cultural politics, as this book sees it, involves the construction of meanings and values through a strategic use of representations, narrative and rhetoric. Such representations mask the ideologies behind the meanings of products, events and conditions. In other words, products, services and conditions instantiate discourses and, therefore, politics. Packaging Life ‘unpacks’ these ideologies that insinuate as discourses—discourses of the family, perfectible bodies, fairness, style and sociability—that inform representations of risk, comfort, home, old age, lifestyle, disease, connectivity and cosmopolitanism. This book explores the ways in which aspects of everyday life such as health, housing, lifestyles and identities acquire meanings such as good health, cosmopolitan identities or luxurious lifestyles. Such constructions—or what this book calls packaging—encourage us to buy particular commodities, adopt certain lifestyles, assimilate speciﬁc political or social beliefs and develop signiﬁcant anxieties. In other words, discourses morph into consumer cultural practices. To ‘unpack’ a discourse is to track the ideologically macadamized route a commodity, attitude, response or behaviour traverses within the informational landscape of images, rhetoric, narratives and representations. My rationale for examining the cultures and discourses of health, comfort, risk and mobilities is simply that they seemed to me the most

Packaging Life

dominant ones in print, visual and other media, and which constitute the most prominent frames within which consumer cultures of the everyday work today. This book of course ought to have studied other forms of everyday life too: the packaging of sexuality, bodies, wisdom and sentiment among others. But if I did all that here, what would I do in my next book? And yes, the cutesy chapter titles are deliberate, and the product of my own perverse mind! Pramod K. Nayar Hyderabad 2007–09

viii

Acknowledgements

I

revived this book in late 2007 after some hiatus, partly on Elina Majumdar’s encouragement; and so, I owe her a huge debt because, contrary to my fears at this revisiting of old haunts (a.k.a book ideas), I enjoyed researching and writing it (in between these two processes, I also did some thinking!). And, while I was writing about reenchantment, taskmaster Elina also convinced me that there would be, must be, another soon after. Thank you, Elina of SAGE Publications. My work-in-progress (which sometimes is not progress) is usually haunted by frequent bouts of exhaustion which, I suspect, worry my parents and takes away the joy of seeing another of my books (‘one more’?). But they remain quietly, aﬀectionately, prayerfully supportive, and for this I am very grateful—where else would I go? Nandini’s enthusiasm for everything popular—FM Radio to Food Guides—is particularly useful because she directs me to sources I did not know existed. Her careful attention to product packaging has come in useful on too many occasions to number. For her unﬂagging energy born, no doubt, of a healthier diet than mine (here goes another ‘healthism’), aﬀection and cheer, and her attempts to clear time and space for me to write, I am very grateful to N. Young Pranav’s school projects—with their consequent (weekly) shopping expeditions for charts, chart-paper, pencils, crayons, matchsticks, odd-coloured ‘doughs’—and the chortle-interrupted togetherviewing of Tom and Jerry, the awed together-reading of The Dark Knight Returns and the guﬀawed together-consumption of Asterix are necessary distractions for me. There is also now the added attraction of sharing interests with him—speciﬁcally the superhero comic book. For his ‘bundling’ presence—thank you, P. (And I do think ‘General Electric’ is the funniest name in Asterix, though ‘General Metric’ and his ‘metric system’ of warfare, Cumulonimbus, Makalos [Make-a-loss], Gluteus Maximus and Inﬁrmofpurpos come pretty close). I must also thank my students, S. Vimala, Neeraja Sundaram and Deepthi Sebastian, for reading some of my chapters and oﬀering suggestions and comments. Deepthi, in particular, deserves a special note

Packaging Life

of gratitude for tracking references and serving as a quick informationretrieval device for journal articles at the university (and delivering them by email at 7.35 every morning). I am grateful to the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), the UK, and my friend Colin Harrison there, for inviting me as Visiting Professor in February–March 2008. I also thank the India Foundation, Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the Center for International Programmes, University of Dayton (Ohio, USA), who collaborated in inviting me as Visiting Professor in 2008. Both visits gave me the much-needed access to libraries and resources that helped shape this book. My academic friends in India and abroad have been suppliers of materials and encouraging (if bewildered) witnesses to my erratic course of work. I must thank, with great pleasure, Colin at LJMU for being one of my staunchest supporters, and of course Nandana Dutta and Brinda Bose. More recently, I have been privileged with the friendship of Akhila Ramnarayan at the University of Dayton and Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. Sophia College’s English department (the indomitable Shireen Vakil, the persuasive Sr Ananda Amritamahal and my friend Jihasa Vachcharajani) invited me to a seminar on Gender and Popular Culture in early January 2008 where my paper on men’s magazines oﬀered me the opportunity to think about ‘healthisms’—thank you Sophia (and I am glad that I overcame my reluctance to be a ‘conferencee’ and attended the seminar). Talking popular culture with comrade-colleague Anna—my listening board, interlocutor, bibliographic researcher, library fellow-traveller and friend—is to open up several books simultaneously. This book, like the ones before it, is in irremediable debt to her intellect, reading and priceless aﬀection (and for the gentle hints: ‘No, really Pramod, that sentence really does not work’). Mysore Jagadish of the American Library, Chennai, deserves special thanks for supplying me journal articles and books at incredible speed. Thanks to Anupam and the SAGE team for their editorial expertise and ﬁnal sharpening and shaping of this book.

x

Introduction Packaging Life

T

his book deals with the ways in which public culture constructs meanings around and about particular issues, concepts and conditions—especially those that constitute the framework within which we live, socialise, consume and are entertained and informed. It analyses how four select aspects of everyday life—health, risk, comfort and mobility—are ‘packaged’ in particular ways for us (there are of course many kinds of mobility, and so ‘mobilities’ might be a more apposite term). Life itself, this book argues via a scrutiny of these four components, gets ‘packaged’ through forms of representations in the media, in the rhetoric of ‘experts’ and in the hard-sell narrative of the manufacturing house. The book builds on a set of assumptions about cultural practices. Desires, experiences, ambitions, ideals and opinions in everyday life are always contaminated by the information, ideologies and images— representations—circulating around health, luxury or success. These representations are situated within larger contexts of enunciation; contexts that are permeated by relations of power and politics. These contexts of representation and enunciation are ‘discourses’. Discourse, in Hayden White’s terms, ‘constitutes the objects it pretends only to describe realistically and objectively’ (White 1978: 2). Discourse, as a dictionary of cultural theory puts it succinctly, ‘is a means of producing and organizing meaning within a social context’ (Edgar and Sedgwick 2004: 117). More signiﬁcantly, discourses are ‘signifying ways of systematically organizing human experience of the social world in language and thereby constituting modes of knowledge’ (Edgar and Sedgwick 2004: 117). Thus, discourse mediates the very experience of life. Proceeding from this deﬁnition, Packaging Life studies the discourses that enable, hinder and inﬂuence our experience of and views on health, comfort, risk and mobilities. It believes that the discourses emanating from the business house, the media and the expert, represent everyday life to us in speciﬁc ways, and our experience of these

Packaging Life

conditions, whether of risk or success, is at least partly inﬂected by our consumption of these representations. Public culture is the realm of social and cultural expressions in civil society. It is the space of cinema, advertisements, TV, celebrity culture, the woman’s magazine, the Indian Premiere League (IPL) and sporting events, autobiographies of public ﬁgures, websites and webpages of institutions, tourist guides, museums, comic strips, and so on. It is a space where meanings are made, fought over, re-done, appropriated and subverted, and over which no control—state or corporate, to name but two—is total. It is the cultural ‘space’ of cinema that must be subject to critical scrutiny in Cultural Studies for the power relations that inform and mediate meaning-production. Claims and counter-claims over meanings are invariably debates about representation (that is, language). And representation is about narrative and the contexts in which narratives are produced, disseminated and received. Thus, the ‘meaning’ of an advert from an insurance company is produced within multiple discourses of risk, safety, prudence and planning. These discourses could be further reﬁned into subcategories of biomedical, educational and ﬁnancial risks, the rhetoric of safety for the family and discourses of ‘planning’. Take a topical example of this multi-layered discourse in public culture: obesity and health. We are inundated with discourses about health in this age of ‘healthism’. Newspaper reports about obesity, ads for lowfat food, medical and scientiﬁc information from nutrition specialists reprinted in magazines, advice in health columns in newspapers, insurance against risks and the rhetoric of care in hospitals treating fat-related cardiac problems are all discourses that ask us to: • buy a product (use sugar-free sweetener), • practice a particular regimen (add exercise to everyday schedules), • alter the lifestyle (delete fast foods) and/or • obtain a service (seek medical advice). What I propose to study, in such an instance, is the construction of obesity as a problem, issue and condition. I am interested in the meanings—biomedical, ethical, social, economic and aesthetic—constructed xii

Introduction

around obesity and obese individuals. This construction of meaning through various narratives and rhetorical strategies across various genres is what I am ‘packaging’. ‘Packaging’ is the discursive, representational, rhetorical and narrative dimension of public culture and, as this book demonstrates, of consumer culture. This meaning–consumer culture linkage requires some preliminary comments. Meaning, as theorists of consumer culture argue, is increasingly ‘provided by corporate entities seeking greater return on their investments’ and, therefore, they seek to govern the ‘public mind’—a process that results in ‘a mystical connection between consumers and purveyors, “consumer goods” and what Tim Duvall calls the “great chain of consumption”’ (Duvall 2003: 84–85). While Packaging Life subscribes to Duvall’s argument about the public mind and its meaning-making being determined to a great extent by corporate interests and consumer goods suppliers, I also believe that ‘consumer’ culture involves more than a simple myth-making and its resultant consumption of goods and services. It involves, for instance, the development of particular views of the self, the body, success and health. While many of these views might be the regulating framework of consumption, it would be reductive to say all views and ideas eventually lead only to consumption. These ideas (could) also lead to diﬀerent forms of socialization and domestic structures, public health policy and initiatives—and these are not solely about consumer culture. Thus, while it is mostly coterminous with ‘promotional culture’, ‘packaging’ diﬀers from it in signiﬁcant ways. I use the term as shorthand to signal the process through which meaning is ascribed to an object such as health or a car, and is accepted as such by the individual or community; a process that could alter, reinforce and generate forms of behaviour, social relations and domestic and public arrangements of people, space and time. To phrase it diﬀerently, ‘packaging’ as a term draws attention to the persuasive ways through which concepts, services, opinions and products are ‘sold’ to consumers and the audience. By ‘sold’ I do not mean only the commercial-ﬁnancial element. ‘Sold’ also implies persuading people to have a particular opinion or develop a new value system. For the purposes of this book, ‘sold’ is the semantic scope of ‘commerce’ itself that is expanded to include cultural, socio-psychological xiii

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and ideational elements, but always gesturing at the market dimension as well. What I am suggesting is: ‘Packaging’ partakes of the ﬁnancial economy, but also of various other economies—psychological, mythic and socio-cultural. It is at once about selling a product or service, but also more than that—it generates values, ideas, beliefs, superstitions, myths, anxieties and panics that constitute a form of social knowledge and the contemporary cultural imaginary. ‘Packaging’ is my term for the narratives of commercially viable products as well as abstract ideas, of proﬁt-motivated services as well as social causes, of saleable objects as well as ‘immaterial’ notions. ‘Packaging’ is the ornamentalized, glamourized or expertise-coated wrapping in which, among others, we: • • • • • •

encounter ideas about health and risk, stare at imminent disasters and possible solutions, experience anxieties, evaluate products, execute new forms of sociality and conceive plans (and dreams) for political and social change.

‘Packaging’ is a multi-layered process that appropriates in various degrees and guises the tone, language, style, strategies and politics of scientism, commerce, social causes and ‘values’. This meaning-making process, or ‘packaging’, has ideological and political implications because it encodes particular notions of the family, the individual or ‘India’ and constructs ‘roles’ for individuals and collectives. Constructions of aged people, promotion of luxury as a desirable quality or emphasis on material success often call into question, reinforce or marginalize individuals or groups who do not ﬁt into acceptable notions and categories of ‘youth’, ‘successful’ or ‘stylish’, and thus, construct power relations between people. Meaning-making that assigns roles, prescribes responsibilities and generates stereotypes (of men and women, age and leisure, success and comfort) are exercises in power and therefore of politics. Thus, promotional culture, which relies on such constructions of categories and notions, is a political matter. Further, the very act of constructing such categories in discourse is an exercise in power, for it catalogues, discerns or discriminates among individuals and groups. In other words, the discourses xiv

Introduction

of promotional culture are always political. Packaging Life thus unpacks a bundle consisting of: 1. the commonly circulating discourses of health, risk or safety, 2. the material culture of cars, foods or phones, 3. the consumer culture that is often (but not always) the result of the ﬁrst two and 4. the cultural codes that operate within these discourses so that they become eﬀective. In earlier works, I had explored how various ‘genres’ of public culture such as cinema, the comic book, museums, tourism, mobile phones, housing, property and shopping and celebrity culture constructed particular kinds of meaning (Nayar 2006, 2008b, 2009b). Packaging Life extends these earlier works, examining the discursive constructions of health and illness, beauty and ﬁtness, comfort and luxury, risk and moral threats, connectivity and cosmopolitanism within contemporary Indian (metropolitan) public culture and continually links them with a consumer culture. Packaging Life is alert to the cultural rhetorics of consumer culture where particular meanings often lead to, or induce a desire for, a particular product or action. Cultural rhetorics is the process of meaningmaking through a highly strategic use of representations, and is more than a simple linguistic act, often referencing cultural contexts and appealing to and also ‘tweaking’ already circulating sentiments, beliefs, cultural norms and codes, value systems and traditions. Cultural codes, of course, are political, for they rely on speciﬁc notions of family, gender, class or leisure in order to reinforce, subvert or reject power relations between genders, classes, groups or communities. Public culture in this book is closely aligned with material and consumer culture, but is not restricted to either. Packaging Life is informed by the assumption that public culture depends mainly on narratives and discourses that generate meaning. A central component of public culture is the machinery that produces meaning in order to sell products and services. This is the structure of consumer culture, a feature of the public culture in most cultures across the world. The terms ‘consumer culture’ and ‘consumer society’ require a quick elaboration here. xv

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In the world of consumer culture, meaning and desire are cultivated in the consumer preliminary to the selling of a product or service. By consumer culture I mean the culture of commodities and commercialized services that we live with and in today. Consumer culture as a term is used to ‘emphasize that the world of goods and their principles of structuration are central to the understanding of contemporary society’ (Featherstone 1991: 84). This means paying attention to the cultural dimension of economy as well as the economic dimensions of cultural goods. Thus, we need to explore the ways in which ﬁlms, soap operas, advertising and advice columns promote products whose sales are directly linked to economic proﬁts. It also means that we study the proﬁts garnered through the sale of ﬁlms, albums, TV serial rights and sporting events. Consumption now plays a ‘systemic role,’ as David Clarke calls it (2003: 2), where it inﬂuences ways of thinking, political beliefs, religion, education, ideologies of emancipation, clothing and fashion, social groups and alliances—in short, practically all that constitutes a social order. Things—objects of consumption, from food to housing— of course signify and construct a sense of the self for the individual user. Objects become the means, in other words, of diﬀerentiating the individuals. But they also serve as modes of social integration because, as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton point out, ‘The cultivation of individuality serves a larger goal of integration because the intention to diﬀerentiate oneself from others still needs other people to give it meaning’ (1981: 33). To borrow Jean Baudrillard’s example, choosing one car over another may be an act of ‘personalization’ (or distinction), but ‘the most important thing about the fact of choosing is that it assigns you a place in the overall economic order’ (2008: 152). We have consumption as a basis for a social system of mutual recognition, aﬃliation and alliances. To cite David Clarke once more, ‘In a fully ﬂedged consumer society, consumption performs a role that keeps the entire social system ticking over.… A consumer society…sees this common, everyday activity elevated to new heights’ (2003: 13). It is such a ‘social order’—and ‘social order’ signiﬁes power and politics—of consumption that this book assumes is characteristic of urban India today. Consumption is political because it is, of course, about proﬁts for the manufacturer. But it is also political for the ways in which it shapes an individual’s identity, social relations and group aﬃliations. Consumption xvi

Introduction

becomes political because it is one way (anti-consumerism activists will say, ‘only’) of interfacing with the world. Jonathan Friedman captures the political dimension of consumption when he writes: [Consumption] expresses a romantic longing to become an other in an existential situation where whatever one becomes must eventually be disenchanted by the knowledge that all identity is an arrangement of man-made [sic] products, thus an artiﬁce. No authentic identity is possible, so consumption must go on in quest of a fulﬁllment that can never be attained. (Friedman 1991: 158; Lee 1993)

Thus, consumption is related to the sense of self and identity, which in turn inﬂuences social interaction, and is therefore a political matter. Consumer culture constructs both the subject and the object of consumption—the buyer-user and the commodity, respectively. As Roberta Sassatelli points out, historically, numerous actors and institutions have helped construct the consumer as a ‘social persona’, and to ‘consolidate the consumer culture as a culture both for consumers and of consumers: both a set of commodities for people to consume in certain ways, and a set of representations of people as consumers’ (Sassatelli 2007: 41). The ‘subject of consumption’ is ‘the individual who is imagined and acted upon by the imperative to consume’ (Miller and Rose 1997: 1). The ‘imperative’ that Miller and Rose identify is what this book unravels—or unpacks—as the ideological-political subtext of consumer culture. Take the home and its ‘packaging’, for instance. Homes are spaces of domestic consumption, and therefore, invoke questions of commerce and economics as much as the world of bazaar or the mall. The economies of the home involving food and clothing, women and labour, household technologies and the very idea of ‘home’—that subsume ideologies of gender, the family, parenting and consumption—constitute a realm of the political (for an excellent representative volume dealing with the ‘economies’ and politics of domestic consumption, see Jackson and Moores 1995; also see Nayar 2008b, Chapter 5). Thus, the number of advertisements showing the woman taking decision to change the cooking oil for the health of her family encodes a cultural politics of domestic consumption where gender roles are constructed and reinforced. xvii

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Consumer culture’s aim is to ‘use images, signs and symbolic goods which summon up dreams, desires and fantasies,’ which it then proceeds to fulﬁl by providing goods and services (Featherstone 1991: 27). It is this aspect—the ‘use [of ] images, signs and symbolic goods’—the present book is interested in. I am interested in the ways in which a diverse variety of goods, services, opinions, behaviour and attitudes are ‘packaged’ for us to desire, acquire, imitate and use. That is, I am interested in the sales pitch, the rhetorical strategies and the informational culture embedding products, brands, aesthetics and services: from insurance to water ﬁlters, from Cartier watches to social networking, from clothing accessories to six-pack abs. Packaging Life is also interested in non-consumer (that is, non-proﬁteering) discourses in public culture where values, concerns and advice are oﬀered on looks, ﬁtness and safety. How does an Armani jacket, a Spanish villa or a Roman artefact become associated with luxury and, therefore, wealth, success and power? How is global warming marketed as a matter of risk and, therefore, of common concern? How does a youth rave party become iconic, for some, of the ‘collapse of Indian values’? How does a low-carb diet get projected as the best thing for men’s health? How is the texture of shampooed hair promoted as a desirable quality in teens? And since when did social mobility become associated with cosmopolitan tastes in food and fashion? How does the structural nature of consumer culture— shopping, manufacturing, advertising—become political? How does consumerism get embedded in politics, debates about morality, a social panic or the theme of ‘family values’? How does the purely ‘formal’ consumption of goods connect with more abstract notions of morality or values? And, conversely, how are these ‘values’—what I term ‘cultural rhetorics’—deployed to sell us products and services? These are the kinds of questions that inform this book. The book is interested less in context-speciﬁc empirical work of consumption (such as shopper surveys, proﬁts and manufacturing). Its interest lies in the discourses surrounding matters such as health, risk, mobility and comfort rather than in particular brand marketing strategies. While this runs the risk of homogenizing several discourses—some of them not overtly ‘consumerist’, such as alternative and ethical consumerisms in the Ethical Consumer magazine, or public-interest ads— into one, it also enables me to map a larger terrain. It helps me to see xviii

Introduction

how notions such as cosmopolitanism or health have become associated not only with commodities, but also with attitudes and lifestyles. It facilitates a reading of a variety of social phenomena, from moral panics in society about youth culture alongside the culture of ﬁtness as (a) the process of generating signiﬁcant meanings, and (b) the propagation of particular ideologies within public culture. The methodology used here is almost exclusively discourse studies from within the Cultural Studies approach. The project is not to discover or trace moments of origin or cause–eﬀect sequences within discourse or material culture. My interest lies in ‘resonances’. I seek commonalities, overlaps, intersections and multiplicities in themes, ﬁgures, images and ideas. I want to see how images and themes in genres as diverse and as speciﬁc (in terms of their technologies of representation) advertising, ﬁlms, TV serials, magazine cultures, brochures, promotional material, oﬃcial documentation resonate with each other. Thus, the focus is less on tracing origins of these discourses or material objects than on intersecting, overlapping and even conﬂicting cultural processes and discourses that construct images of say, health or risk and safety. My intention is to read representational strategies, rhetorical styles and discourses that serve up gadgets, services, views in particular ways in order to maximize impact and consumption. Thus, Packaging Life is an example of a Cultural Studies that is more interested in language, representation and rhetoric and treats them and the meanings they construct as political. Cultural Studies, especially the strand inﬂuenced by poststructuralism, believes that language and narrative—discourse—are signifying practices that construct meanings and identities for people, products, events and things. Discourse is the context in which material objects, people and events acquire meaning. It is the language and narrative shared amongst the manufacturer of the product, the producer of the advert and the potential buyer that constructs the meaning of that commodity. It is the narrative act of communication between the medical practitioner about the symptom and the ill-feeling patient that constructs the individual as ‘diseased’. Discourse, in short, is the mode through which we understand, interpret and share the world, as I have already emphasized in the inaugural moments of this introduction. Medicine constructs the sick/healthy body, the law the criminal or victim body. xix

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Religion fetishizes sin as a concept and practice and fashions an identity of the ‘sinner’. The marketer treats the individual as the buyer. All these are discourses with their own rhetorical and narrative modes. My ‘texts’, in keeping with the approach, are many and multi-modal— advertisements, TV, brochures, cinema, product literature, advise columns, magazines, newspapers, oﬃcial documents and websites. This does run the risk of ignoring the conventions of every form—the use of audio or voice-over and the reduction of everything to the verbal—but, I believe, it facilitates the tracing of a map of the discourse in all its variations, undulations and blind-ends. Packaging Life is the study of four such discourses that are central to our lives today: health, risk, comfort and mobility. ‘Packaging’, from ‘pack’, is etymologically linked to both ‘bundle’ and ‘deliver’. I use the term in all its semantic dimensions. I use it to refer, therefore, to the bundling together of ideas and products into one rhetorical form, a narrative ‘bundle’ where ideologies of consumerism are entwined with those of self-care, where notions of fashion cosmopolitanism co-exist—share discursive and representational space—with a sense of local pride. I use it also to speak of the transportation—‘delivering’ of ideas and meanings through images in multiple media forms to the consumer, citizen, community and individual. ‘Packaging’ is a term I use to describe an act of communication—or narration—as the vehicle of meaning-production, delivery and reception where multiple ideologies, purposes, eﬀects are bundled together. It also references, quite self-consciously, the ‘packaging’ of products for consumption. Adapting theories of consumer societies based on empirical studies of Euro-American cultures in order to ‘read’ Indian public culture runs the risk of an inappropriate ‘application’ without due attention to historical and other speciﬁcities. This is true despite the fact that India is now one of the largest consumer markets in the world (since 2006, it has topped the AT Kearney Global Retail Development Index, showing a 25 to 30 per cent growth rate in retailing),1 and its metropolitan cultures exhibit several of the hallmarks of First World consumer cultures—from malls to the dominance of brand cultures. But one of the several advantages ‘theory’ has, especially in Cultural Studies, is that it can work across geographical locations. Reading discourses, rhetorical strategies or representations for ideological subtexts xx

Introduction

of gender or class often demands an attention to language. Studies of representation are ‘theoretical’, but are, I believe, adaptable for reading cultural practices across diﬀerent social and geographical contexts. This book locates consumer culture and its many representational modes within ‘political’ themes of class, gender and the new urbanisms. ‘Politics’, as this book sees it, is essentially about power, ideology and the control over people, ideas and behaviour, where ideology works mainly through suggestion, advice and opinion. In the case of consumer cultures, the sense of ‘politics’ leans towards signiﬁcation and the power promotional materials (essentially, narratives) have over people’s behaviour, the inﬂuence they exert over attitudes and beliefs, the ways in which meanings are constructed so as to sell products and services, and the eﬀective languages of persuasion. It foregrounds the power of selling, just as it emphasizes the power of purchasing, where purchase and consumption represent not simply a matter of appropriate sartorial codes or aesthetics but the very basis of identity. It gestures at the gendered ideology of domesticity and the family that inform the rhetoric of insurance ads or health products’ promotion. It sees mobility, success and ‘careerism’ as a near-prescriptive ideology that seeks to present particular goals and desires for the ‘new’ India. Like all Cultural Studies, this one is selective too—both in terms of its ‘sites’ as well as approaches. The study’s scope remains the metropolitan settings of shopping malls, corporate hospitals, glossy (and expensive) magazines and predominantly English-language promotional materials. It ignores, therefore, rural marketing and the semi-urban sector. I am aware that this circumscribes the study of consumer packaging in India, but makes no claims of doing anything more. Moreover, it should be clear that I am interested in the consumer- or user-end of the consumption process, not with the production end. This is not to deny the importance of productive labour, economic policy and industrial capitalism in consumer cultures. But my focus is however on how these processes manifest.

**** My ﬁrst case study is the discourse of health in contemporary Indian public culture. ‘Packaging health’ is the process through which a xxi

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low-calorie body signifying health becomes a product, an event, a desirable entity, a condition of life and an element of consumer culture. The ‘packaging’ of health in contemporary public culture generates, I argue, an ideology of ‘healthism’ and a culture of care and cure. Health is packaged, among other things, as a desirable and acquirable state of wellness, and one that is acquirable through the purchase and use of particular commodities and services—what I am calling a low-calorie edition of life itself. With this aim in mind, I look at discourses that medicalize everyday lives through an informational culture of disease and health and the ideologically potent narratives of healthism. I explore the culture of care and cure that manifests in myths, ideas and advice about the perfectible body and an ideology of ‘care of the self ’. Finally, I look at the business of managing health today. We live in a culture where wellness is the concern of, and therefore promoted by, insurance companies, biomedical research organizations, the medical fraternity, gyms and ﬁtness centres, and even the state. In this age of managing wellness, we can see an increasing technologization of health in the form of scans, digital projects of medical research and even art forms that are located at the intersection of biomedicine, technology and arts. Managing health is also the concern of the state, and this often modulates into a condition where programmes, projects and campaigns acquire a distinct militaristic tone. The ‘biomilitary state’, as I term this, is an important element in the discourse of health today, and is studied in some detail here. Finally, I turn to social marketing where products and services seek to serve the purpose of social advocacy. This includes the creation of medical spectacles (including scandals) and even medical horror ﬁlms that serve an important function in popularizing medical conditions and solutions. In the second chapter, I look at a more consumer-oriented and consumerist aspect of public culture: comfort and the ‘deluxe edition’ of life. The chapter analyzes a major shift—from comfort to luxury—within consumer culture in the late 20th century. I explore, ﬁrst, the culture of comfort. Comfort is linked, in contemporary culture, with consumption. Products and services are, therefore, increasingly promoted as objects that add to one’s physical, emotional and mental comfort. The packaging of comfort has two components. The culture of comfort, xxii

Introduction

I argue, relies on a rhetoric of ‘Utility Plus’, or a culture of the supplement where something extra is needed to make a necessity a comfort. This supplement is both a necessary completion and an excess that renders the object comfort. Comfort, in other words, is the consequence of the supplement in consumer culture’s discourses. I then turn to matters of styling, arguing that the ‘stylization of life’ (Featherstone 1991: 97) is an index of comfort and a mix of brand biography and self-branding. It is in stylization that the shift from comfort to luxury ﬁrst makes its appearance. In the section on the culture of luxury, I ﬁrst deal with the ‘de-moralization of luxury’, where indulgence is no more seen as immoral, but rather as an earned marker of success. I then move on to two particular modes of packaging luxury—as ornamentalism and re-enchantment. Under re-enchantment, I discuss speciﬁc features grouped under ‘sacralization’ wherein products and services—and their users—are ‘sacralized’, rendered special, unique and luxurious. The third chapter turns to the packaging of risk in contemporary culture and its role in constructing a bubble-wrapped edition of life. I propose that risk-packaging demands an act of imagination, oﬀering us scenarios of disaster and threat. Risk culture depends on the availability of information about such impending, probable threats, and disseminates this information within a language of risk that de-mythiﬁes risk. Risk cultures demand an emotional response from us, and ‘emotional imaging’ is a constituent of this packaging. Moral panics, the most visible outcome of this emotional response, are a commonplace condition, I argue, even as I study the ‘structure’ of a moral panic. The packaging of risk also includes expert cultures, where the solution to the imminent risk is provided by the expert. Finally, I turn to risk practices, modes of preventing and alleviating the conditions and events of risk—which include apportioning blame and risk aversion. In the last chapter, Packaging Life addresses a dominant form of public culture: the culture of mobility, or the high-speed edition of life. Mobility is repurposed as a signiﬁcant trope and metaphor in addition to the physical act of transportation in the late 20th century. The chapter opens with a survey of the most prominent mode of mobility—connectivity. It explores, ﬁrst, mobile phones and its resultant multiple mobilities, and second, social networking and mobile subjectivity. xxiii

Packaging Life

I then go on to consumption as a mode and condition of mobility, addressing the acts of mobile consumption—shopping—and the global circulation of consumer goods. The following section takes up ‘automobility’, where the purpose is not to examine automobiles as much as the discourses of automobility—from car ads to the convergence of automobility with entertainment. In the section on cultural mobilities, I address a crucial form of mobilities visible in cosmopolitan, globalized cities today—food cultures. The cultural rhetorics here, I argue, take recourse to the image of the global citizen. The last section deals with what I take to be the most spectacular form of mobility—cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is now a much-desired dream of the metropolitan shopper, and constitutes a concrete ‘consumer orientation’ according to consumer research (Caldwell et al. 2006). Here, I locate a cosmopolitan ideal of products, services and experiences as instantiating a culture of mobility.

**** Several other discourses and cultural phenomena, of course, need to be studied, which this book has left out. Sexuality, the sacred, sentiment, death and romance are proximate aspects of everyday life that come packaged to us in diﬀerent ways. These discourses ﬁnd expression in adverts, reportage, popular and mass cultural forms such as TV shows and magazines, and are presented to us in diﬀerent ways, some in order to sell products or services, but often as mythic, imaginative or rhetorical forms. Packaging Life is an exercise in ‘unpacking’. It oﬀers an interpretive scheme to decode four of the dominant discourses in contemporary Indian public culture by prising open the cultural politics embedded in consumer rhetoric, commentary, advice and expert talk. It thus shows the way to read obvious, legitimized and legitimizing, ‘naturalized’ discourses that control social relations and encode power. With this ‘unpacking’ it performs, hopefully, the anterior moment of political or dissident readings by showing how these discourses conceal power, and therefore, can be subverted or resisted from within through an alert reading practice. xxiv

Introduction

Note 1

Data from http://www.atkearney.com/shared_res/pdf/GRDI_2007.pdf (accessed on 1 April 2009).

xxv

Chapter 1

Life, the Low-calorie Edition Cultures of Health

W

e live in an age when health is in fashion. Even our everyday metaphors seem to have appropriated health as their motif. The economy sometimes (though not recently) exhibits ‘healthy trends’ and factories are frequently termed ‘sick units’. Aphorisms like ‘health is wealth’ and ‘no pain, no gain’ are constants in routine conversations. Marginalized people are historically imaged as ‘lepers’, a nomenclatural practice that dates back to the ancient times when leprosy was considered the worst possible scourge. Low-cal editions are the newest versions of socially desirable, risk-free, feel-good life forms. Healthy bodies, ﬁt bodies—the great six-pack made popular by the toned bodies of male ﬁlm stars and the size zero of the heroines—are the new cool. According to a survey, 58 per cent of Indians had made this their New Year resolution for 2008: lose weight and become ﬁtter (AC Nielsen 2007). Everywhere around us health is aligned with happiness, wealth, peace and pleasure. Everyday life is ﬁlled with images, news reports and descriptions of SRK’s (Shah Rukh Khan’s) six-pack, the Aamir Khan’s Ghajini-body, cholesterol-free oil, Dr Batra’s ‘positive health’ campaign, the then health minister Dr Ramadoss’ eﬀorts to ban smoking on screen, massive VLCC adverts, news of horriﬁc viruses like the Ebola and health-advice columns that deal in all these. Health is ‘packaged’ in brochures for products, advertisements, product information (calories), the advice column on the beneﬁts of yoga, governmental initiatives against dengue fever, World Health Organization (WHO) reports in the media, doctor-advice shows on TV or online (such as DoctorNDTV, http://www.doctorndtv.com/home/),1 ﬁction dealing with outbreaks of disease (the best-selling work of Robin Cook, Outbreak, 1988), nonﬁction, popular and bestseller books on genetics (Matt Ridley’s Genome, 2000, and Richard Dawkins’ The Selﬁsh Gene, 1976) or disease (Richard

Packaging Life

Preston’s The Hot Zone on Ebola, 1995) and several others. Studies have explored the popularization of scientiﬁc developments, arguing that in cases of technologies like cloning, science seems to fulﬁl the prophecies and potential outlined by laypersons and popular science ﬁction. That is, medical developments seem to partake of imaginative narratives in popular culture and scientiﬁc events.2 ‘Packaging health’ is the process through which health becomes a product, an event, a desirable entity and state of being and a consumer ideology. It includes a wide variety of related themes and issues: health risks, healthcare technologies (hospitals, hospital management) and biowarfare threats. This ‘packaging’ generates an ideology of ‘healthism’ within what I call a culture of care and cure. Health is not simply a state of wellness, but an active intervention in life processes, a product that can be acquired (or bought), a system of self-care that can help regulate one’s life, a state of being that the medical profession (from research labs to hospitals) creates through its eﬀorts. Health is packaged in multiple ways, and constitutes the subject of this chapter. ‘Health’ is deﬁned and described—represented—for us everyday in expert advice, adverts and health columns. Health is discursively constructed for us in such images and narratives that organize our ways of understanding the very idea and meaning of a ‘healthy’ body. Our knowledge of what is right and wrong about bodies comes to us through such discourses. Thus, discourses and representations—what I am calling ‘packaging’ throughout the book—of medicine, obesity, health, sickness and recovery mediate our experience of the hospital, clinic, health column and medical news reports. Illness and its ‘packaging’ in the form of medical information and knowledge (about illness) make us aware of all the things that are (or could go) wrong within us. This heightened awareness of the physiological, pathological and anatomical states of our body is what I term ‘hyper-pathologization’, and is linked to increased information availability about medical conditions. ‘Packaging’ health is thus the construction of particular meanings about the body, its anatomy, physiology, pathology, appearance and psychology in brochures, news items, columns and adverts—meanings that are often a composite of biomedical, ethical, social, economic, aesthetic narratives about bodies, conditions and medical care. Life is now, preferably, a low-cal edition. 2

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

Health might be feeling good or being able to perform several activities with no pain or assistance. Our interpretation of the feeling or the performance is based on the information we possess about conditions of sound bodies or pathological-physiological states. Does an absence of pain indicate that my body is working well? Is my ability to lift weights an index of a medically ﬁt body? Is a recurrent cough a symptom of a disease aﬄicting my lungs? These questions arise when we are already aware of the answers in some nebulous way. Such answers come from the information and discourses around ‘healthy bodies’, ﬁtness, pathological conditions, diseases and biomedical symptoms that we encounter on an almost daily basis. In other words, we ‘read’ our bodies through the representations of them. These representations provide us with the conceptual, epistemological and linguistic vocabularies for the analysis of the ‘signs’ of the body. If ‘health’, as I have suggested earlier, is a matter of interpreting signs in/on our bodies, it is important to understand how health or ﬁtness is represented and deﬁned for us so that we have the vocabulary and skills to ‘read’ the signs. Take for instance, a commonplace advert. Children play cricket after consuming Boost or eating particular biscuits (inspired throughout by Sachin Tendulkar, whose cricketing exploits imply a healthy body). The advert suggests an intrinsic connection between the consumption of these products, health and the ability to play the game: Only healthy bodies can engage in sport. In eﬀect, health has been deﬁned and represented here as the energy and ability to engage in strenuous exercise and physical sport. The number of ads featuring health drinks that enable/empower the child to play a more sedentary game like chess are rare, are they not? Health is deﬁned as physical, bodily stamina, energy and ability. This means, a sporting body will be read as a sign of ‘health’ because we have been bombarded with images of the same. I see health discourse as embedded in the culture of care and cure, a culture that emerges primarily through the extraordinary process of the medicalization of everyday life. ‘Unpacking’ involves a careful disentangling of the various cultural, technological and commercial codes that make up the culture of health today—the ‘bundling’ of ideologies of individual choice, technological advancement and the perfectible body within diverse representations. 3

Packaging Life

The Medicalization of the Everyday We keep our bodies under constant surveillance. This does not mean that we are policed, but that we police our own bodies based on the authority of medical knowledge. Health comes packaged in the form of endless amounts of information that enables us to examine ourselves for signs of debility and disease. The culture of care and cure originates with this medicalization of the everyday where health is projected as a ‘resource’ that we need to guard, use carefully and defend.3 We: • • • • • •

monitor our blood pressure, watch our calories, record temperatures, check for lumps, nodules, numbness, measure sugar levels and examine our teeth.

In general, we check to see if the body is working smoothly, keeping our bodies under constant surveillance. We have, in short, medicalized our lives. This is made possible, as pointed out earlier, through the availability of easily digestible information (health in a biscuit-byte), but also through technologies that are usable by lay persons. Thus, • • • • • •

self-injection devices (insulin pens), digital sphygmomanometer (blood pressure apparatus), thermometers, corn caps, weighing scales and glucometers

are inventions that have furthered this medicalization of the everyday. We are all now paramedics in the sense that we are all partly medicos! ‘Packaging’ is the process that ensures that we have acquired suﬃcient knowledge—and vocabulary—of medicine, biology and pathology and the technologies for such a medicalization, self-surveillance and even advice. Medicine and its assorted components have been delivered to us 4

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

through this ‘packaging’. We experience what can be called ‘the medical eﬀect’ on a regular basis in our everyday lives. The ‘medical eﬀect’ adds two (now-commonplace) components to the everyday culture of cure and care: 1. The recognition and increased talk of lifestyle diseases, the emphasis on working out, self-surveillance, diet and control are key elements in the present discourse of medicine. Health and sickness are here packaged as something you can achieve if you are disciplined in your lifestyle, follow a basic exercise regimen and undertake periodic examinations (self or with help) of your body. In short, the discourse of medicine now places the onus for maintaining health on you. 2. Health is something that occurs between your biological body and your environment. Or, the relationship between your body and your environment determines the state of your health. Medicine itself, as commentators have noted, relies on authority, control and power (Lindenbaum and Lock 1993; Turner 1987; Young 1997). The white coat bestows upon its wearer a fair amount of authority. Thus, even ads for toothpastes depict actors dressed up as doctors in order to show that they have medical authority behind them.4 Historians and sociologists of medicine have argued that observation, surveillance and control are central to the medical construction of the body (Foucault 1994; Porter 1997). Medicine clearly exerts a regulatory power on bodies and populations. This regulatory regime is exempliﬁed in the Apollo Hospitals group’s manual of instructions for in-patients, titled In-Patient Guide (Apollo Health City, undated, brochure, Hyderabad). It provides detailed information about the structure of the hospital, the facilities, the do’s and don’ts and the rights of the patients. What the guide does is to organize the hospital experience by informing us, in advance, of what to expect and how to behave. Just as courtesy books once informed the experience of say courtship or formal dinners, the hospital guide prepares us to function in certain ways. Sociologists of medicine situate knowledge and power at the centre of the medical profession (Annandale 2001; Bury and Gabe 2004; 5

Packaging Life

Nettleton 2006; Turner 1987, 1999). Sociologists of medicine argue that in order to understand how medicine works we need to see how medicine works through structures of power upon the body (individual and collective). Medical sociologists are interested in the following questions: • How does biomedicine promote itself as authoritative? • How does it impose controls on individuals and groups? This approach necessarily takes into account not just the biological dimensions of medicine but also issues of research funding, the social contexts of research and medical biology (for instance, the social background to AIDS research that isolates homosexuals as a high-risk group and therefore stigmatizes them), the institutional structures of the hospital, the National Institutes of Health in the USA, the racial dimensions (the diﬀerential publicity given to diseases that could aﬀect the USA, for instance, as Susan Moeller [1999] has noted), the intervention of the state (through national policies or measures, rural health schemes), among others. It also accounts for the role of media, the power of advertising and the politics of pharma (arguably the biggest industry). Medicine is a ‘package’ involving an assorted bag of such elements, and involves several non-biomedical and socio-cultural elements. In what follows, we shall ‘unpack’ some of these elements.5

The Informational Culture of Health Bronchoscopy is a procedure that allows your doctor to look at your airway through a thin viewing instrument called a bronchoscope… How it is done: You may be given some medications… You may be asked to remove dentures, eyeglasses or contact lenses … Your heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen level will be checked… A chest x-ray may be done before… – Bronchoscopy, Brochure, Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad.

6

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

Medicalization of the everyday is marked by a pronounced awareness of our states of health and sickness. This involves the circulation of a massive amount of information—expert, professional, alternative and some commonsensical—about health and disease. Biomedical and health information is perhaps the most visible factor of the information environment today. Note, for instance, the items available on the Yahoo! (arguably one of the most popular Internet services) opening menu and its featured services link ‘Health’: Everyday Wellness, Diet and Fitness, Mind and Mood, Longevity, Conditions and Diseases and Resources. It includes expert advice, a video on heart disease (as on 29 May 2008), tips for ‘beautiful skin’ and sex lives, coping with tragedy, advice on diabetes, videos for everyday ﬁtness and the dangers of excessive use of antibiotics. The Hindu carries a health column that often provides specialized topics like adolescent health, eye diseases, depression or geriatric problems. There is a wide enough variety for you to choose from—from cosmetics to antibiotics, chronic ailments to everyday ﬁtness regimen. ‘Health is now a part of the everyday life of information itself,’ the webpage mentions. Works like Robert Proctor’s Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer (1995) call our attention to the ‘problem’ of information, misinformation and non-information about diseases. And of course everybody knows about Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), genetic engineering and the ‘book of life’ (DNA) even as metaphors of and from genetics (the ‘DNA of …’,) has become all pervasive. In fact, DNA is now so ubiquitous that the historian-philosopher of science, Evelyn Fox Keller (2000) designated the 20th century the ‘century of the gene’. It is here that the full power of what I have called ‘packaging’ becomes manifest. Commentators have noted that with the arrival of the Internet there has been a veritable explosion of websites devoted to delivering medical information. In fact, empirical studies such as the Pew Internet and American Life Project 2006 have shown that 80 per cent of all adult Internet users in the USA have searched for health information on the Internet (Fox 2006). Health-related websites are, according to some sources, the most popular resources on the World Wide Web (WWW).6 This could include authoritative, physician-researcher 7

Packaging Life

created resources but, more and more, user-generated content and matter about health issues. The ‘medicalization of cyberspace’, as Andy Miah and Emma Rich have termed it, has altered not only knowledge-delivery of medicine and medical research (for both doctors and the lay person), but also has signiﬁcantly changed the doctor–patient relationship (Miah and Rich 2008). The cybercultural turn in medicine, medical cultures and health matters has been signiﬁcant enough to warrant a full journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research. In the USA, the highly respected medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association preview some of their key articles for the press before the journal is released. Articles published in these venerated journals are often covered in mass-circulation newspapers like The New York Times, and thus, the mass media becomes a vehicle for delivering cutting-edge medical research to the common person. With this mechanism the journal acquires publicity for its work, and the lay public gains knowledge about recent research—where the publicity and information also feed into research in terms of attracting funding opportunities. Brochures, such as the one cited before (on bronchoscopy), serve the purpose of furnishing information about a biomedical procedure. Information in the brochure includes the uses of bronchoscopy, preparation, the actual procedure and risks. Pamphlets like Prevention of Seasonal Diseases (May 2007) by the respected All India Institute of Medical Sciences (New Delhi) on prevalent diseases like dengue fever (downloadable from the website) also constitute this informational culture of medicine and health (All India Institute of Medical Sciences 2007). Indeed, this right to be informed about health matters has gained ascendancy as a crucial citizen’s right, and has, at least since the 1990s, been installed as a public health imperative (Lupton 1995). Debates in the Parliament and the US Congress on medical research or health crises are reported regularly in the mass media and keep the public informed about developments. For instance, every Englishlanguage newspaper and magazine has, for the past ﬁve years (before Barack Obama’s Presidency), carried governmental, scientiﬁc and medical debates about stem-cell research and President Bush’s opposition to it. It widened the domain of bio-medical research and technology beyond the medical establishment into the ﬁelds of ethics, religion, morality, 8

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

pedagogy and public ﬁnance involving priests, common people, social and political theorists (Francis Fukuyama’s polemical Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution has acquired bestseller status since its ﬁrst publication in 2003), administrators and ethical philosophers. To take another example of the mediation of science and biomedicine in the public domain, genetics as a science might be inaccessible to members of the general public, but the language in which research is reported and popularized takes recourse to metaphors and rhetoric that the public understands. Thus, metaphors like ‘the book of life’, the ‘blueprint’ or the ‘recipe’ drawing upon the more commonplace language of information coding have become the means of public representations of genetics (see Condit and Condit 2001). This ‘media-tion’ (I use the term to indicate the media coverage and the mediation) of biomedicine is, I believe, an important advancement in the social processes of medicine because it seeks to demystify the procedure—technological, medical and recuperative—to the patient or the lay person. It is ‘packaging’ because it generates public awareness, commonly-available, bite-sized and specialized information— discourses—about biomedicine. This communicative aspect (and dependence) of biomedicine has come in for considerable attention for its role in the public health opinions, policy, lifestyle choices that it inﬂuences, and has given rise to scholarly attention in journals like Communication and Medicine and Journal of the Medical Humanities. Multiple dimensions of sickness and health—the pathogen, the nature of the disease, the contexts of the disease, the possible prevention and cure, the setting (hospitals) and the processes of treatment (surgery, alternative medicine, post-operative care, physiotherapy or medication)—are delivered to us through media representations. In ‘media representations’, I include promotional material from hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical ﬁrms, documentaries and public interest articles, health columns and advice programmes on TV and even ﬁctional/creative representations in ﬁlms (arguably, before Black [2000], to the best of my knowledge, there has been no ﬁctional representation of Alzheimer’s disease in Hindi cinema, Rajesh Khanna’s Anand [1971] gave high visibility to cancer, AIDS-themed ﬁlms like My Brother Nikhil [2005] and Phir Milenge [2004] provide some information—some perhaps misinformation—about the disease). Men’s Health and Woman’s 9

Packaging Life

Era oﬀer suggestions on healthy living, exercise and makeover. Disease, health, medicine, cure and treatment are popularized for consumption like any other product/event today. Health advice in magazines such as Men’s Health is often medicalized; technical yet accessible. The informational culture of health is at least partly the language of medicine. For instance, we read about how beef is a good source of zinc and creatine (Men’s Health, June 2007, p. 97). Or ‘thin-walled vessels in the brain can burst under extreme pressure, causing the wholesale slaughter of brain cells that’s known as a haemorrhagic stroke’ (Men’s Health, July 2007, p. 118). Or, it shows you, through computer-generated visuals, how exactly the leg muscles move during a run (Men’s Health, July 2007, p. 34). Such magazines also embody a ‘culture of expertise’, as I have termed it elsewhere (Nayar 2008b). Advice columns cite mostly people with PhDs and MDs attached to their names, thereby lending a certain legitimacy and authority to the discourse of health and ﬁtness. More recently, it has been recommended that restaurant menus display the calories and nutrition facts of their dishes (rather like such information on food products now), where ‘nutritional information can help consumers moderate their eating over time’.7

Healthism ‘Now I feel great, absolutely fantastic. Everyday I wake up feeling on top of the world. I am also comforted by the fact that I have maintained the weight loss.’ He has emerged a new man. His physical ailments are things of the past and replaced by conﬁdence and a new found sense of assurance and pride in his appearance. – Testimonial by Matthew Thomas and commentary on VLCC website8

Once the information about dengue fever, the possibility of a proteinrich diet helping a six-pack body or the vaccinations available for the scourge of 2006–07 chikungunya are disseminated, we have an immediate and protracted public awareness about the disease (as late as 2009, 10

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

three years after the epidemic, newspapers occasionally provide reports and scientiﬁc studies of the disease. See Raj 2009). There is, on occasion, panic purchase of preventive medication from various homoeopaths—a common sight during the chikungunya epidemic. Information dissemination of disease, ﬁtness programmes, diets and nutritional facts generate what has been called ‘healthism’, an extreme preoccupation with personal health (cited in Moulting 2007: 62). Once information is made available to us about what the ‘healthy body’ should be, it becomes contingent upon us to act responsibly and stay healthy. ‘Being informed about one’s own health,’ writes a sociologist of medicine, ‘also invokes the emergence of a “healthy self ” ideal, creating the obligation to reach and sustain that ideal, thus driving the relentless pursuit of information’ (Kivits 2004: 513). We are also made aware, through the work of exceptional journalists and commentators that ‘health’ is rarely a neutral concept or condition. Thus, Kalpana Sharma writing in The Hindu noted that the All India Services Performance Appraisal Rules, 2007, under the heading, ‘Brief Clinical History, If Any’ for ‘female oﬃcers’ insisted on knowing their menstrual cycle (Sharma 2007). Healthism emerges in part due to the hyper-pathologization of the body. Disease is something we are very familiar with not only in terms of personal experience, but also through what I have called the ‘informational culture of health’. How exactly is the diseased, at-risk, decaying body portrayed in this ideology of healthism? An advertisement for MIOT joint clinic (Hyderabad) shows a senior citizen performing the Suryanamaskar. The tag line goes: ‘Suryanamaskar at 70? Why not?’ The ad captures a crucial element in the way medicine is promoted today: medicine and medical expertise are what enable you to go on doing what you do. At 70 you do not have to alter your morning exercise regimen just because your weak bones and hip do not allow you—medical treatment, including hip replacement, can help you continue to perform the same exercises that you did at 35. Healthism is linked to this project of continued personal health. Continuity is a key theme in medical discourses about chronic illness. Chronic illness is what Michael Bury has theorized as a ‘biographical disruption’ (Bury 1982). This means, illness, especially chronic illness, 11

Packaging Life

interrupts the regular rhythm of life. Illness is a disruptive situation. It causes us to suddenly pay attention to our bodies, to seek explanations for the illness and to ﬁnd practical solutions to it. Health is a resource and ‘capital’ for a good life, and must therefore be nurtured and safeguarded. The advantage of seeing illness as disruption is that it shows us how illness alters our lives. Illness demands changes in food habits, the monthly budget, the spaces of living (hospitalization, home-nurses, special equipment in the sick room), the family, habits and hobbies—in fact, everything. Thus the diseased body reorients the spaces around it, even as the body itself is being transformed through the pathological condition. Illness has therefore, social, cultural and economic changes, all revolving around or connected to the body, where the body is more than simply a medicalized one. Illness also alters the body’s perception of itself (what is called Body Image Dissatisfaction syndrome). It conﬂicts with the way we have thus far perceived our bodies. The VLCC ads about obesity and slimming are an excellent illustration of this. Arguably, many of these dwell not on obesity as a medical problem, but one of psychological crisis and a crisis in looks. Ads where young men and women (there are no old people in VLCC ads that I am aware of: Is it that old people are not concerned about their self-identity and appearance?) declare that they got back their appearance, conﬁdence, indeed life itself after slimming down. As the Matthew Thomas testimonial and description from VLCC suggests, the person’s identity is intimately linked to the body’s form and appearance. And VLCC enables the man to ﬁnd, improve and reconstruct his identity. In these cases, their form and appearance—a bulge or a crooked smile—was at odds with their notions of themselves: the body was what they did not want the body to be. ‘Improve your smile, boost your self conﬁdence’ declares the ﬂyer for Impressions Dental Hospitals, Hyderabad, thus linking form with conﬁdence, faith in one’s bodyappearance (‘do not hesitate to smile full heartedly’, it goes on to add) and ﬁnally medical interventions. In such ads, what we see is the modiﬁcation of the body, at least partly through biomedical intervention (surgery, nutrition), in order that it approximates to what the self-representation is. Obesity here can be seen as something that works at the interface of the person’s image of 12

Life, the Low-calorie Edition

her/him-self and her/his body. Illness works the same way because it shows up the gap between self-representation (this is me) and the sick body (this is my ailing body). Medicine works at this gap where it seeks to bring the body closer to the person’s estimate of her/him-self, to become a low-cal life form.

The Culture of Care and Cure The packaging of health results, I suggest, in a culture of care and cure. The medical profession professes its care for us, the biomedical researchers express their concerns, and the individuals are expected to care about themselves. This culture of care and cure has very speciﬁc essentials: • It involves a notion of the body as something that can be perfected and reconstructed. • It involves a very deﬁnite notion of the care of the self. From the late 1990s, the cult of appearance and the increasing globalization of celebrity culture (depicting ﬁt and healthy bodies), the availability of cosmetic products from all over the world saw a signiﬁcant transformation of Indian bodies, so to speak. The cult of the perfectible body acquired higher visibility when it involved the Indian cricket team. John Wright, the then coach of the Indian cricket team, came down harshly on the lack of ﬁtness among the players. As one commentator on the ‘changed’ players put it: It was Wright, again, who introduced the traditionally lazy Indian cricketer to the culture of ﬁtness. It was Wright who emphasized the need for ﬁtness training, and arm-twisted the most parsimonious sports body in the world into investing in a physio and physical trainer, a policy that has resulted in the notoriously slack Indian team now taking its place as one of the ﬁttest on the circuit. (Shariﬀ 2003)

In a country where cricket is a religion, the shift to a ﬁtness regimen under the aegis of a foreign coach—it must be remembered that former India players, including Kapil Dev and Anshuman Gaekwad 13

Packaging Life

were against Wright’s appointment—is signiﬁcant. Fitness in sports is considered essential and, John Wright had to point out, Indian players were simply not ﬁt. The culture of ﬁtness in sport has from around 2000 spilled over into other areas. The new age of ﬁtness and health was recognizable enough in its manifestations for India Today to run a special report on what it called the ‘lust for youth’. It mapped the numerous technologies and procedures that are now available to ‘ensure that the quality of life does not decline with age’ (Bezbaruah 2004). This is popular rhetoric that reﬂects the prevalent culture of cure and care. The culture of care and cure can be examined for its speciﬁc forms (not exhaustive, but indicative).

The Perfectible Body 3 minutes is all it takes to help repair 3 months of damage…. Presenting Femina-Pantene 3 minute miracle challenge…. – Pantene advert, Femina, 8 April 2009, pp. 14–15

The cosmetologist group, Kaya, calls itself the ‘Kaya Skin Clinic’. Beauty parlours around India are ‘beauty clinics’. This seems to suggest, on the one hand, that dermal problems might be pathological-physiological and therefore requiring medical intervention. On the other hand, it also suggests something else: blemishes, acne, scars and asymmetric teeth are not simply pathological conditions but cultural conditions.9 Ugliness—attributed to these skin conditions—is something that seems to demand medical attention. Hence, ‘beauty clinics’ are where ugliness of the skin is ‘treated’. In other words, the ad’s representations hinge upon an Indian fetish and cultural rhetorics of fair complexion, skin tone and beauty. This cultural rhetorics becomes the norm within the discourse of cosmetic enhancement and repairs. A low-cal life form can emerge even from within your obese body, if the promotional material of any slimming centre is to be believed. This is the age of the perfectible body, and all of us are asked to invest in what have been called ‘body projects’ (Shilling 1993: 4–8). ‘Projects’ imply information, imagination, diagnosis and a process of intervention 14

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that attains a target.10 The body is now an entity that is in the process of becoming, in transformation and transition, into something healthier, better-shaped and more beautiful. A body project is now part of the making of the individual’s self-identity. This is a crucial dimension of packaging health today. The body is a project because we are aware—and constantly made aware—that its shape, form, size, features and, increasingly, its contents can be modiﬁed. Thus, Kaya Skin Clinic: 1. helps you identify the situation—blemishes, warts, skin ailments, 2. oﬀers a diagnosis and a well-deﬁned target—root (medical) cause and clear skin respectively and 3. prepares a process of intervention—treatment. It asks you to indulge in a ‘body project’ where blemishes do not have to be a part of your body. All those ads about diabetes being curable and controllable suggest that one does not have to accept the body as a given—the body is open to change and reconstruction. A variety of such projects are commonplace today: heart patients can have pace-makers installed, gym work outs give a diﬀerent body shape, high-protein and low-carb diets give better Body Mass Index (BMI), teeth can be ﬁled, chiseled and braced-in to shape up, liposuction means you do not have to be obese any more. ‘Body projects’, especially of the biomedical kind, are here to stay and they are linked to the wide circulation of the images of the perfectible. This excessive circulation of the images of the perfectible, and the discourse of healthism, has led to consequences such as the new phenomenon of Body Image Dissatisfaction or BID (Moulting 2007). Here, the person is unhappy with her/his body’s appearance and seeks medical support. This leads, in some cases, to severe psychological stress and depression. Body Image Dissatisfaction is now a documented medical condition in Western societies. It is also a gendered condition, and has a social dimension since it informs social interaction of people with the syndrome. In order to understand this, we need to turn to the thinness imperative among women in the West, and, since the 1990s, globally. 15

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Susan Bordo in her classic work (1990) has shown how the pursuit of thinness is a highly seductive project for young women and girls. Bordo argues that this drive towards anorexic bodies can be seen as a form of resistance to traditional ideals of the ‘matured’ feminine body. Bordo, however, sees this drive as inherently contradictory because on the one hand the girls are tempted with consumer products that add to their weight, and on the other, they are asked to curb their food intake and look thin. Healthism relies on such a contradictory discourse of the perfectible body. The ideological drives behind this enormously gendered discourse of health and beauty have therefore become the subject of numerous feminist-driven studies (for India, see Anand 2002). In the case of men, a similar ideological prejudice about particular kinds of bodies prevails. Magazines like Men’s Health promote a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of the muscled, healthy and ﬁt male. A biological determinism of the youthful is clearly visible in the rhetoric of magazines like Men’s Health. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, a term ﬁrst used by R.W. Connell in 1979, refers to speciﬁc kinds of masculinity that gain dominance over other kinds in speciﬁc cultural, historical and political contexts (Beasley 2005: 192). It describes how speciﬁc types of men occupy positions of power, and proceed to legitimize, reinforce and naturalize it (Carrigan et al. 1985). We are now in the age of the yuppie masculine— epitomized in the ﬁt and wealthy bodies of Anil Ambani and Aditya Birla—where successful career professionals interested in the care of the self represent the most dominant form of masculinity. The current ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is of the businessman, or what is identiﬁed as the ‘transnational business masculinity’ where power and authority remain masculine, but include attributes like tolerance, energy focused on work, ﬂexibility, a certain libertarianism, technological skills and skill in communication (Connell and Wood 2005). The number of corporate businessmen depicted in magazines is a good index of this form of hegemonic masculinity. As a result of this, it comes as no surprise to see the development of a concept of ‘corporate wellness’ where companies encourage healthy lifestyles among their employees (Nambiar 2008). And therefore, a bank advert that carries a visual of a young man with the legend, ‘Ceo@24’ and declares ‘banking for a young India’ (The Week, 22 March 2009, p. 23). 16

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Magazines like Men’s Health thrive on the link between the desire to be distinctive and the ‘culture of expertise’ that generates the rhetoric of desire and desirability. Note the rhetoric: ‘Fight Fat and Win’, ‘Eat Curry, Lose your Belly’, ‘Double your Muscle in Half the Time’ and ‘Burn Fat, Get Fit’ (from Men’s Health, May 2007; June 2007; July 2007; August 2007). Stated as imperatives in this kind of grammatical construction, the ﬁt body is set up as a goal, which presupposes its desirability. The ideal male body in Men’s Health is a body builder, though ﬁtness of other kinds—from martial arts to athletic bodies to de-stressed lives—also ﬁgure. In terms of sheer quantity, body building outweighs any other kind of health advice. There is a distinctive feature about what I have elsewhere (Nayar 2008a) termed as ‘pornography of ﬁtness’ (I have used the term ‘pornography’ deliberately, in order to describe products, events and advertising ‘designed to stimulate and excite’ [which is the other meaning of the term ‘pornography’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary]). The ideal shape of the man’s body as seen in the visual vocabulary of Men’s Health is: muscled, hairless, lean, clean-shaven and, if in colour, tanned. The rhetoric presupposes that the muscled body is (or ought to be) the goal of every man and masculinity codes as muscle. What is also interesting is that this goal of muscled bodies is presented as an easy acquisition. All gym and ﬁtness advice suggests that these muscles can be achieved with moderate eﬀort. This discourse of ease takes the form of a numbered rhetoric of ﬁtness, a quantiﬁcatory imperative: ‘Pantene’s 3-minute miracle’ (as in the epigraph to this section), ‘Double your Muscle in Half the Time’, ‘Six protein-packed veggie superfoods’, ‘A head-to-toe overhaul in 15 minutes or less’, ‘Five Quick Fixes: Alternative Health Cures that Work’ (Men’s Health July 2007; May 2007; August 2007). It is almost as though the numbering reduces any suggestion of hard work. Five steps in the gym that include weight training are not ‘easy’ by any stretch of imagination: but what we are asked to do is to focus on the numerically smaller 5 steps rather than the intensity of each of those steps. The opening of fast food centres, new modes of work (computerized, work from home) and automation has made physical movement minimal for most people. Lifestyle changes in food and work habits have generated a crisis of obesity, according to reports from most countries 17

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round the world. Consumer culture asks, invites and pleads with the citizens to indulge themselves—eat more, play more, shop more. Yet, simultaneously this same consumer culture markets health products, ﬁtness machines, diet foods and nutrient supplements. Indeed, the market metaphor is what dominates public health discourse itself—hawking health as a product (Malone 1999). Computer gaming, often seen as unhealthy, has also cashed in on the healthism ideology—Reebok has introduced CyberRider and CyberFit exercise bikes with PlayStation controls so you can pedal and play at the same time. The cultural rhetorics of the perfectible body—male and female, with variations for each—is one that is drawn in two directions simultaneously: consume more, control more. What I have termed the ‘culture of care and cure’ can actually be rephrased as the culture of care, cure and consumption, where care and health are products that can be purchased. A noticeable shift that has occurred in notions of the perfectible body is the new emphasis on ‘holistic’ health. If we live in increasingly fragmented societies and cultures—the age of the ‘fragmentation of the social’, as one thinker has claimed (Jenks 2005)—the emphasis on ‘holistic’ cures and treatments is an interesting phenomenon where wholeness of body and mind are sought at least at the individual level. Thus, AddLife, the popular Ayurvedic chain, speaks of its ‘holistic approach to health’ in its ﬂyer. In alternative systems of medicine, ‘holistic’ appears as a key concept and image. ‘Holistic’ is used as a term to describe a whole made up of interdependent parts which would include: • mind and body, • mind, body and spirit, or • spirituality, emotions and the body. It is now used as a synonym for alternative therapies such as homoeopathy or Ayurveda. ‘Packaging health’ since the 1990s has involved a massive amount of information and publicity for alternative systems of medicine and therapy. To tweak the argument about holism slightly, it also indicates the integration of multiple levels of care and cure into one large system. Hospitals like Apollo now oﬀer psychological support—a thing unheard of 18

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in the 1980s and 1990s in India. They also integrate things like patient rights and responsibilities (Apollo Hospitals has a brochure detailing these).

The Care of the Self A beauty regime inside your purse… – Advert for Kara Skincare Wipes (Chronicle Hyderabad, Deccan Chronicle, 1 June 2008, p. 60)

The care of the self is at least partly to do with the idea that you need to be healthy to survive in a competitive world, to carry out everyday functions and be a good citizen. Health and biomedicine have a particular way of understanding health, one that gives primacy to the body. Bodies have borders that are violated by disease-causing pathogens. The body’s borders have to be secured against the invaders. What is interesting is that the battle for the body against the invaders is a battle between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. The human body has been cultivated, perfected and controlled—in other words, cultured. Viruses, infections, pathogens—in other words, disease— represent nature where everything is uncontrolled and in excess. Health is the state of being when nature—infections, disease—is kept out of the body, in which the body’s boundaries are secured against the invasive forms of natural life. In other words, the biomedical view is that disease occurs when natural processes such as cellular multiplication, or the crossing of the border between human bodies and the world, occur. Medicine attempts to regulate these processes because these natural processes threaten the integrity of the human body (see Waldby 1996 for an excellent study of this theme in AIDS discourse). And yet, this regulation is something that one can perform for oneself, on a daily basis. The use of the term ‘regime’ in the advert cited at the head of this section captures the regulatory imperative in self-care today. The mid-20th century was when medicine really began to speak of social diseases, and social factors as causal agents for sickness. Thus diseases resulting from malnutrition were not pathological or biological, but social—since they resulted from poverty, poor hygiene and 19

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nutritional problems. Here, disease is the result of ﬂawed social rather than biological systems. In simple terms, the new approach to medicine placed disease in the social context: poverty/aﬄuence, location and neighbourhood and lifestyles. This meant that doctors, clinicians and researchers had to acquire the knowledge of non-biological factors about the disease or patient. The social model of illness also suggests that medical intervention is only one component of the contexts of disease. Hygiene, sanitation, nutrition and environment (including things like race and ethnicity) were equally important factors in the origin, spread and control of disease. In such a model, ‘diseases’ like anorexia or other eating disorders are the results of not (only) individual choices but also of a social context: the glamourization of thin (the low-cal edition of life, as I am calling it). Being sick involves, in contemporary medical practices, a social aspect in addition to the biological one. A person being sick involves more than the sick body—it means an institutional involvement, the responsibility of the medical profession and the pharmacist, the laboratory and sometimes even the state. The sick person, argued the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1951), has an obligation to get better because being sick meant being a non-productive member of the social system (in addition to being a burden on the system’s economy) and a non-participant in the social obligations (this emphasis on the productive citizen is the cultural rhetoric at work within the discourse of sickness). The ‘sick role’ also legitimizes the function and power of the medical profession: its members identify and mark a person as sick or healthy. What this means is simply that sickness has a very prominent social dimension. It is important that the body’s borders are kept safe. Health is something that can be achieved, and culture kept pure and safe. Health is increasingly depicted as something we can achieve through bodily control—of exercise, food habits and lifestyle. Obesity is therefore a ‘lifestyle disease’ and is linked with the consumption of ‘junk food’ instead of ‘health food’. Sedentary lifestyles, excessive computer-related work are seen as the cause of spondylosis, back pain and other ailments. AIDS is linked to promiscuous lifestyles and unsafe sex. Coronary heart disease is connected, like obesity, to sedentary lifestyles and bad food habits. In short, health and sickness are related to factors of habits, lifestyle and environment. Health is here about bodily discipline and control. Or, 20

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more fascinatingly, health is about regulated consumption of the good things in life: rich foods, luxurious lifestyle. Excessive consumption (also known as hedonism) and indulgence of the pleasures of life is the route to sickness and medical problems. Health is the condition that results from the correct balance between denial and pleasure. The term ‘balance’ is critical in all health advice and writings today. The ‘balance’ is also, on occasion, between the regime of treatment and the regime of pleasure. Leisure and relaxation are now integral to the culture of self-care, and leisure is itself seen as something one does as a component of ‘self-improvement’ and self-actualization (which of course includes questions of agency, self-determination and identitymaking).11 Ayurveda, known for its rigorous diet programme, seeks to reinvent itself by projecting its form of treatment as pleasure. Cure as pleasure is captured in the advertisement for Ayurbay, an ‘Ayurvedic Beach Resort’, in its tag line: ‘Wellness or vacation’. This is accompanied by visuals of foreigners relaxing by the beach and in the garden (Global Ayurveda, 3.4, 2007, p. 35). A similar rhetoric conﬂating healthcare and pleasure is visible in other wellness centres (Global Ayurveda, 3.4, 2007, p. 6). The idea is to show the regime of cure and care need not be tortuous at all, but can very well be an agenda on your vacation. Medical tourism, especially with Ayurveda, is an attempt to combine the two regimes of cure and pleasure. More signiﬁcantly, health is something to be managed by the self too. With increasing facilities and technologies managing one’s health is a routine task of the everyday. Google launched its Google Health in February 2008 with its personal health record (PHR) facility for users— once you have registered, Google displays listings of healthcare organizations and product/service vendors that have integrated with Google Health.12 Users can compile and download their records, including conditions, medication, allergies and test results, from the multiple sources used to generate any health record. This integrates an individual’s health records into one, and can be directly ‘fed’ or transmitted to the healthcare worker/hospital—yet another instance of the ‘informational culture of health’. Men’s Health India from the India Today group aims to provide ‘unmatched content for Indian men to take control of their physical, mental, and emotional lives,’ with a focus on ‘health, ﬁtness, fashion, 21

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nutrition, relationships, sex, travel, gear and money’13 (It must be noted that there is no mention of parenting or domestic work here). Every issue of Men’s Health carries a semi-clad male form on the cover. Aged male bodies are completely left out—except as caricature—in the magazine, thus suggesting an ideology of ageism at work: the only body worth looking at and talking about is the youthful one. The health columns and advice carefully mix unhealthy things with ﬁtness. Thus, one article on weight loss advises men: ‘You can eat French fries sparingly’ (Men’s Health May 2007: 60). Another quotes medical authorities to declare: ‘People who down one or two alcoholic drinks a day retain their memories better than either teetotallers or heavy drinkers’ (Men’s Health May 2007: 64). It encourages men to play video and computer games because it apparently improves concentration levels (Men’s Health May 2007: 64). Men’s Health presents a hedonistic, aggressive male stereotype where lifestyles and habits that have long been associated with ill-health and nerds are recast as things males must or can do in moderation. And this is the point I have made before: contemporary care of the self is marked by a self-contradictory move where on the one hand you have to consume more to be cool or ‘with it’ as a good consumer citizen, and on the other, you have to consume in moderation. The care of the self in the packaging of health presupposes an autonomous subject who can make choices about her/his lifestyle, food habits, exercise regimen and work style. The individual, made aware of the problems, beneﬁts and risks in adopting a particular lifestyle is able to transform her/him-self accordingly. In other words, the ideology of self-care assumes that we are empowered individuals who can make such decisions. This makes conditions like obesity the consequence of poor lifestyle and self-control. It shifts the condition from the medical to the moral, where the choice of lifestyle, indulgence or lack of self-control in the individual is blamed for the ‘problem’. The autonomous individual must make moral choices about exercise, food habits and lifestyle. To cut a long story short, the care of the self is a moral imperative on the individual, a bioethic for the individual to pursue and implement. Such an imperative placed upon the autonomous individual and bioethics is problematic in India because decisions as to food habits are governed by strong family structures. The ideology of self-care works 22

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for First World families where the basis of all rights, including human rights, is the autonomous individual with agency and control over her/ his lifestyle choices. The same does not hold good for India. So, lifestyle choices in India are severely restrained and restricted by the family structures an individual occupies and to which she/he often submits. Then what is the form that the care of the self takes in India? Notice the number of ads that target ‘you’, as in, the individual. These address the individual as the site of lifestyle choices. However, a slightly diﬀerent order of the same care discourse works for the family. Ads for cooking oils, for instance, or insurance, focus on the family as a unit. In such cases, I propose, we see the care of the self is tempered and suitably modiﬁed with a commitment, especially on the part of the woman— these are highly gendered ads—toward the family’s health. The cultural rhetorics within which the care of the self is embedded in India exhibits a dualism. On the one hand there is an increasing atomization where lifestyle choices focus on the individual rather than the family or community. On the other hand, there is a far greater emphasis on the family in particular discourses of safety, ﬁnances, home and housing, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Nayar 2008b, see especially Chapter 5). The care of the self is, in the case of India, caught between self-care and welfare, where the ﬁrst is, as the term indicates, about the individual and the second is about the family.

Managing Health, Promoting Wellness Health has to be managed. Wellness is promoted by insurance companies, biomedical research organizations, the medical fraternity, gyms and ﬁtness centres and even the state. Like ﬁnance, risk or careers, health is part of the great managerialism of the late 20th century. Physicians are not simply doctors— they are health managers, regulating your body and mind to achieve health. Apollo Hospitals Hyderabad declares itself as ‘Asia’s First Health City’. A city, we know, consists of some of the most organized and managed ‘systems’—transport, law and order, healthcare, communications, administration—integrated so that the city runs well. The city has to be

23

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‘managed’. The city is also many things put together—cultural, social, political and infrastructural. To see a hospital and healthcare facility described as a city is therefore rather interesting.

The Technologization of Health The hospital is at the forefront of medical technology and expertise. – Prefatory note, Out Patient Clinic Brochure, Apollo Hospitals

Why do hospitals ﬁrst showcase their technologies rather than their caring, compassionate and kind doctors? Why are hospitals and clinics state-of-the-art rather than, if I may indulge in drollery, state-of-theheart? ‘Care’, ‘charity’ and ‘cure’—the roots of medicine—proceed from ‘caritas’, which implied the physician’s sense of compassion and humanity. This component seems to have dropped out of sight, or at least seems miniaturized, in descriptions and self-representations of hospitals and biomedicine. Instead we see a preponderance of a highly technologized biomedical environment. Ads for hospitals regularly and invariably showcase new technological devices that (apparently) help cure people’s ailments. I turn to two high-proﬁle examples of the technologized body in biomedicine today. There has been, historically, an intrinsic connection between visuality, visual representation—photographs, graphs, charts, images, models, simulations—and medical diagnosis. In the beginning, the dissection yielded up the body’s interiors and workings to the eye of the physician. Engineering has tried constantly to provide better tools to look into, probe and explore the human body. Laennac’s stethoscope invented in 1819 enabled the physician to ‘read’ the heart. Röntgen’s X-rays in 1896 helped doctors see fractures in bones. In the latter half of the 20th century, MRI scans, X-rays, CAT scans, DNA sampling, all provide visual images of disease, the pathogen and the damage. Schematic models of the DNA are commonplace in the cultural imagination because they occur frequently as visual representations in newspapers, magazines and other forms.14 We now know what the structure of the AIDS virus is through ﬁlms, newspapers and reportage. Computerized imaging is now integral to medical technology. The massive Visible Human Project 24

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has rendered the human form in 3D ﬂy-through video for anybody who wishes to know the human anatomy. Visualization technology transforms the body itself into a visual medium. Medical visualization technology and the digital human projects are ways of perceiving and representing the body—that is, they are about images. However, these technologies are not neutral. There are social, cultural, economic and political aspects to any technology. In the rest of this section I look at select ways of ‘screening’ health and sickness. The projects that I take up deal with the digitization of the human body. The Visible Human Project of the National Library of Medicine, USA (VHP, inaugurated in 1994) and a related project by the Center for Human Simulation, Colorado (CHS) are two medically related projects.15 Both the projects have become extraordinarily famous as anatomy texts. The project has sectioned the human body, photographed it, and stored it as digitized data. What the CHS does is to cause the digitally constructed, chip-driven ‘heart’ or ‘lungs’ to simulate physiology, and even disease, so that the processes can be studied better. The images in 3D and virtual reality models—which the CHS compares to ﬂight simulation—are meant to serve as educational devices. When converted into the digital format, transmitted and reconstructed elsewhere to produce an anatomy the body in eﬀect disappears to be reassembled elsewhere, indeﬁnitely, inﬁnitely. One of the key, and fascinating, features of the VHP and CHS is their stark realism. These are computer-generated views created directly from body slices. Where earlier medical textbooks used photographs or artists’ visualizations—that is, created in the imagination—of the body, the VHP works with the body itself as raw data to create its images. The VHP presents a unique combination of the ﬂeshly and the virtual, the cadaver and the digital, the skin-and-bones and the computer code (Cartwright 1998). Visibility here is linked both to the ﬂeshly real and the coded virtual. It is simultaneously real and computer-generated— this is the fascinating dimension of the VHP’s digital anatomy. It is interesting to note that this ‘Visible Human’ is a biological male. Thus ‘human’ is automatically assumed to be male. It is in line with convention in medical science where the ‘standard model’ of the human was always male, and the female body (in anatomy or physiology) would only be described in terms homologous to that of the male. A study of 25

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US medical text books from the 1890–1990 period demonstrated this crucial cultural diﬀerence in the ways in which male and female bodies were perceived even in medicine: the male body was the primary and standard, and the female was only a variant to be studied after studying the male model (Lawrence and Bendixen 1992). What is evident here is that the visibility of the human body in medical texts is governed less by anatomical or medical requirements than by cultural viewpoints and prejudices. It is because the woman was considered secondary to the man that anatomy lessons were prepared based on the primary model: the male. Later, a ‘visible woman’ was added to the VHP database. This ‘visible woman’ was based on the body of a 59-year old woman. It was emphasized here that the woman was past the reproductive age, thereby linking the woman’s identity to the possibility of the procreative function: no such condition was used to identify the visible human male. It is almost as though the woman’s visibility depends on the reproductive ability and function. In 1995, an equivalent of the Visible Human was created at the Stanford University, termed Stanford Visible Female (SVF). This one was based on the body of a 32-year old woman, and is, crucially, described thus: [T]he SVF project is unique in two important ways: the specimen is that of a 32 year old female and it was ﬁxed in a standing position. These features are unlike the 59 year old post-menopausal Visible Human Female. The uterus and ovaries are those of a reproductive age female and do not reﬂect the atrophic signs of post-menopause.16

The representation in the SVF is apparently of the ‘normal’ female. As seen in the discussion of the VHP, the visual simulation generates a model or standard for the human. In the case of the SVF the ‘standard’ is that of a woman in the reproductive age group. In other words, the politics of representation here casts the woman as normal or standard only if she is within the reproductive age. As in the case of the VHP visible female, the woman’s identity, even in simulation, revolves around her ability to bear children. Child-bearing becomes the mark of her femininity. Visibility here is restricted to viewing the woman’s body in (mainly) its reproductive functions. What I want to emphasize here is that the 26

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technology is rooted in cultural prejudices and ideologies where the woman is reduced to her reproductive ability. A second example for the cultural politics of visualization technologies in medicine is the ultrasound. In 2003 the Punjab government considered banning a US company’s gender determination technology kit for fear that it would lead to killing of female foetuses and ruin the state’s already precarious sex ratio (Gulfnews.com 2006). The Indian government in the 1990s had already starting cracking down on prenatal gender determination procedures because there was an alarming increase in female foeticide—here an instance of a cultural rhetoric of ‘protecting the female’ that runs counter to the cultural rhetoric that privileges the male child (since the 1990s the ultrasound scan and other modes of foetal gender identiﬁcation procedures came in for much attention all over the world). India’s Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Tests Act prevents gender testing of foetuses. We shall return to the politics of childbirth later, but right now, it is the centrality of visual culture to the issue of foetuses that is the focus. What is central to the ban and the ultrasound is the visualization of the foetus, the granting of recognition to the foetus because we now have knowledge of its identity as male or female—the foetus’ ﬁrst step to socialization. With ultrasound, the foetus appears for the ﬁrst time as a ‘person’. In 1990, Life magazine put the foetus in the womb on its cover with the caption: ‘The ﬁrst pictures ever of how life begins.’17 Now, the moment when the foetus becomes a sentient human being—for instance, the change from an ‘embryo’ to a ‘foetus’—has been furiously debated by ethicists and the medical profession (just as the ‘moment’ of death has been). What the ultrasound picture did was to suddenly give the foetus an identity as a human. Parents begin to ‘bond with’ their child well before its birth through ultrasound scans. What is important is that the boundaries between the medical and the personal are blurred here. The biomedical image takes on the ‘aura’ of a portrait and creates a document of the baby as a social being. Clearly, visualizing technology in medicine has cultural consequences and emotional eﬀects on viewers. This was demonstrated by a Volvo automobile ad which showed a foetus in an ultrasound scan visual, with a tag line below—‘Is something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?’— thus suggesting that the foetus inside needs to be protected and you 27

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therefore need to purchase/consume a particular product. In 1984, Bernard Nathanson made a videotape called The Silent Scream, wherein he showed ‘real-time’ ultra-sound images of a 12-week old foetus. He stated that the images converted him to anti-abortionist because they revealed to him that what he saw on screen was a ‘living unborn child’. The foetus thus becomes a ‘person’ when viewed thus. Images of foetuses have been used by pro-life groups in the USA to oppose abortion. Feminist critics have argued that such foetal representation, by bestowing some kind of autonomous identity upon the foetus somehow ensures the disappearance of the mother and the mother’s material body, which is set in speciﬁc economic, cultural and social contexts (Stabile 1998). By focusing on the foetus as a ‘human being’ that requires protection (and hence no abortion) it is separated from the mother’s body and its needs: access to health, food and shelter. The gendered nature of medical visualization techniques has social consequences, argue commentators (see Treichler et al. 1998). A related domain of medicine’s visual and performance culture is the work done by artists with scans, bodies and medical concepts. The 1990s and 21st century art forms appropriated and aestheticized contemporary developments in technoculture, especially in biology, medicine and genetics. Franko B uses his own blood and bodily ﬂuids in order to comment on medicine’s obsession with objectivity and control (see http://www.franko-b.com/gallery/g_performance4.htm). Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou) interfaces his body with machines and the Internet. Alexis Rockman’s The Farm (2000) depicted a soybean ﬁeld that shows recognizable plants and animals, and speculated on how they might look in future. These are transgenic art forms, blurring the boundaries between human, animal and vegetable.18 The medical image of a body (now sliced into less than a millimetre thick, photographed and digitized) is now an exhibition of the internal body. It turns the body inside out, as the newest exhibition in this line, Gunther von Hagens’ ‘Body Worlds’ actually does (also archived at www.bodyworlds.com). When it comes to genes and chromosomes, it literally inﬂates the smallest component of the human into a visual treat. In the case of genomic art, the modiﬁed animals and plants are basically exhibitions and renderings of the ‘natural’ processes of evolution, growth and decay. 28

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Genomic art is about the aesthetization of the ultimate secret processes of the human body. The deformity or perfect forms represented here signify possibilities, and artists and scholars alike are fascinated by the directions human life/form can take, as evidenced in a new volume of essays titled, appropriately, Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (Miah 2008). It is cybercultural art that takes the human form, environment and future in the context of heavily technologized environments very seriously. In order to emphasize this possible transformation of the real/bodily through technologies, it takes recourse to particular aesthetic forms. What the images, performances and installations in Alexis Rockman or Stelarc tell us is the course our (as in human) future life could take. Genomic art establishes anomalous, non-natural forms, even when they have natural functions (such as the third ear, which was used by the artist Stelarc). The Pig Wings project calls attention to this aspect in its opening statements: Rhetoric surrounding the development of new biological technologies make us wonder if pigs could ﬂy one day. If pigs could ﬂy, what shape their wings will take? The Pig Wings project presents the ﬁrst use of living pig tissue to construct and grow winged shaped semiliving objects.19

Such projects are attempts to demystify and popularize—albeit to the hardened viewer—the medicalized body. By ‘revealing’ the processes in biomedicine and genetics, new media and genomic art renders it more visible, even as it adds to the sense that medicine is an integral part of our lives.

The Biomilitary State Global War Against AIDS Runs Short of Vital Weapon: Donated Condoms. (McNeil 2002) At Ground Zero of India’s War on AIDS. (Warrier 2006)

Medicine itself can now be deﬁned as the attempt to keep nature (in the form of bacteria or pathogens) from intruding into our lives. Human 29

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life, in this view, is culture. Viruses and bacteria represent nature and nature constantly tries to take over, colonize and overwhelm the cultured human. Infection is this invasion by and multiplication of another body within the human one. This multiplication is natural to the life form, but in the biomedical view, it causes serious changes in the human body. Disease therefore occurs when natural processes such as cellular multiplication or the crossing of the border between human bodies and the world happen. Medicine attempts to regulate these processes because these natural processes threaten the integrity of the human body. In this section, I want to explore how epidemics and diseases are packaged. I am interested in the processes through which particular ideologies, prejudices and political ideas inform the packaging of diseases and epidemics. In order to understand these processes, it is important to look at one of the most inﬂuential models of the biomedical body in the 20th century: the immunological model. The immunological model of illness has become one of the most prominent in the latter half of the 20th century. In this model the body’s own warriors—the white blood corpuscles, the T-lymphocytes, the macrophages—ﬁght the invaders. What is fascinating about the immune model and its rhetoric in medicine is the image of military warfare. Here is a description from a textbook: The innate immune system is our ﬁrst line of defense against invading organisms while the adaptive immune system acts as a second line of defense and also aﬀords protection against re-exposure to the same pathogen.20

This is how the prestigious US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (of the National Institutes of Health) deﬁnes the immune system: The immune system is a network of cells, tissues, and organs that work together to defend the body against attacks by ‘foreign’ invaders.21

The entire body is imaged as a nation with its own battalion of soldiers (Martin 1990). The pathogens are enemy invaders that need to be 30

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fought oﬀ and destroyed. The body is a territory that has boundaries, and these are vulnerable to invasion. The immune system is the guardian of this territory. Such a conception of the body as a nation-state and the immune system as an army transforms medicine itself into a war with the body as battleground. More importantly the immune model in medicine situates the body as the site of a battle between self and the foreign, the self and the invader-other. The very term ‘immune’ comes from the Latin immunis meaning ‘exempt’ and refers to protection against foreign agents. This rhetoric of the immune system is based on a larger cultural and philosophical assumption: that the non-self or anything from the outside is a source of threat. The immune model creates the body as a bounded territory that is at risk from invasion.22 An epidemic occurs when the non-human natural world (of bacteria, viruses, pathogens) crosses over into the human, cultural world. The aim of medicine, following from this argument, is to keep the civilized world of humans separated and guarded from the natural one, and to keep the identity of the human body inviolate from the pathogens.23 This attempt is usually cast as what has been termed ‘biomilitary’ images (Montgomery 1991). If disease is seen as an invasion of culture by nature, then epidemics are frequently imaged as an attack on the cultured body of a nation or city or civilization. The nation as body politic is an image that dates back (in Europe) to the early modern period. James I of England thus saw his role of King as combined with that of the physician of this body politic. In such contexts invasion by enemies was almost always imaged as invasion by disease (Harris 1998). Concurrently, disease itself becomes a military attack. In the 20th century, as several critics have noted, AIDS—the celebrity plague of the age— has been constantly described in martial terms: The ‘war against AIDS’, for instance (Waldby 1996). Governments see their role as marshalling resources in this war, even as the biomedical teams see themselves as soldiers. This kind of imagery is not medical but cultural, since, technically, the two ﬁelds of military and medicine have nothing in common. However, modern discourses have ensured that the languages of the two ﬁelds—war and medicine—merge, and epidemics are particularly suited to the new conﬂated language. As early as 1993, smoking demanded a war, as in the headlines from the New York Times: ‘17 States in vanguard of war on smoking’ (Brody 31

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1993, emphasis added). A headline in Financial Express announced: ‘WHO Prof wants war on obesity’ (Financial Express 15 May 2008, emphasis added). The article went to cite the respected professor who suggested that governments need to take the same kind of action against obesity as they did against smoking. The popular medical news website, MedIndia.com announced that ‘the war against cancer continues’ (MedIndia.com 25 December 2005, emphasis added). Outlook magazine ran a cover story on blood pressure and titled it ‘Silent Killer’ (Wadhwa 2003). ‘Healthwatch’ of The Hindu carried an article on World No Tobacco Day (31 May), which had a visual of volunteers spreading awareness of the dangers of smoking. The caption for the visual was: ‘Silent Killer’ (Narasimhan 2008). AIDS of course readily attracts the metaphor of war. Thus, the then Prime Minister of India A.B. Vajpayee addressing the ministers of six states in 2001 called for a joint war against AIDS.24 In 2002, a Chandigarh panel discussion involving experts from various organizations, including military ones like the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) termed malaria a ‘killer disease’ and called for ‘a pragmatic approach on the grassroot level must be adopted for better implementation of the eﬀorts being made to win the war against malaria’ (Chauhan 2002). The ‘biomilitary’ metaphors bring together military and biomedicine while focused on two things: the body of the individual and the body of the social order. It also relies heavily on the image of the contagion: the agent of disease and disruption that breaks up the body of the individual and the body of the society/nation. The contagion, as Cynthia Davis points out, is both the disease and the process of the transmission of the disease (Davis 2002). It is important to note that cultural transmission has also been, historically speaking, treated as contagion. That is, cultural aspects are also seen as both disease and the process of disease transmission. This usually involved an anxiety of racial mixing in the colonial cultures of the 19th century. There was a ﬁrm delineation of boundaries where every culture, body politic and self was held in, guarded and defended against mixing with other cultures. This tendency to mix race, national identity and disease reached its most horriﬁc peak in the Nazi regime of the 20th century. In the 1930s, the Germans set out to mark the ‘racially pure’ Aryans and the ‘others’. Purity was to be established on the basis of blood and anthropological race studies. Otto Reche, professor of racial science at 32

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Leipzig, conducted blood research aimed at identifying physiological racial features and diﬀerences, and set up the Blood Group Research in 1926. After their research, they concluded that there was a correlation between race and blood type, but with intermarriage, the pure lines of blood had got mixed up. New races such as Jews and Slavs were seen as mongrel races resulting from the mixing of blood lines. In 1935, Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws excluding Jews from being considered German citizens. This law deﬁned Jews as those with at least three Jewish grandparents; those with fewer than three were considered ‘half-breeds’. This was a concerted attempt to distinguish Jews and Germans on the basis of their blood—an exercise in cultural rhetorics that ‘packaged’ race as biological, and the Jewish race as an enemy of the state.25 In the 20th century, such a fear of culture as contagion has resulted in Western anxieties about particular ‘Third World’ nations, and other racial groups. Thus, the fear of culture/contagion from Africa and other ‘hot zones’—the standard term for regions designated as zones of infectious diseases—has resulted in extraordinary attitudes towards these countries as the source, origin and cause of infectious diseases. Take, for example, the furore over sickle cell anemia in the 1970s in the USA. In 1971, the US Congress passed the Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act. What was curious in this case is that it was treated as a potential public health hazard and an epidemic, even though it was a genetic disease, and genetic diseases are never transmitted epidemically! Sickle cell anaemia control programmes focused exclusively on African Americans. What I am trying to emphasize is that the idea of disease contagion quickly folds into the idea and practice of cultural contagion. Places and diseases are mapped onto each other, and each is taken as an instantiation of the other. Anxieties about Africa as the source of AIDS, for instance, have resulted in classiﬁcation of Africans as AIDS-carriers. In other words, contagion is a means of shifting between disease and culture. Or, the very idea of contagion has political consequences. Take AIDS, for instance. Africa has always been, for the West, the ‘dark continent’. Stereotypes in ﬁction from the late 18th century and later in ﬁlms like Romancing the Stone (1984), the Indiana Jones series (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008) or even more recently Blood Diamond (2006) depicted Africa as a savage place that can be subdued only by the white man. Darkness, mystery and danger (Africa) demand light, solutions and 33

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control (the white man’s). Later, representations of AIDS in the media painted Africa as a region devastated by AIDS, where cures and treatments were diﬃcult because of the ‘primitive’ beliefs and superstitions. As Paula Treichler has pointed out in her magisterial study of AIDS and its cultural locations, stories about Africa were ‘designed primarily to warn Western readers about themselves’, and treating Africa as the point of origin of this demon (Treichler 1999: 125). In addition, of course, AIDS isolated the gay community as direct threats—as carriers of the contagion—to the heterosexual community. Biomedical discourse very determinedly maps on to a discourse of (racial) Othering. With the ‘arrival’ of the Ebola virus, Africa returns to the news as a ‘hot zone’. Authors like Richard Preston (The Hot Zone, 1994, and a New York Times bestseller in the non-ﬁction category for 12 months), by tracing an outbreak of Ebola in Virginia, USA, to Africa, retrieve older images of Africa as the originary moment of the world’s great diseases. Films like Outbreak (1995), Robin Cook’s ﬁction (1988, also entitled Outbreak), invariably show Africa as the site where numerous deadly diseases emerge. Yet what is important, as in the case of AIDS pointed out in the preceding paragraph, is that these diseases are represented as threats originating in Africa, but moving towards the USA and the First World. Critics have demonstrated how, for instance, Preston’s book frames the Virginia outbreak by foregrounding the European encounter with particular viruses in Africa (see Haynes 2002). The Virginia outbreak, in this packaging of Ebola, becomes a trans-Atlantic attack by an African pathogen. In all cases, the community is foregrounded as the victim of the disease/contagion or the beneﬁciary of the muniﬁcent efforts of the (usually white) biomedical heroes (Nayar 2008c). Genetic science projects such as the Human Genome Project (HGP) also generate particular models of communities and populations. Information of the world’s populations will be stored in databases that could, as the Project itself announces in its manifesto, be sold to private buyers. The indigenous populations—who have been ‘databased’—themselves will have no access to the information. As the project puts it: Because much of the challenge is interpreting genomic data and making the results available for scientiﬁc and technological applications, the challenge extends not just to the Human Genome Project, but 34

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also to the microbial genome program and to public- and privatesector programs focused on areas such as health eﬀects, structural biology, and environmental remediation. Eﬀorts in all these areas are the mandate of the DOE genome informatics program, whose products are already widely used in genome laboratories, general molecular biology and medical laboratories, biotechnology companies, and biopharmaceutical companies around the world. (emphasis added)26

Originally, African Americans were not included in the genomic survey of the human race. That is, African Americans had not been originally treated as part of “humanity” when the DNA of the entire race was being proﬁled. This exclusion is a throwback to the colonial age when Africans did not ﬁgure in tracts on humanity, except as primitives and animal-like species. A normative human genetic code drawn from a narrow section of the population—white, Caucasian—becomes ‘representative’ of all humans. It is crucial as to whose genetic make-up is being used as a baseline or standard because medical, health and such research will use these as models. That is, in ﬁelds like pharmacogenetics (where medicines will be prepared according to genetic proﬁles), there will be no medicines designed for the African American. It will generate a genetic racism where African American genes do not constitute a case for analysis and medical biology’s advances in therapeutic medicine. Commercial drugs based on genetic proﬁles will, therefore, not be designed for African American or Chicano/a people. The paradox is worth pondering over: on the one hand genomic projects collect genetic materials from minority and ‘Third World’ communities, and on the other, commercial interests could possibly exclude this (economically weaker, and therefore representing a meagre market) ‘gene pool’ from getting drugs suited to their genetic make-up. It is illustrative to note that Norton Zinder, who chaired the advisory committee to the HGP, had mentioned social anxieties that ‘having the human genome at hand might provide an inﬁnite number of new reasons for genetic discrimination by employers and insurance companies; it might even inspire Nazi-like eugenic measures’ (Wilkie 1993: 77).27 In short, the ‘packaging’ of racial data preliminary to pharmacogenomics and genetically engineered medicine could well be a new form of racism and biocolonialism, as I have argued elsewhere (Nayar 2006; Thacker 2005). 35

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Such cultural and political anxieties about contagions and disease are of course readily stoked by events such as the anthrax scare in late 2001. ‘Biowar’ and ‘bioterrorism’ have suddenly acquired a celebrity status in the wake of the anthrax scare. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have appeared since 2001, providing, in particular, detailed information about lethal pathogens. There is even a ‘beginner’s guide’ to Bioterror and Biowarfare! (Dando 2006).

Social Marketing A key element in the packaging of health is its social marketing of health. Social marketing proceeds from the assumption that several problems are the consequence of the social and cultural contexts. Thus, for example, critics have argued that eating disorders are located in the marketing of thinness and the predominance of thin in glamour contests. In such circumstances, marketing agents become social advocates seeking changes in the system that generates particular ailments. An individual negative body image is not of her choice but is induced through peer pressure and socially circulating images of ‘thin is beautiful’.28 Social marketing is the marketing of products and services that seek to serve as social advocates. It is not entirely commercial in its intentions, even though large pharma companies might have stakes in the sales of products and services. It glamourizes the particular disease and enables an attention-grabbing advert for a larger cause. In 2002, Akshay Kumar and Sonali Bendre worked with the UK Public Health Ministry in its campaign against tuberculosis.29 In 2005, a large number of Bollywood and sports stars (Salman Khan, Anil Kapoor, Shilpa Shetty, Sharmila Tagore, Kapil Dev) campaigned for AIDS awareness.30 During the 2003 Cricket World Cup, the cricket teams from India and Pakistan together promoted the national polio eradication campaign in TV commercials.31 The now-routine polio vaccination campaign in India with no less than Amitabh Bachchan, in print and on TV, is another case in point. Issued in public interest the ads preach health, security and the family’s ‘healthfare’. Jackie Shroﬀ campaigning for AIDS care is another instance of social marketing. In the AIDS campaigns, the social marketing does something more. It focuses on the individual as the site 36

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of transformation—the individual chooses a lifestyle—but at the same time locates the individual within a context: of the family in particular. The care of the self, suggest these campaigns, is connected to the care of the family. Such campaigns hope to eﬀect both individual and environmental/ social change. They position the individual as an active subject who can transform her/his life while, at the same time, locating her/him as somebody whose choices are predetermined by the structures she/he inhabits.

Medical Spectacles One arrested for manufacturing duplicate medicine. – Headlines, Daily News and Analysis, 23 November 2007 Girl separation surgery a success. – BBC South Asia, 7 November 2007 I am like a left-handed batsman. – The Hindu, 24 March 2009

An eﬀective way of promoting health is to transform medicine into a spectacle. By spectacle I mean something put on display for purposes of information or entertainment, mostly on the screen but not restricted to it. Dramatic footage in newspapers, documentaries and reports are also spectacles. Medical spectacles mark a powerful convergence—of theatre (drama, but also staging), science, the body, disease and medicine. Theatre is not simply theatrical presentations, but also representations that highlight particular situations such as life-and-death battles, monstrous disﬁgurement or horriﬁc diseases. I take ‘theatre’ to now simply mean ‘media’, since—and this is my key argument—diseases and bodies are represented theatrically through technologies of ﬁlming, voice-overs, editing and choice of medium. Medical spectacles contribute to the common fund of the layman’s knowledge of medicine and disease. Medical documentaries, reportage and entertainment participate in a process whereby the general public is informed of the developments in these areas. ‘Science communication’, 37

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as this realm is called, is the ‘packaging’ of scientiﬁc and technical information that is passed on from experts to the common public. This spectacle and informational culture is crucial because it inﬂuences the public’s perception of the profession as well its views on issues like cloning or genetic engineering. A study demonstrated that news coverage of the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccine during 2002 in the UK inﬂuenced public opinions about the vaccine, and a reported fall in vaccinations (Speer and Lewis 2004). Another recent study—of the visualization techniques in nanotechnology—demonstrated that the ‘public that can be rapidly swayed from neutrality toward either support for or strong opposition to the technology, depending on the course of events and the particular slant of the streams of images of nanotechnology to which they are exposed’ (Landau et al. 2009: 335). The scientiﬁcally challenged public develops opinions—and choices—depending upon the information (print, visual, expert) passed on to them. Thus, ‘information’ is about ‘packaging’. And this is precisely my implicit argument throughout the chapter (and the book, in fact) that information and the communication-dissemination of information in controlled ways is the setting for a deliberative democracy and the informational culture of today inﬂuences public opinions, choices and even policy. To shift focus to medicine, such a ‘packaging’ can take various forms. Michael Bury and Jonathan Gabe (2006) have proposed that television coverage of medicine takes one of three formats: the exposé (where corruption within the system, the powerful interests working within medicine and incompetence are exposed), the documentary (which seeks to widen the public awareness of medicine and, as I have proposed earlier, incorporates medical knowledge within our everyday lives) and the drama format (serials and soaps dealing with medical themes, hospital stories). The ﬁrst epigraph to this section, cited from a newspaper, is an exposé revealing the ﬂaws within medicine. The second epigraph dramatizes a medical procedure, even though it is not cast as a soap opera. Medicine has achieved cult status as entertainment in the form of long-running and popular TV shows like ER and Chicago Hope. This is medical culture as drama, and constitutes an important means of popularizing—perhaps not very accurately, as critics have pointed 38

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out32—life inside a hospital. In televised medical drama there exists a tension between information and entertainment. Does the audience learn anything about disease, pathogens or treatment from the soap opera? Or is the emphasis simply on entertainment? Critics have argued that the media tends to trivialize serious issues like personal tragedy or disease in order to amuse, and often, misrepresent the medical condition (Atkins 2008). However, entertainment need not, of course, exclude knowledge. Thus, ER can help us understand the culture of a hospital, the processes of decision-making, the hierarchies, the key procedures in treatment, and even deliver an evaluative judgment. Recall, for example, the scenes in Munnabhai MBBS in which Munnabhai objects to the bureaucratization of the hospital where one has to ﬁrst ﬁll in multiple forms before treatment can be given. Invariably in these soaps, the doctor is heroic and, as commentators have noted, even breaks rules in order to help patients (Makoul and Peer 2004). It is also true that much of the medical drama on TV addresses the personal lives of doctors rather than medicine per se (Cinevista’s Sanjivani, launched in 2004 and now also being aired on TV Asia in the USA, is a case in point). Earlier forms of dramatic narratives of medicine—James Herriott’s books on life as a country veterinarian in England are good examples—also delivered the profession as a scene of drama. But medical spectacles need not necessarily be restricted to television. I see narratives of medical discoveries—biographies of ﬁgures like Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming—also as spectacles. They capture the drama of discovery, the terror of failures, the tensions of disease-agents in their storytelling. The causal agent is demonized—in fact, a recent book on the search and discovery of sulfa, the ﬁrst antibiotic, is titled The Demon Under the Microscope (Hager 2006)—the infrastructure (the hospital, the lab) seems to fail, and yet, ﬁnally, then doctor-researcher emerges triumphant. Medical spectacle invariably casts the doctor as hero and marks the convergence of theatre, science and disease. Professionalism and the constraints under which doctors work and some ethics are usual themes here, though almost all of these are overlaid with the personal. There is little discussion of the institution of medicine itself—the status of the profession, the role of the state or the question 39

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of public health, for instance. Even patient–doctor interactions shift to the personal end of the spectrum rather than the professional. The constant emphasis on the doctor as human is a notable feature of all these soaps, and is linked with the dramatic, emotional and personal component of doctor serials. Makoul and Peer therefore conclude that the key frames operating in such soaps are: medicine is drama, doctors are human and patients are trouble or troubled (2004: 258). It is important to note that such medical dramas shape public perception of the profession, and can eventually inform the attitudes patients take with them into the hospital, and the doctor–patient relationship. They can also be instrumental in public debates about bioethics and controversial medical interventions such as euthanasia. Yet another form of medical spectacle that renders the discipline far more complex is seen in the case of doctor-writers like Atul Gawande and Abraham Verghese, it showcases the doctor’s struggles to deal with the reality of illness and institutions, and even assumes the form of a bildungsroman (in literary texts, this is a type of novel where the young boy becomes a man through a physical and internal journey, during the course of which he faces and overcomes many obstacles). Discovery and disillusionment, personal courage and the scourges and the battle for superiority over the known and unknown demons become the sources for and sites of dramatic journeys—into institutions, the self, the patient and the realm of pathogens. While ‘narrative medicine’ (exempliﬁed in the work of Rita Charon 2006) focuses on the patient stories of illness—and contributes equally to what I have described as ‘medical spectacle’—medical narratives of discovery, pathogen-battles and doctors’ life stories constitute a whole new genre where medical science and the white-draped hero ‘grow’ in stature and in the process discover themselves. Medical documentaries prepared by the WHO, the Films Division of India, National Geographic Channel are located at the interface of information and entertainment. Some of these are politically sensitive because, as has been the case with AIDS ﬁlms, their portrayal of countries has resulted in the dissemination of particular opinions on the disease. The African countries have been regularly depicted as zones of disease and, as commentators have noted, the world itself has been mapped by 40

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organizations like the WHO in terms of disease zones, a kind of medical geography of the earth (Ostherr 2004). Another kind of medical drama consists of medical documentaries on unusual diseases and bodies. BBC Channel 4’s Bodyshock series focuses on what can only be called extreme bodies: a girl born with eight limbs—the surgery in Bangalore that removed her extra limbs made headlines even in Australian news reports (ABC News 2007)—a family where four children are victims to progeria (a rare premature aging disorder), a vastly overweight boy, among others. It is medical drama that is partly about information and partly about entertainment. Corporeal monstrosities and monstrous illnesses—ﬂesh-eating bacteria being the latest—have always been the subject of curiosity, and medical science has, historically speaking, been responsible for converting these into spectacles. The Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick, born severely deformed), for example, was exhibited in a London sideshow in 1884 as an anomaly and a monstrosity (his remains were for a long time exhibited in the Royal London Hospital). Surgical procedures on Siamese twins have always attracted media attention (BBC News 2005). News items about people with unusual medical conditions make headlines, even if for a day (as the epigraphs to this section suggest). Horror ﬁlms have relied upon monstrous bodies, bodily processes such as mutation, alien reproduction to produce a genre that has been termed ‘Frankenﬂicks’, after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Clark 2004). These would include hugely successful ﬁlms such as The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, The Elephant Man, The Fly, Alien and even the many versions of The War of the Worlds—all of which have a medical subtext running through them. The medical spectacle that relies on monstrosities and abnormalities is eﬀective in drawing attention to what ‘normal’ itself means. Like freaks in freak shows and circuses from the 19th century, misshapen and grotesque bodies remind us of our own vulnerabilities. Freaks are versions of the ‘normal’ because we can deﬁne normalcy in terms of what we are not. Medical drama—ﬁctional, nonﬁctional—marks, as suggested earlier, the convergence of theatre, science, bodies, diseases and medicine. Yet, such medical drama relies on a key element—aﬀect—in order to achieve its purposes. As José van Dijck has pointed out, ‘Surgical intervention is hardly the main subject of the 41

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ﬁlm: what matters is the full story, from birth and diagnosis to operation and after-care’ (2002: 547). In short medical spectacle demands aﬀect and a dramatic plot. Sympathy, horror, disgust and revulsion are common features associated with viewing monstrosities, disﬁgurements and degenerative bodies. In the literary tradition, genres like the Gothic have relied on dissolving bodies, broken bodies and disﬁgured bodies in order to invoke horror. Medical drama is a mediated, quasi-scientiﬁc—the presence of the doctor, the carefully positioned equipment and medical charts constitute the rhetoric of medical authority—and commercial spectacle of the human form. ‘Unpacking’ the health discourse around and of the low-cal body therefore reveals a battery of ideologies and implicit politics. The medicalization of the everyday and the informational culture of medicine results in the hyper-pathologization of everyday lives where we place our own bodies under surveillance. Healthism thrives on the projection of particular bodies as desirable and as norms. In the culture of care and cure the cult of the perfectible body reigns supreme across adverts and advice columns. The care of the self thus becomes an imperative, even as it presupposes an autonomous individual who can take and execute decisions on her/his looks, diet and exercise regimen. The ‘management’ of health and wellness involves a large-scale technologization (especially visualization techniques) of biomedicine and the body. This carries its own political baggage of the ‘standard’ body and the transparent body subject to the doctor or X-ray machine’s gaze even as it leads to social consequences (especially in the realm of childbirth, as this chapter showed). This ‘visualization’ of biomedicine is at least partly driven by artistic responses and renderings, this chapter argued. The biomilitary state, working with the immunological paradigm, wages wars against disease and disease-agents and often builds on a rhetoric of othering, one that has in the past, slipped into a racialized discourse. Social marketing takes up the diseased body as a cause for campaigns. Medical spectacles of visual and other dramatic modes renders disease commonplace, popularizes medicine as a profession even as it seeks to deﬁne the standard human body. The ‘packaging’ of health clearly indicates numerous complex layers within it—and that a low-cal body is acquirable. 42

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Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8 9

10

A book series called the DoctorNDTV Book Series is now available. As an example, Peter Poon (2000) shows how cloning as an idea and an entity has been co-constructed in imaginative works, ethicist debates and scientiﬁc laboratories. It is the consequence of both scientiﬁc and cultural events. The notion of health as ‘resource’ and ‘capital’ for everyday life has been dominant since the late 1990s. See Williamson and Carr (2009) for a study. It is important to note that medical authorities are not always in agreement in each other. Medicine and diagnosis are matters of interpretation of ‘hard data’ (symptoms), and interpretations of the same set of symptoms can often be very diﬀerent. Systems of medicine—Western and Ayurveda for example— sometimes diﬀer too. Institutionalization is a means of organizing medical knowledge, and hence, the government’s frequent crackdown on ‘quacks’ and faith healers. Occasionally warnings are issued about the unscientiﬁc practices of particular doctors or systems. In the editorial for the May issue of Global Ayurveda (3.4, May 2007), for example, Joseph Mathew writes about how one of the periodical’s foreign representatives visiting Ayurvedic treatment centres in tourist destinations found the situation to be ‘unAyurvedic’ in not following proper procedures. I am not interested the sociology of medical cultures, but in the representational and narrative elements which are, of course, social. Such searches and information seeking is not a simple matter at all. M.J. Dutta and G.D. Bodie (2008) have recently explored how health information searches are done on the WWW, showing that disparities in healthcare are reﬂected in the searches themselves. They therefore recommend communications infrastructures, health literacy, information literacy and Internet literacy in the marginalized sectors of society to create accessible health information. See http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage (accessed on 4 April 2009). See http://www.vlcc.co.in/wm-testimonials.asp (accessed on 31 May 2008). Disease and physiognomies were once associated with sin and sinning bodies. With the secularization of the body, the perspective has shifted, but the moral angle—for instance, about gluttony or the work ethic—and the body has not altered (see Turner 1999: 213 on secularization of the body). A ‘project’ is ‘a socially transformative endeavour that is localized, politicized and partial, yet also engendered by longer historical developments and ways of narrating them,’ but also with an interest in creating something new (Thomas 1994: 105). ‘Projects’ are ‘willed’ by the ‘agent’ even though it may not be apparent to her/him. ‘Projects’ presuppose a ‘particular imagination of the social situation … and a diagnosis of what is lacking, that can be rectiﬁed by 43

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

intervention’ (Thomas 1994: 106). The use of the term ‘project’ thus signals a conscious, socially located, political process that identiﬁes a situation (illness, ugliness) and oﬀers an intervention (medical, exercise, diet) in order to achieve a set target. Van Eijck and Mommaas have argued that leisure participation is now based on a narrative of ‘personal enrichment’ (2004). See http://www.healthmgttech.com/industry_watch.aspx#special (accessed on 30 May 2008). See http://www.menshealthindia.com/mhindia.htm (accessed on 27 May 2008). For a study of the ubiquity of the DNA and the ‘double helix’ in the cultural imagination see Nelkin and Lindee (1995) and Judith Roof (2007). See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_gallery.html, http://www. uchsc.edu/sm/chs/gallery/animate/animation.htm (accessed on 16 July 2009). See http://lucy.stanford.edu/visibhum.html (accessed on 27 May 2008). The cover can be viewed at http://www.2neatmagazines.com/life/1990cover. html (accessed on 16 July 2009). See http://www.genomicart.org/oﬀerings.htm (accessed on 16 July 2009). See www.tca.uwa.edu.au/pig (accessed on 16 July 2009). Microbiology and Immunology On-Line Textbook. USC School of Medicine, http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/ghaﬀar/innate.htm (accessed on 27 May 2008). http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/immuneSystem/default.htm (accessed on 27 May 2008). The immune model of the body and the nation-as-territory has resulted, in the 20th century, in theories of racial purity and led to extreme events like the Holocaust. Contemporary political philosopher, Roberto Esposito (2008) argues that the Nazi biopolitical apparatus, including the concentration camps, which were based on biological views of race, was an attempt to immunize the German body politic against the Jew and other ‘impurities’. I take this view of epidemic disease from Catherine Waldby (1996). AIDS Asia. 2001. 3(3–4):15. For a study of the Nazi obsession with bloodlines, racial purity and their statesponsored discriminatory programmes, see Allyson Polsky (2002). See http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/tko/07_ beyond.html (accessed on 16 July 2009). See also Zilinskas and Balint (2001) and especially the ground-breaking work of Fatimah Jackson (1999, 2001). It is instructive to note that pro-anorexia sites, on which many individuals assert their right to choose thinness, attracted criticism, and many were forced to shut down. See Miah and Rich (2008) for a study. See http://redhotcurry.com/archive/health/news2004/tb_awareness.htm (accessed on 3 July 2008). 44

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http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/02/stories/2005120220151500.htm (accessed on 3 July 2008). 31 http://www.sportanddev.org/learnmore/sport_and_health/sport_and_ public_health_campaigns/ (accessed on 3 July 2008). 32 For instance, in a study of the depiction of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in medical dramas, Diem et al. (1995, quoted in Makoul and Peer 2004: 245–46) have noted that survival of acute trauma on a TV is more likely than in actuality.

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Chapter 2

Life, the Deluxe Edition Cultures of Comfort

T

his chapter is concerned with a self-evident consumer-oriented aspect of public culture: the marketing of comfort, where comfort is promoted and projected as an essential condition of life, and one that can be achieved through the increasingly easy purchase and use of commodities. Sanjay Kapoor, the Chief Executive Oﬃcer (CEO) of Genesis Colors, which markets Satya Paul and other luxury brands in India, comments on this easy availability of luxury goods: ‘From a socialist economy we are now in an era where you step into a mall and it brings in a completely new lifestyle in front of you’ (Hi! Blitz, 7.4, 2009: 130–34, quoted from p. 134). This accessibility to luxury and lifestyles is the regulatory grid for a new consumerism, one that has shifted from comfort to luxury. From the pleasure of sipping the cup that cheers to car travel, from hotel rooms to television viewing, humankind has sought to maximize comfort. Once the basic necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing, safety and health—have been attained, mankind moves on to seek better quality instances and usables of the same necessities. Necessities are needs—objects without which life would be diﬃcult or impossible. Comforts are wants—objects and conditions that make life smoother, faster and easier.1 Consumer culture today rarely packages necessities, even though, as reports tell us, across the world, there are people living on the threshold of life without the bare necessities. Consumer culture is concerned with comfort and, increasingly (as this chapter argues), with luxury. It seeks answers to questions like: How is comfort sold to the consumer? What is the form of its packaging? And what distinguishes ‘luxury’ from ‘comfort’?

Life, the Deluxe Edition

In this chapter, I explore the packaging of comfort and luxury. My assumption here is that high-end consumption—or conspicuous consumption, which is not about necessities, but about lifestyle—is increasingly possible to the consumer through a democratization of comfort. Consumer culture simultaneously seeks a widening of the consumer base (what I termed ‘democratization’) via mass circulation of highproﬁle, expensive brands as well as a judicious (especially in terms of proﬁts) separation of the mass market from the niche one. This distinction between the mass, mall-culture and the niche-boutique one of consumption is, I argue, the distinction between comfort and luxury. In other words, comfort is the cultural logic of mass manufacture, marketing and consumption, while luxury is the cultural logic of niche manufacture, marketing and consumption. This chapter explores how these cultural logics are worked out in consumer culture. ‘Unpacking’ comfort and luxury is to unravel the multiple discourses of utility, stylization and self-branding, the oxymoronic ‘necessary luxury’, heritage and sacralization, among others.

The Culture of Comfort We skillfully blend three varieties of Tulsi leaves and blossoms to craft a truly exquisite tea drinking experience. – Promotional pamphlet, Tulsi Tea Collection from ITC Skin creams alone don’t preserve your complexion …. Garware Suncontrol ﬁlm … stops harsh sunlight from piercing your car window, protecting your skin from becoming dark, and keeping your car cool and comfortable. – Garware Suncontrol window ﬁlm advertisement (Top Gear, September 2007, p. 51)

Comfort is the most pervasive and visible cultural logic of consumer culture today. Whether it is housing or air travel, furniture or food, comfort is the demand and condition that is most emphasized in marketing products and services.

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Comfort was, until the 17th and 18th centuries, used to refer primarily to physical comfort, and physical satisfaction remains the chief emphasis in any rhetoric or narrative of comfort. Comfort is the selfconscious satisfaction of the relationship between the body/mind with its immediate environment (where the environment can include people as well as things). Comfort is related mainly to bodily satisfaction, and is closely linked with physical settings of seating, housing, objects of use, etc. In other words, comfort is the consequence of a particular kind of relationship of the body with its neighbouring material objects. Leather upholstery in the car, spacious rooms that are well-lit and ergonomically designed chairs are all material objects that ensure the physical comforts of the individual body. However, a state of well-being is not always physical alone. With an increasing psychologizing of comfort in the 20th century, we have product narratives that speak of emotional comfort. This could include: a sense of safety and security, a measure of peace and tranquility, and a feeling of ‘at-home-ness’. Chocolate, as science will tell us, is a ‘comfort food’. It cheers us when our biological and emotional states are rather low. This state of wellness and cheer is also about being comfortable. Comfort is the physical, mental, emotional feeling of satisfaction arising out of a relationship usually with material objects in one’s vicinity. Humanity is intimately linked to material culture and the objects that constitute material cultures. That is, objects are central to the formation of humans as subjects because we are engaged in a relationship with them. Objects can be the medium through which social relations are forged and reinforced.2 Comfort, I propose, is a condition that is closely linked with the consumer culture, speciﬁcally, material culture—one consumes in order to be comfortable. Products and services are increasingly promoted as objects that add to your physical, emotional and mental comfort. Phrases like ‘comfort zone’, ‘comfort levels’, ‘comfort foods’ are loaded terms: they indicate the prominence of comfort as: • a sales and purchase category, • an intended aim of consumption and • an entire cultural condition. 48

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So, once we have established that comfort is aligned with material culture (which also includes, it must be noted, services) in a consumer society, we can proceed to speak of how this relationship is represented. Comfort is essentially ‘liveability’, to adopt Tomas Maldonado’s term (1991). ‘Liveability’ itself varies from context to context. In war-torn nations, ‘liveability’ means a context where the bare minimum level of existence—without hunger or fear—is available. ‘Liveability’ here is survival. In other cases where bare survival is not an issue, ‘liveability’ is a context where amenities make for better living conditions. Liveability comfort, Maldonado argues, emerged as a theme in Europe with the industrial revolution when more and more material goods were manufactured (1991: 35). Goods that helped make everyday life or a space (such as the home) more liveable were increasingly available for the larger populace through mass manufacture. Comfort was evidently a result of the appropriate material objects. Material objects have a deeper meaning than simply utility for their users. How things are used, displayed and incorporated into everyday lives often have very signiﬁcant consequences for individuals and families and their ‘liveability’. Material things mean diﬀerent things to different people at diﬀerent points in time. A commemorative object, a photograph of an ancestor, a family heirloom, a new technological device in the living room—each of these material objects possesses meaning depending upon the individual(s) perceiving them. Thus people— ‘users’—give meaning to material objects; meanings that are not perhaps intended by the manufacturer. Goods, in other words, possess meanings that are dependent upon their appropriation by the users. Material culture, therefore, is not simply about things and objects. Rather, it is about the intimate connection between the object and its users. Issues of style, fashion, aesthetic appeal are not properties inherent in particular objects, but the result of a social and cultural evaluation of these objects. Very often, as we know, the user bestows the value upon the object: the material object’s ‘value’ is co-constructed through its use and appropriation. Comfort is a material condition (involving material goods and services related to the use of goods) between necessity and luxury. Comfort is not indispensable to life, but it makes life easier. The packaging of comfort often works at the intersection of utility, eﬃciency and aesthetics. 49

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Necessity, Supplement and Utility Plus The Trans chair brings harmony in comfort and takes away stress. – Monarch furniture (Hi! Blitz, August 2008, p. 157)

Necessity would consist of the very basics for living: food, shelter and clothing. Necessity, in this view, is embedded within the cultural rhetorics of lower incomes and even poverty. Luxury, at the opposite end of the scale, signiﬁes massive wealth, but also, as we shall see, taste. Comfort occupies the middle ground and is to do with amenities of liveability rather than necessities. As John Crowley (1999) has pointed out in his study of the sensibility of comfort in 17th and 18th centuries Euro-American cultures, comfort was described as ‘conveniences’ or ‘decencies’. The culture of comfort is not about needs, but wants. If necessities are about plain functionality and the need for safety, comfort is about functionality with a certain eﬃciency, artistry, aesthetic appeal and style (I shall return to style in the next section). Douglas Holt (1997) has argued that consumption almost always occurs within ‘cultural frameworks’— of taste, ideology (such as patriotism and nationalism), aesthetics (styling) and eﬃciency. Even the subjective-psychological contexts and conditions of consumption are informed by these cultural frameworks. The wearing of khadi or the consumption of native agro-products, for example, are to be understood within a cultural framework—rhetorics—of nationalist ideology. The marketing and consumption of eco-products and nature is within a cultural framework of environmentalism. When Bombay Dyeing’s range of eco-friendly towels asks you to ‘surrender to nature’s soft caress,’ it is to be ‘consumed’ within a cultural framework of personal comfort as well as within an environmental one (Hello! June 2008, p. 80). The discourse of necessity works within a cultural framework that is still, predominantly, middle class and emphasizes functionality, utility, economy, safety and hygiene. These constitute the basic parameters on which a consumer product will be evaluated. Thus, cleaning ﬂuids and disinfectants that eradicate bacteria would be necessities in today’s world. Yet one rarely sees these products being advertised in their basic condition of disinfectant chemicals. 50

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No product can now be marketed as simply ‘necessity’—it needs a little extra something. Consumer culture now encodes what I have elsewhere termed as ‘rhetoric of pluses’ (Nayar 2008b: 142–44). The ‘rhetoric of pluses’ is the basic necessity, function and utility with something added to it. With this addition, the product moves from the category of necessity into one of comfort. The cultural framework of functionality and eﬃciency increasingly folds into one of stylized eﬃciency, utility and additions, but does not completely abandon ideas of thrift, economy or the family. As we shall see, comfort is a discourse that seamlessly merges three economies: the ﬁnancial, moral and cultural. The condition of the consumer where these additions have become a norm is the culture of ‘Utility Plus’. ‘Utility Plus’ is the larger cultural rhetorics of contemporary consumer culture where the framework of necessity and utility and manifests as the culture of bargains, extras and freebies. Toothpastes, soaps, drinks, all have an additional 25 per cent (Nayar 2008b: 142–44). Free gifts accompany almost every biscuit and food product. I should know: my 6 year-old refuses to buy a biscuit unless there is a toy free, and we often buy biscuits that we do not like because there is a toy free—in the supermarket. Often associated with terms like ‘deals’ or ‘bargains’, the rhetoric of ‘Utility Plus’ marks the rise of the culture of the supplement. The culture of the supplement is, at one level, about extras and therefore of the ﬁnancial economy, but it also caters to a moral economy—of thrift, saving and economic prudence. This ‘supplement’ is an addition where the object or context marks completion and excess at the same time.3 Thus, fragrant disinfectants and stylish furniture contain ‘additives’ such as aroma or colouring that are not integral to the functioning of the product. Lavender aroma in a disinfectant does not drive away germs, and the colour of the upholstery does not make the seating more comfortable. Yet, ease of use is a supplement that adds to the appeal of the product. Blumotion from Blum is advertised as oﬀering the ‘perfect and eﬀortless movement of kitchen drawers’ (Good Housekeeping, July 2006). Toshiba’s electric chimneys offer ‘the Ultimate Comfort’ (Inside/Outside, August 2008, pp. 16–17). While the culture of comfort does not always emphasize economy, the latter remains a subtext. Hence, aﬀordability and maintenance costs are features that are advertised even though they may not be central to the rhetoric of comfort. Low-electrical consumption is a major feature of 51

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adverts for all products: refrigerators, washing machines, the microwave, the electric iron, with ‘energy saving’ stickers on the products themselves. The advert for Toshiba electric chimneys speak of ‘energy eﬃciency’ as a major feature of the product (Inside/Outside, August 2008, pp. 16–17). Eﬃciency in these ads is, like thrift, about the moral economy—where the saving fuel reﬂects positively on a family /household. Such features are add-ons. They give a sense of completion to the basic function of a refrigerator or chimney. These additions are factors that make the products more convenient and pleasurable to use—and pleasure is central to consumption once the basic necessities have been fulﬁlled. BMW cars are thus ‘sheer driving pleasure’, where pleasure is a supplement integral to the driving experience—for it completes the driving experience with the introduction of pleasing sensations. Supplements lend an aesthetic—visual, aural, olfactory, tactile—appeal to the use of the product. What is termed ‘styling’ is a superﬂuous addition, a supplement, to the product’s functions, but which has come to be regarded as integral to the comfort in using the product. ‘Plus’ thus includes ease of use as well as economy and aesthetic appeal. It is situated at the intersection of the ﬁnancial, the moral and the aesthetic economies of a home. As we have noted earlier, ‘comfort’ is the physical as well as emotional equilibrium or pleasure attained through a relationship with the objects around us, or the events. In the new BMW model 5-Series (priced, according to the report, at Rs 4,250,000), for example, there is an iPod socket. This means, writes a reviewer, ‘you can carry all your tunes without all the CD cases’. This is an ‘extra’, and the ‘updated’ model gives ‘added pleasure’ (T3, January 2008, p. 55). Thus, in the culture of the supplement, comfort here is the emotional condition—pleasure—achieved by virtue of having got something more than one paid for. We pay for the carbolic acid in the disinfectant, we get a fresh lime-smelling one. Comfort is the consequence of the supplement. It is a condition of supplementarity, not of the basics. The discourse of necessity merges, almost every time, with the discourse of comfort through this culture of the supplement which caters, as I have suggested, to the ﬁnancial economy, but also to its aesthetic and occasionally moral one (a BMW does not cater to the moral economy of a middle-class Indian family). In 52

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contemporary India’s consumer culture, a product moves (in its rhetoric) from simple functionality to easy functionality and simple utility to stylized utility. In this it has moved from necessity to comfort, from a basic good to an amenity. Thus, comfort can be deﬁned as: • functionality/utility with ease and • functionality/utility with style. A washing machine can of course be advertised only as a utility device that makes for ‘liveability’. As the IFB washing machine ad puts it: ‘You can always wash and dry at your convenience in comfort, with the IFB washer dryer combo’ (Filmfare, 26 June–9 July 2008, p. 49). With timers and automatic controls, the machine moves beyond the basic function into the realm of comfort. When Responsive ﬂooring advertises itself, it emphasizes both functionality and ‘utility’ as something that will ‘leave you amazed’. The functionality/utility component is advertised thus: ‘easy to maintain’ and includes resistance to stains, the hygienic, ﬁre-retardant, qualities. Thus, functionality/utility is about safety and hygiene. Then comes the supplement that adds the comfort to the necessity: the ‘vibrant colours and textures’ (Inside/Outside, August 2008, pp. 22–23). AIS glass suggests that not only does the use of this glass on windows and doors render your home safer, it also ‘makes your home look modern and beautiful’ (Good Housekeeping, March 2006). A cellphone’s basic function is to enable communication. The integration of games and entertainment programmes constitute a supplement to this basic function and its ‘plus’. Utility functions as a discourse in insidious ways. Cleverly situated within the discourse of family safety, insurance, cleaning solutions, toothpaste and cooking oils are all sold as utility+safety for the family. Here, the question is not simply of the ﬁnancial economy of utility and savings, but the moral economy of being concerned about the entire family. The utility of tiles, glass or cell phone is a component of the discourse of necessity. Yet, with the addition of style, aesthetic appeal and entertainment, it has folded into the discourse of comfort. This is Utility 53

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Plus, where style is added to the basic function to generate comfort. And comfort, rather than necessity, is what sells the product today. Comfort is the cultural rhetorics of utility (and, in some case, thrift) ampliﬁed to include the cultural rhetorics of style. In addition to the moral and ﬁnancial economies of utility, functionality, responsibility and thrift, the discourse of comfort possesses one more element that distinguishes it from necessity. Comfort is therefore about styling that may enhance the object’s use-value but deﬁnitely ampliﬁes its cultural-symbolic (status) value. ‘Liveability’—or comfort, as we have seen—today is intimately linked to social appeal. That is, sociability and sociality are considered indispensable for a good life. This is the cultural economy of comfort, and often functions unobtrusively beside the moral (responsibility, thrift, eﬃciency) and ﬁnancial (utility) one. As a result, home spaces, fashion and goods that would have been considered primarily for their function and utility, are now evaluated in public culture forms such as newspapers, magazines, advice columns, for their style and social appeal (the ‘wow’ factor). In other words, utility and functionality of goods must be accompanied by an aesthetic appeal—what I have simply denoted by the term ‘style’, and to which I return later in the chapter. If comfort is the condition of equivalence and pleasure established between the body and the surrounding objects, then it follows that the objects/surroundings must possess qualities that induce this condition. In other words, comfort is intimately dependent upon the material— texture, visual, aural—nature of the product. Comfort is the achievement of a balance between the ﬁnancial (utility, functionality), moral (thrift, eﬃciency) and cultural (style, status, appearance, aesthetics) economies of any product or service. What is clear is that this balance must somehow be the characteristic of the product, brand or object. Comfort is primarily the eﬀect of the materials.

The Materials of Comfort Comfort is a warm feeling. – Advert for A.O. Smith-Jaquar Water Heaters (Inside/Outside, August 2008, p. 36) 54

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Comfort is the eﬀect of a particular relationship between the material object and the user. More importantly, in consumer cultures, this relationship is what is targeted, promoted and sold to the user: that the use of this particular object/context will give you physical, mental, and emotional satisfaction/comfort. What I have termed the ‘culture of comfort’ is this narrative that links the individual body with particular material objects and services, assuring the potential user that the continued use of object would provide comfort. Comfort, in other words, is a projection and narrativization of the link between an object and the individual body. Objects are located within a human context—what material culture studies terms ‘narrative elaborations’ of objects, referring to their embeddedness in the life stories of humans (Hoskins 2006)—and humans are aﬃliated with, and in proximity to, the objects. The sensation—anticipated—in sipping Tulsi tea is narrativized in the advert when it speaks of an ‘exquisite experience’. The link—narrative—here is between a physical experience (pleasure) and the material object (tea). Sensation is at the core of the culture of comfort. ‘Packaging’ is this construction of a narrative between the object-context and the user’s internal state of comfort. Clearly, this narrative of comfort appropriates a very personal, internalinterior and, therefore, subjective sensation or condition of comfort and repurposes it to speak of a physical object or context. Comfort, one can argue, is the meaning attached to this relation, this interplay between subjective feelings/sensations and material culture. Objects are emplaced in a human relation, human setting and a human lifestyle, even as human interactions and sentiments are plotted around comfort/able objects. There are two modes of this interplay narrative. Proxemical Relations

In the ﬁrst mode of the interplay narrative, proxemical relations of objects and/in their human settings are geared to providing comfort levels (proxemics is the science of the bodily use of space and, in this context, of objects). That is, human bodies feel ‘comfortable’ depending on their relation with objects in their vicinity and with which their bodies might be in physical or sensate contact. Objects in proximate relations oﬀer a 55

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sensual, emotional and mental comfort. Thus, a comfortable, eﬃcient kitchen can, apparently, fuel romance. Gilma’s ad runs thus: The graceful designs crafted with exceptional good looks and luster, explores the deepest yearnings of the heart as it stirs the tender, shimmering thrill of romance. (Good Housekeeping, May 2008, p. 27).

In the ad for IceCubes Kitchens, we see a (supposedly) sexily clad woman on the kitchen counter, a man leaning towards her, shirt unbuttoned, while she eats a slice of chocolate cake. The tagline says: ‘There’s a lot more to kitchen than cooking’ (Good Housekeeping, March 2009, p. 31). There is no tangible link between the functioning of a chimney and romance and yet the ad persuades us that romance is a natural outcome of the proper functioning of a chimney. In consumer culture, a manufacturer or service provider has to convince the potential consumer of the consequence of this relation between function and comfort, that the use of a particular object/context will generate comfort—this is the ‘narrative elaboration’ of the object and the objectiﬁcation of a life story or lifestyle. What is central to this narrative in the culture of comfort is the experiential moment: the individual body’s experience of the object or context that oﬀers a pleasing sensation. Because comfort is a proximate condition—based on the immediacy of location of the body in that context or alongside the object—the culture of comfort relies heavily on proxemics. All narratives within a culture of comfort rely on this sense of proximity and experience. The ways in which objects must be used— experienced—within the space of the house inform the degree of ‘comfort’. Here, comfort is the consequence of an equable balance between body and the objects in its environs. In terms of personal products, proxemics and the experiential imperative inform choices of products. Transformative Relations

In the second mode of the interplay narrative, comfort is contingent upon the transformation of the body through the incorporation and 56

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adaptation of objects so that you are at ease with the surroundings. The settings become secondary to the body because the body has been transformed. ‘Cleanse. Body and Soul’ says an ad for Euro sanitary ware thus linking bodies, emotional and metaphysical comforts in one package (Hi! Blitz, March 2009, p. 25). The ‘packaging’ of comfort includes building a narrative where the individual’s internal state is linked, hypothetically, to the object. Packaging comfort and luxury is the deliberate creation of fantasies of transformation: ordinary to attractive, weak to strong, bare necessity to comfort. There is, as we shall see in the case of luxury, a magical air lent to the fantasies of transformation. Material culture, in order to bestow comfort, must be satisfying to the senses: soft/gentle touch, pleasant taste, good ﬂavour/smells. Thus Ĺoréal’s new shampoo advertises itself as a sensory/sensual experience of comfort: New Light Technology Mirror shine, cashmere touch … weightless feel!

It then goes on to add: Hair feels clean and light to the touch. (Marie Claire, April 2008, pp. 258–59)

Cosmetic ads are, as seen in this case, about a level of comfort for and with one’s own body. However, they constitute an interesting genre in terms of the discourse of comfort. It is important to note that in some cases, comfort is a feature and consequence not linked to your body’s immediate settings: it is the result of what you have done to your body as make-up, ﬁtness or beauty-treatment. Rosemary Huisman in her study of advertising culture points out that most ads for cosmetics lack any setting (in sharp contrast to, say, car ads). Huisman writes: ‘It doesn’t matter where you are or what your social role is, beauty is available to you at the price of a product; your world will be centred on your own wonderful presence’ (Huisman 2005: 291). This is, notes Huisman, magical. However, what is crucial here is the way in which cosmetic ads work: 57

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• in locating comfort as the consequence only of the body and the immediate/proximate product and • in disconnecting the body from the immediate contexts. According to Tomas Maldonado, comfort is about order and control (1991: 36). For Maldonado, this means the conduct of the body in relation to objects such as furniture is ritualized and ordered for maximum comfort. Comfort is the regimentation of daily life—disciplining time, space and functions. This regimentation is governed by two principal concerns in the modern age: privacy and hygiene (Maldonado 1991: 37). As noted earlier, the body’s proxemical relations with the control and regimentation that Maldonado theorizes is essentially about the relationship a body’s proxemical relations with the neighbourhood objects as well as the body’s transformative relations determine the level of comfort (as I have discussed earlier). I have elsewhere argued that adverts for housing properties and housing appliances invariably demonstrate three main discourses: utility–safety–health, fashion and lifestyle, and the family (Nayar 2008b: 215–20). I now propose that these discourses are essentially about comfort because they: • suggest privacy as a key feature of family-space as a selfcontained, closed unit (the moral economy of ensuring the safety-privacy of the family), • suggest economical and eﬃcient modes of caring for the house and its inhabitants (the ﬁnancial economy), • suggest hygiene and safety measures to ‘secure’ the family space against invasion by burglars, but also by germs and • suggest stylization and aesthetic ‘work’ in order to make the family-space ‘presentable’ (the cultural economy). Comfort, I argue, has to do with all four, where all discourses are plotted within the discourse of aesthetic appeal. The second element of the discourse of comfort aligns it with necessity (since, as argued earlier, safety is a feature of necessity rather than comfort). But the ﬁrst and third elements constitute the discourse of comfort because these are supplements and amenities rather than necessities. Signiﬁcantly, therefore, 58

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the culture of comfort combines function and utility with artistry and style. Physical design, sensory pleasure and social appeal are all equally central to the culture of comfort. Thus, necessity becomes sidelined within contemporary consumer culture because necessities are always stylized in product and service promotions. Necessities, packaged as stylized, make them comforts and amenities. Indeed, it could be argued that style rules over utility and function, but retains a moral economy of thrift, safety and eﬃciency. Style, as the dominant cultural rhetoric today, is what mediates between and distinguishes comfort from luxury. The packaging of comfort is increasingly the packaging of luxury, and this involves the promotion of style as a key factor in consumer culture.

The ‘Stylization of Life’ Itself Style your life. – Advertisement for Villeroy and Boch crockery (Delicious, October 2007, p. 19) Keep your style alive. – Tagline, Westside (Good Housekeeping, May 2008, p. 19) From Essence of Luxury to Icon of Luxury. – The Pride Hotels group (Hi! Blitz, August 2008, p. 158)

Late 20th century consumer culture thrives on a ‘stylization of life’, a term Mike Featherstone (1991) adapts from the sociologist Max Weber. Consumption is not simply about the utilization of a product for fulﬁlling a particular function. As noted earlier, functionality moves towards comfort in consumer culture. Consumption, argues Douglas Holt, is also about ‘integration’: of self and object and, sometimes, altering their self-concept so that it aligns with an institutionally deﬁned identity (Holt 1995: 6–9). Thus, material objects are ‘domesticated’ so that they integrate into our everyday lives (Silverstone and Haddon 1996). They become a part of our identities. Comfort, therefore, is the smooth integration 59

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of objects into our lives, where the objects lend an air of physical and emotional satisfaction and pleasure to our bodies. However, as Douglas Holt argues, there is also a social angle to consumption. Social worlds are necessary to provide consumers-users with the resources to construct meanings. Holt uses the example of games and spectacles as institutional structures that help the consumer of the sport understand the experience and generate meaning (Holt 1995: 6–9). Fashion is the social world into which an individual must immerse in order to understand the meaning of her/his costume, accessories, etiquette and style. The peer group of corporate culture, for instance, is a social world that demands a dress code, a speech pattern and behaviour. Likewise, being ‘cool’ with gadgets and clothing is to be accepted within a college peer group. Integration is this participation in the social world via the cultivation of style. Style is the uneasy and complex negotiation between determining one’s own style and ﬁnding acceptance among one’s peers through a common code. The social world of comfort with technology, pop culture or fashion is a world in which you need to be both individualistic (different) and recognizable (sharing). As the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu puts it, aesthetic stances adopted in clothing or home decoration ‘are opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept’ (Bourdieu 1999: 57). Style is the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the rhetoric of promotional culture is consistently informed by the aesthetic imperative. Housing, fashion, food, technology, are all consumer products promoted in terms of style and not just function-utility. The launch of Tata Sumo’s new variant, Sumo Grande, produced a rhetoric in Autocar India that illustrates precisely this function + style + personality—the deluxe edition—mode of consumer culture: Oodles of comfort, generous power and fresh looks are what you will get. (Autocar India, February 2008, p. 23)

Stylization is never far from supreme functional qualities or comfort here. In some cases the style takes precedence over function, as Anand Parthasarathy’s product review of the Apple iPhone pointed out:

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The iPhone is a canny mix of form and function—with form winning by a whisker. (2008: 13)

Style marks a new turn in the culture of comfort—a turn to luxury where style is emphasized over function. Consumer culture in the late 20th century is marked by several simultaneous shifts from: • use to display • function to artistry • utility to aesthetics These shifts together mark, from what I have been arguing thus far, the larger shift: from comfort to luxury. Luxury is the excessive stylization (the deluxe edition) of life, the culture of display, ornamentalism and spectacle. If comfort was about utility, functions and economy—in short, ‘liveability’, as argued earlier—then luxury is about looks, appeal and spectacle. ‘Luxury’ itself, as its etymology (luxus) suggests, is about excess. Expensive brands were earlier described as deluxe—literally, de luxe (the excess). Stylization is a process of signiﬁcation—of generating new kinds of meaning through the vocabulary of brands and objects so that the self becomes a text with all-new meanings. A luxury brand or good is characterized by product quality, heritage and prestige (Jackson and Haid 2006: 63). It is also associated with particular kinds of people—those who value heritage and those who clamour for recognition as connoisseurs of heritage. That is, luxury signiﬁes not only product biography but the user biography as well. A luxury brand or commodity does not develop an aura on its own—it becomes a luxury brand, at least, partly through its endorsement and appropriation by people who are themselves icons of style, fashion and the good life. The object is evaluated in terms of its ‘narrative elaboration’, its emplacement within human life stories. Gucci, Jaguar, Cartier, Mont Blanc are brands and commodities that have become luxury items because of who their buyer-wearer-users are. Luxury commodities are part of the contemporary contexts of their ‘stylization of life’, a ‘stylization of life’ common to the masses as well as the elite, the bargain hunter as well as the luxury hunter. In the case of luxury commodities, stylization

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is about self-branding by the wealthy, the powerful and the so-called ‘trend-setters’. If, as I have proposed, a commodity becomes a luxury brand through its association with particular people and lifestyles it follows that we need to pay attention to the ways in which commodities and lifestyles coincide or work in conjunction. To this end, I shall examine two modes of branding that are intrinsic to stylization: 1. The product or brand biography. 2. The user biography, or self-branding. Stylization is the intertextual narrative that results when these two narratives merge into each other.

Brand Biography Product or brand biography is the narrative of/around the product. Brands, as we know, are reliant upon narratives for their popularity, visibility and sales. These narratives are a combination of names, signs and slogans (Frow 2002). Branding, as James Twitchell (2004) has demonstrated, is the ability to tell a convincing story, that is, narrative, about the product. Product biography is the tale told of a particular commodity through promotion campaigns, logos and the circulating images. Product biography, in short, is, using Andrew Wernick’s (1991) term, the ‘promotional culture’ circulating around a particular commodity, and constructing it as valuable, easy-to-use, economical or, in this case, a status-accessory. The product functions as a sign, with speciﬁc meanings attached, but whose entire force of meaning is dependent upon its situation. This context-speciﬁc meaning involves a shift in the text of the brand through the following stages of signiﬁcation: 1. Its contextualization in the brand’s history or company, say Gucci, and its history. 2. Its de-contextualization where the sign/brand is taken out of the showroom. 3. Its re-contextualization in the lives of its users. 62

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The third stage is one of re-signiﬁcation, where the brand’s meaning is modiﬁed through its use, even as it modiﬁes the user. The paradox of this process of re-signiﬁcation is what I turn to next. High styling, or status-branding, includes not having to speak of the brand one sports: the brand speaks for itself. Cartier and Gucci, for instance, do not demand or require the wearer-user to speak of it. The well-publicized launch of Apple’s iPhone (22–25 August 2008) promoted the brand as style statement. This means, eﬀectively, the sign of the brand—its biography—carries weight and meaning on its own, by virtue of its location (contextualization) in the history of brands. In this, the ﬁrst stage of signiﬁcation, the speaker depends on the iterability and recognizability of the sign-brand irrespective of the user. That is, a person wearing Gucci must be seen as any person wearing Gucci, where Gucci does not depend on the person wearing it. Gucci is a sign whose meaning exists outside and independent of the wearer. Then, Gucci is sold and acquired—and thereby, de-contextualized from its moment/point of origin in the second stage of signiﬁcation. It is acquired by an individual who then proceeds to display, use and own it. This is the third moment of signiﬁcation, and is the moment where luxury and branding reveals its paradox. The second and third stages are eﬀected through the agency of the user. The brand does not have to speak for itself, the user speaks for it. When Gucci is worn, say by celebrities, it gets re-signiﬁed as the brand that even celebs choose to wear: This is Gucci worn by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. It becomes a sign-brand that is given value addition because Aishwarya Rai Bachchan wears it, lending it her meanings. Or, when a cheaper, mimicked version of it appears in the local markets, it becomes re-signiﬁed as a global luxury brand that can be duplicated for middle-class users too. Gucci has been re-contextualized and a new text has emerged that is the composite of the narratives of its lineage and of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Appropriation of signs and brands, what I am calling re-contextualization and re-signiﬁcation, are now a commonplace phenomenon, and alter the texts that constitute product biography, a feature we can examine by scrutinizing ‘cultural borrowing’. ‘Cultural borrowing’ is a term used by Linda Peck to speak of exoticism in early modern English material-consumer cultures, where to 63

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‘borrow’ styles and products from diﬀerent parts of the world was a marker of class (Peck 2005). In the late 20th century’s consumer culture a widespread and dominant knowledge economy operates. Fashion shows, mass cultural forms like ﬁlms, tabloids and fashion catalogues help the dissemination of knowledge about exotic, foreign and global products and practices. The corporate dress code, for instance, enlivened by the ‘Friday casuals’ mode in multinational corporations (MNCs) in India constitute a ‘cultural borrowing’ within consumer culture, where an informed appropriation of a diﬀerent fashion, cultural practice or custom is possible. This ‘cultural borrowing’ is characteristic of the shift from the culture of comfort to the culture of luxury and is visible in the cosmopolitanization of high-end brands and products (as seen in the chapter on mobilities). While the use of Gucci or Jimmy Choo, the addiction to Westlife or the ﬁlms of Woody Allen might overtly indicate a cosmopolitan taste, other, more subtle methods also exist. Brand biography involves an act of agency—of recognizing the brand—but also of appropriating a wide variety of global brands today. The global brand has been re-contextualized by the Indian user. Feng Shui, not only as a means of home décor (style), but also as a means of spiritualizing the home (comfort), is an instance. Advice columns in design and architecture magazines suggest Feng shui measures to ‘improve’ the home. The displays of exotic imported trophies, ornamental work or ‘foreign’ objects are instances of this complex interplay of form (style) and function in contemporary material culture. Tai chi, as a form of exercise, is another cultural import that is situated somewhere between comfort and luxury. What I am proposing here is that brand biography within the ‘stylization of life’ incorporates an element of agency and ability to borrow from and adapt to other cultural products and practices. Style, as I have argued, is the narrative of the brand working in conjunction of the self/ person. When the brand is high-end we get a higher value of signiﬁcation, a greater valence of the product and the body on which it is positioned and creates a narrative of luxury stylization. In the cosmopolitan consumer economy of the late 20th century, this ‘cultural borrowing’ is a hybridization of consumer practices that announces one’s style. The dominant cultural rhetoric here is that of personal taste, style, agency and aﬀordability, all of which result in the 64

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re-signiﬁcation of the brand when absorbed into the life of the user. To be native as well as international, local as well as global, is the new hybrid chic of the consumer revolution. A study of luxury housing in India notes that such homes often ‘reﬂec[t] a ﬂavour of chosen cultures’ (Hello! June 2008, p. 75). And this is a matter of style not function alone. The projection of such a cosmopolitan identity is more than the brand biography: it is the language of the self—self-branding—to communicate with the world and one’s peer group. The display of commodities and styles is not simply a matter of selfbranding and self-satisfaction—display, especially of high-end brands ‘becomes the site for both the appropriation of the outside, public world and the representation of the private, inside world’ (Money 2007: 357). Thus, the objects displayed on the person or in the home become a means of interfacing with the world, winning adulation as well as aﬃliation. Object cultures are, therefore, modes of socializing where the individual displays her/his personality, feelings, status and ‘private’ character to the world through the acquisition and display of fashionable brands. In other words, the narrative of a person is built through the merging of the object narrative, the intimate narrative (of character) and the public narrative (of social acceptance and validation). In what follows, we shall look at the culture of self-branding as an integral component of the culture of comfort and luxury. The third stage of signiﬁcation (re-contextualization and re-signiﬁcation of the product) that I have explored in brand biography is the re-contextualization of the object within the life story of the wearer/user. Stylization is the re-contextualization of a brand within a self-branding narrative.

Self-branding Commentators have argued that ‘self-branding’ is a form of labour that involves highly stylized self-construction. It is the packaging of the self for the public eye. Success is dependent upon ‘the glossy packaging of the “self ” and the unrelenting pursuit of attention’ (Hearn 2008: 498). In the case of people, magazines seek to ﬁnd out where the wealthy shop, what kind of clothes they like and their preferred holiday 65

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destinations. In similar fashion, I have argued elsewhere that celebrity culture is based upon the large-scale circulation of information, that is, narratives (Nayar 2009b). Celebrities promote their tastes and preferences. Self-branding is therefore narrative—the promotional language of interviews, photographs, ceremonial appearances and circulating information. Within this self-branding by the wealthy occurs, often, the promotion of commodities and brands through association where the product biography (brand) enhances and is in turn enhanced by the user-biography. This is an exercise in self-branding and the third stage of signiﬁcation in a product’s biography. What I am calling excessive stylization in the case of luxury is not simply a matter of degree (more expensive, larger numbers), but one of hierarchic and auratic qualities. Luxury culture embedded in celebrity culture thrives on rarity and exclusivity. Excessive stylization includes the freedom to choose objects that have little functional value over others, but provide aesthetic appeal and satisfaction. As scholars of luxury have pointed out, luxury is hierarchic. ‘Liberty and magniﬁcence’, John Sekora points out in his historical account of the idea of luxury, were the domain of the highest social ranks, and denied to the others (Sekora 1977: 61). That is, the liberty to choose stylized objects, rather than useful-functional ones, was the privilege of the few who could aﬀord them. Stylization therefore is a matter of freedom born of capability. To put it diﬀerently, stylization is a matter of agency and ability. The choice of a luxury brand—and the self-branding that accompanies it—is a marker of ability: economic, taste and social. Luxury culture is the culture of the agency of particular people, and the circulation of information about this agency in the media. It sets up this agencyability to own Gucci or Jaguar as a benchmark of success. The cultivation of success is thus the cultivation of the ability to stylize one’s life in the way one chooses without worrying about expense. Luxury is the creation of a particular kind of self-branding. Objects acquire meaning when re-contextualized on the user’s person. The objects function as signs—narratives—of the self (of the user) signifying taste, ability nd choice. The self, in turn, brands the objects. The re-signiﬁcation of the brand is accompanied by a re-signiﬁcation of the self. This argument 66

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of mutual branding is built on the premise that commodities and objects are not simply prostheses to the person, but constitutive of the very self. Film stars, for example, have always been linked to fashion and, therefore, consumption. Jackie Stacey has noted how British and American women responded to Hollywood heroines of the 1940s and 1950s as fashion icons, and sought to emulate them in terms of consuming similar fashions (Stacey 2007). The stars and their commodiﬁcation, as Stacey puts it, extend beyond the cinema and into the spectator’s purchasing practices (2007: 321). It would, therefore, be tautological to argue that mass cultural forms like cinema and celebrity culture today, are central to consumer culture. Even when celebs pose without make-up or in ‘everyday’ costume (that is, not haute couture), they lend an aura to consumption. That is, in their abandonment of conspicuous consumption, they highlight their agency. When stars ‘pose’ without make-up, as Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba and others did for the magazine Marie Claire (April 2008, pp. 142–47), they emphasize their voluntary renunciation of their ability to wear luxury. It is the culture of restraint— understatement, ‘normal’ dressing, behaving like a ‘regular guy’—that, ironically, emphasizes the culture of luxury. When SRK appears in casuals (at the IPL for example)—wearing tees and jeans—it is like a million others’ costume he emphasizes his iconic status in this act of routinizing. Roland Barthes once said of descriptions of celebrity novelists in pyjamas: ‘Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration, and making it clearer, it is the whole mythical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such conﬁdences’ (1972a: 31). Barthes underscores the fact that when ‘great’ people abandon their greatness it only emphasizes the ‘miraculousness’ of their costume or habits. It is in the self-denial and the routinization, that their power to consume is emphasized. They are dressed ordinarily because they choose to, even though they can put on their Guccis and Versaces. Thus, many stars, when interviewed, state that they do not mind shopping in routine stores for their clothes: the important thing, they underscore, is that the clothes should ﬁt them and be comfortable—not necessarily fashionable. Restraint and understatement are components of the language 67

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of luxury—they communicate the ability of the celebrity to acquire and renounce brands and wealthy products. Luxury, therefore, is not simply the product. It is increasingly the self that emerges through the use of that product that is central to the aﬄuent. Luxury is the eﬀect of a double-coded narrative—of the self as brand and the brand as intrinsic to the self. Luxury is the explicit and deﬁant promotion of the self as a brand, a brand that is marked by: • individual ability (wealth, power, success), • agency (the power to choose one’s lifestyle) and • social recognition (by one’s peers). The exclusive Vertu mobile phone declares that the product was created ‘for the most discerning individuals’. The cultural rhetorics, clearly located within and embodying an ideology of class and moneypower, is about individual taste and wealth. Having explained its mode of manufacture and its key features the write up announces: ‘This has been Vertu’s decade of achievement. This is your phone’ (Advertisement, India Today, 11 August 2008, p. 9, emphasis added). The rhetoric shifts from the expensive product to the consumer here: suggesting that the phone is something only ‘discerning’ individuals—coded as people with money and taste’—will pick up. The ‘your’ emphasizes the relation between the self and the object. The exclusivity in the ad’s rhetoric is emphasized— and validated—when we discover that it has been declared one of the ‘top ten status symbols’ by the celeb magazine, Hello! (Hello! April 2008, p. 84). Luxury is this process of displacement—from the commodity to the user in a process of branding. It is the intertextual process of signiﬁcation where the two narratives of brand-object (de-contextualized and re-contextualized) and self merge into a larger narrative.

The Culture of Luxury Club Kitchen. Because a craving can strike at any time. – British Airways advertisement (Outlook Travel, December 2007, p. 57) 68

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Pure luxury. Sometimes, luxury is spelled out most eloquently by artful understatement rather than in-your-face opulence … the perfect blend of subtlety and sumptuousness. – ‘The Shops: Fashion Trends on the High Street’ (Kath Brown, Marie Claire, April 2008, p. 70) According to the survey, if money were no object, 41% of Indians and 37% of UAE consumers said they would choose Gucci. – Nielsen Global Luxury Brands Survey, March 2008 Indulgence written all over it… – Advertisement for Godrej Interiors (Good Housekeeping, October 2006)

India has suddenly emerged as a major market for luxury brands, where the manufacture of such items alone could exceed US$ 500 million (The Hindu Business Line, 28 July 2008). Rolex watches, Louis Vuitton bags, BMW sport utility vehicles (SUVs), platinum-plated Mont Blanc pens, a cruise on a luxury liner—items that are a bit more than a watch, a bag, a car or a pen—constitute a signiﬁcant and expanding market in so-called ‘Third World’ India. This indulgence spending is linked to a new cultural dominant visible in late 20th century consumer culture: the culture of luxury. In order to grasp this enormous commercial and cultural shift, we need to go back to what constitutes luxury itself. Luxury is packaged primarily as stylized indulgence for some individuals who can then use it as a marker of self-identity. It is a package that includes a new moral code of consumerism and what I term ‘reenchantment’. The call is to put together, for your self and for the envy and adoration of the world, a deluxe edition of life. Colin Campbell (1987) has suggested that satisfaction-seeking in consumption indicates needs and pleasure-seeking indicates wants. Satisfaction-seeking or comfort-seeking is initiated by the identiﬁcation of a particular need (food, warmth). Food, after the ﬁrst few mouthfuls, fulﬁls the need and is satisfactory. Pleasure, on the other hand, is more general and interchangeable—we wish to try diﬀerent dishes for their tastes, or we move from cinema to shopping for the pleasure of leisure, substituting one form for another. It is in the latter—pleasure-seeking 69

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behaviour—that we can discern the rise of luxury consumption. Luxury, in other words, is the search for pleasure. The culture of comfort emphasizes individual warm and easy sensation, while the culture of luxury oﬀers an emotional pleasure. Campbell (1987) proposes that the shift from comfort to luxury is marked by the shift from sensations to emotions, speciﬁcally the emotion of pleasure, recognition, validation and social status. Indulgence, for example, is the pleasure-seeking behaviour of the consumer and is about something more than a comfortable sensation. As noted earlier, pleasing sensations of warmth, touch, taste are crucial for attaining a degree of comfort in one’s surroundings and object-consumption. In the culture of luxury, this sensation is replaced by the pleasures of recognition, status, a feeling of ‘wellness’ and self-conﬁdence. The pursuit of this emotional rather than sensory pleasure is at the heart of the quest for luxury.

Indulgence and the De-moralization of Luxury4 Go Away Guilt, Over to Luxe. (FICCI–Yes Bank 2008) The world is still deceived with ornament. (Shakespeare 1974)

Scholars have noted that ‘luxury’ has always been treated as something immoral, associated with sin and excess (Berg 2005; Berg and Cliﬀord 1999; Berg with Eger 2003; Jardine 1996; Sekora 1977). The pursuit of comfort, on the other hand, was deemed to be acceptable. Excess was sinful because it was a mere indulgence of the senses. Moralistic views that rejected consumption have treated consumption as simply materialist, capitalist and against the environment, and must therefore be rejected.5 Such moralistic views, as Richard Wilk demonstrates (2001), proceed from particular social contexts and an evaluation of the social and economic status of the consumer: Mukesh Ambani building a massive residential complex does retain a sense of respectability and generates envy while a university teacher who goes into debt in order to buy a large apartment would be reprehensible. With the 18th century, this attitude changed. Luxury and excess were seen as encouraging manufacture and, therefore, the country’s trade. 70

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Luxury was, therefore, a requirement for the country’s good. This shift in attitudes has been termed the ‘de-moralization of luxury’ (Sassatelli 2007: 36). It is important to note, as Daniel Miller warns us (2001a: 232), that to take the example of the minority ultra-rich in order to critique consumption itself is a ﬂawed approach because consumption is also something all classes engage in, to greater or lesser degree. De-moralization occurs in a context of general de-traditionalization of society and culture. When local, culture-speciﬁc norms and moral codes break down, they are substituted with anything else that might be circulating. In a context of globalization, de-traditionalization automatically translates into a cultural globalization. This means, as Mike Featherstone has suggested, there is a loss of local ‘referents’ in a culture full of global signs and commodities (Featherstone 1991: 114). Nike and McDonald’s, the Dark Knight and Gucci become ‘localized’, even though they do not have a local origin or history. In other words, the availability and circulation of global signs, fashions and commodities— via TV, Cosmopolitan and other magazines, catalogues and, more materially, stocks in malls in Indian metropolises (and now, in other towns like Sonipat, Shimla, Thrissur, Pondicherry and others, according to one report by Aiyar [2008])—generates a diﬀerent moral viewpoint regarding commodities. In a global consumer culture, global signs and commodities circulate everywhere, de-linked from local cultures perhaps, but nonetheless effective and hyper-visible. The de-moralization of luxury is contingent upon, and the eﬀect of, the selling of a global corporate and mediadriven idea: that to consume is alright. The epigraphs to this section capture the ‘de-moralization’ of luxury where the sense of guilt that haunts excess does not exist any more. This is not to say that consumers are passive purveyors of global brands. However, the integration of the world’s products, wealth, celebrities and signs exerts considerable pressure on local cultures, manufactures and buyers. The de-moralization of luxury is a logical consequence of the internationalization of consumer culture and lifestyles. It is no more a sin to be seen in luxury brands. A deluxe life is the only one worth living, or desiring. The discourse of luxury thrives on a rejection of the moralistic view of consumption itself, even though one cannot ever separate morality 71

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from consumption (Wilk 2001). Thus, ‘normal’ food—the basic meals and fruit and vegetables—are ‘moral’ and, therefore, justiﬁed because they are linked to work. The consumption of food is linked to pain, utility and sacriﬁce, because goods (including foods) help a human body to work. These are ‘moral’ goods and the consumption itself is moral because they help a body become productive. They fulﬁl a sensory requirement where a physiological state of comfort is attained from the pleasures of taste, touch, sight and smell. On the other hand, foods like chocolates and cakes are often described as ‘sinful’ because they are not linked with work or pain. Instead, they have come to represent pleasure alone. Going by the earlier argument made about the function–utility–artistry ‘imperatives’ for goods, chocolates, ice creams and cakes are driven by the imperative of sociability and pleasure alone, not function or utility. In the culture of luxury, therefore, luxury is packaged as an indulgence that one need not be ashamed of. Luxury goods fulﬁl an emotional requirement. The discourse of luxury, as a result of this rejection, adopts the rhetoric of indulgence. ‘As the mercury rises, stay in, pamper yourself from head to toe,’ advises a column in Good Housekeeping (May 2008, pp. 78–79). ‘Pampering’, as one has noticed in adverts today, is a key term in the culture of luxury. James Twitchell, writing about luxury in America, states the case blandly: When consumption is triumphant, one witnesses an almost universal sense of entitlement to the supposed sensations of luxury. ‘Pamper yourself ’ is no longer a rally cry for the rich. … Now it’s for the rest of us. (Twitchell 2001: 6–7)

Where the discourse of comfort, especially in adverts of home spaces, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Nayar 2008b), turned to a rhetoric that emphasized utility, safety, hygiene and the family, with some concessions to lifestyle and fashion, the discourse of luxury is concerned with something more. The rhetoric of indulgence in the discourse of luxury persuades the consumer that to:

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• pamper oneself is not a sin, • purchase/use something that makes us feel good rather than one that is necessary is perfectly legitimate and • participate in the culture of spectacle by becoming style icons is a human need. While this sounds like hedonism (Colin Campbell 1987) does indeed associate consumption with hedonism), it also marks a major shift in the way we perceive objects and our (human) relation with them. The discourse of luxury is marked by the rhetoric of indulgence that proposes legitimacy for/to hyperconsumption. In the case of Loréal, this rhetoric of indulgence manifests in the tagline: ‘Because you are worth it’. Skoda Fabia’s advertisement announces: ‘Because you are special’ (India Today, 11 August 2008, p. 15). The new line of TV sets from LG, labelled Scarlet, is a semi-erotic portrayal of the technological device and a woman. Termed ‘The ultimate seduction’, the ad presumes that we want to be seduced. Advising people on perfumes for summer, a column provides a description of a particular variety: ‘Cartier Délices de Cartier (priced at Rs 4,950 per 100 ml) … in which frosted cherry reveals a hint of forbidden fruit’ (Good Housekeeping, May 2008, p. 67). Indulgence, here, is not sinful because it is packaged as a just reward for success. Luxury is an indulgence, but one that has been earned. That is, luxury is a reward for having arrived. The purchase of a swanky home and a luxury saloon automobile is a reward for achievements, but more importantly, as a means of making a spectacle of this achievement for the world to see, admire and emulate. The idea of using Cera tiles in the home, says its ad, is to ‘make the world sit up and take notice’ (Inside/ Outside, August 2008, pp. 18–19). If the purpose of consumption is the integration into social worlds (as I suggested in the Introduction), luxury consumption is an integration into a very elite world where success is measured in terms of fashion and ‘style statements’. Success here is the pleasurable emotional experience of being lauded for taste rather than the (mere) sensory pleasure of comfort. Thus, newly-crowned millionaires (India’s millionaire club is set to expand at 12.8 per cent annually, according to one report 73

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[Rediﬀ.com 2006]) expect ‘recognition for their product use,’ according to Robert Henin, American Express India vice president and country manager (Indian Television 2006). This emphasis on recognition for the product use is a metonym for recognition due to the user’s achievements. In other words, brand recognition is user-recognition, or the merging of the two narratives of self and brand noted earlier. Luxury, in India, is thus this complex relation of the brand’s story working with the millionaire’s story (what I argue further as product biography and user biography. As one study of luxury marketing in India puts it, the slogan is ‘Brand me aﬄuent!’ [Mansharamani and Khanna undated]). The emphasis on indulgence as earned and as a marker of having ‘arrived’ is the new culture of luxury. It is a means of escaping the moral dilemmas that have always been associated with consumption because it is seen as a just reward for achievements and hard work. In order to see how the product and user are packaged within this culture of luxury we turn to two speciﬁc process, that of ornamentalism and of ‘re-enchantment’.

Ornamentalism and Luxury Central to the theme of luxury, as I have previously repeated ad inﬁnitum, is the dominance of form and style over function. What I am calling ‘ornamentalism’ is not a pejorative sense of excess, but the increasing preponderance of the decorative in life.6 The decorative is not a vile feature or an immoral condition. The decorative is a celebration of a particular lifestyle, wealth, success, event or occasion. If, as argued, luxury is increasingly treated as a right earned by those who are successful, then ornamentalism is the ideology of this right, and the decorative the most visible form of this ideology. That is (to speak in the language of semiotics), the decorative is the signiﬁer (the word) for the signiﬁed (luxury) located within a discourse of success. Ornament is the outward display of one’s sense of worth, one’s pride in having ‘arrived’. It ties in with luxury because, like luxury, it is not concerned with the use-value of an object: it exists solely as a sign, an image, a style that captures the inner state of the individual. Ornamentalism includes singularization and customization (to which I shall return in 74

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the section on ‘sacralization’)—the ‘imposition’ of the user’s personality onto the object of use. But what is central to ornamentalism and the decorative is the display of adornment. An issue of Hello! listed the paintings of Syed Haider Raza as one of the top 10 status symbols in India today. The write up stated: [T]he … geometric, spiritually inspired symbols, bring an instant and unquestionable aﬃrmation of wealth and status … your walls will speak a language of their own through his technicoloured, resonant visual language. (Hello! April 2008, p. 84)

A few pages later, the magazine lists a jewelled Piaget watch as another such symbol. The rhetoric is illuminating: THE bling watch ﬂashed by our wealthiest.… The central emeraldcut diamond is of the most sought-after colour.… Sporting this baby on your wrist is a sure sign that you’ll be noticed. (Hello! April 2008, p. 86, emphasis in original)

In both cases, the rhetoric emphasizes adornment and display rather than function. Admittedly, an art object is only an adornment with little functional use. However, the fact that the art work and the watch are linked within a discourse of display and ornamentalism suggests something else altogether. This something else is luxury: the display as an end in itself and not for use. The use value here is of attracting attention, as a status symbol and cultural capital. Those who can aﬀord a Pigaet watch or a Syed Haider Raza painting constitute the elite. The pleasure of wearing a Rolex or owning a Raza has little to do with the sensory pleasures of either, but everything to do with the emotional state of social recognition, elite aﬃliation and lifestyle appreciation. The object caters to the emotional rather than to the functional or the sensory. This is the hedonism of luxury consumption. The emphasis in both features is on narrative (‘a language of their own’ and ‘a sure sign that you’ll be noticed’). Ornamentalism, that gestures at the emotional value of an act of consumption, is thus the new language of success. When celebrities become patrons of the arts, we see another instance of ornamentalism. The successful industrialist family that has a couple 75

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of art connoisseurs and patrons (such as Tina Ambani) is an example of deﬂected ornamentalism because, in promoting art work and ornaments, they suggest: • taste, • patronage and • wealth Their support of art works constitutes a discourse of taste within ornamentalism and taste, as we know from Pierre Bourdieu (1999), has always been a marker of class and distinction. Capricious and ‘irrational’ styles—often described in tabloids as ‘wardrobe malfunction’—also constitute a culture of display and ornamentalism. The wardrobe-fashion watch launched by almost every single glamour and tabloid during celebrity events is an index of this culture of ornamentalism. It is not decoration or ornamentalism per se that these columns attack, but what they see as irrational or ‘poor taste’. That is, ornamentalism is treated and accepted as an integral component of successful lives and is not the subject of criticism: the argument is over what constitutes ‘good taste’ or ‘fashion’ within ornamentalism.

Re-enchantment, Sacralized Consumption and Luxury Dream in colour. – Advertisement for Kohler bathroom ﬁttings (Good Housekeeping, May 2008, pp. 8–9) The magical bangle collection. – Advertisement for a jewellery line (Society, July 2008, p. 13)

The BMW is just another car. Or is it? The automobile—and increasingly every commodity—is projected as an extension of the individual’s personality. The vehicle completes the individual. Yet it is also an excess in terms of the automobile itself. The culture of luxury generates a narrative where excess is normal. This

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is the culture of the supplement, where the object or context marks completion and excess at the same time.7 I believe that in the culture of luxury, excess might be an extra, but it also completes the individual because style and socio-cultural capital—to which luxury adds—is a necessity. The luxury object is packaged as a device of dream-fantasy fulﬁllment. ‘Packaging’ consists of what Dennis Rook terms ‘ritual magic’: the projection of fantastic ‘grooming eﬀects’ where products are invested with miraculous properties, and the youth are willing to suspend their disbelief about these properties (Rook 1985: 261). Thus, the Garnier ad where a girl’s shampooed hair is tied to a banister and she is able to pull apart the woodwork because her hair is so strong represents a kind of magic. Driven by the ‘cultural idealization of ‘youthfulness’, as Thompson and Hirschman described it (1995: 143), the packaging of cosmetics and appearance products thrives on the fantasy of ‘forever young’. The use of words like ‘dream’ or ‘magical’ in numerous promotional works suggests a surreal quality, a vision and a certain mysticmythic quality of the product or situation. The repeated occurrence of such images is but a more direct expression of a speciﬁc property of luxury consumption today—what can be called re-enchantment. George Ritzer refers to the contemporary culture of consumption as one that promotes enchantment. Malls and shopping centres are ‘cathedrals of consumption’ because ‘they have an enchanted, sometimes even sacred, religious character for many people’—and Ritzer refers to the sense of community, ceremonial meals, play, mediated connection to nature as marking this sense of religiosity in consumption (Ritzer 1999: 8.10). The extended exposure to high-end consumption in the descriptions of lavish lifestyles and accounts of symbolic exchanges such as the ones described, constitute a ‘re-enchantment’ of the world.8 Re-enchantment is the power of illusion, the return to the mythic, the inexplicable, the magical and the irrational. While comfort oﬀered us a modernized, rationalized world of eﬃciency, utility and necessity, luxury oﬀers us, in contrast, a postmodern, irrational and magical world of display, excess and aesthetics. Ritzer proposes that re-enchantment is a development within the cathedrals of consumption:

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In order to continue to attract, control, and exploit consumers, the cathedrals of consumption undergo a continual process of reenchantment.… The means of consumption are in constant competition with one another to see which one can be most responsive to the demands of consumers for (re-)enchanted settings in which to consume. (Ritzer 1999: 73–76)

He uses the instance of Las Vegas where ‘old hotels are being torn down and enormously expensive new ones are being constructed with more enchanted themes and settings’ (Ritzer 1999: 73–76). While Ritzer is spot-on with his description of the cathedrals of consumption and the enchantment process within consumption, I see the process of enchantment as a primary force in the culture of luxury rather than in the culture of mass-consumption. When Nakshatra asks you to ‘mesmerise the world’ it is not speaking of simple jewellery but diamonds (Filmfare, 29 June–9 July 2008, inside back cover). The mesmerism, enchantment and magic are not any shopping or fashion, but the high-end one. The tagline captures accurately the process of enchantment that I see as characterizing luxury. Enchantment may be the creation of malls and super-malls in Indian metropolises—malls oﬀering the global celebrity brands to all. However, luxury is a step beyond this massiﬁcation of shopping. Hence, I believe, enchantment is inadequate as a term to describe what is beyond the reach of the mall-shopper. I am, therefore, expanding the use of the term ‘re-enchantment’ to mean not just the return to magic and the sacral within consumption (Ritzer’s argument), but to refer to the culture of luxury. Ritzer sees consumer culture as a return to enchantment (and its constant re-invention as re-enchantment), while I propose luxury culture as something more than ordinary (mass) enchantment. That is, re-enchantment in my argument is not the reinvention of the mall (as it is for Ritzer), or the construction of cathedrals of consumption. Re-enchantment here is taken to mean speciﬁcally luxury culture. The culture of luxury is a re-enchantment because the ‘fairy-tale’ lives (a common phrase to describe the elite) of the wealthy is magical, ideal and seems to be like an illusion. This re-enchantment and creation of a parallel, magical world is a process of sacralization.

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Sacralization

Sacralization is the process of making something sacred, and is usually associated with religion. In the 20th century, commentators have taken to describing secular aspects of life becoming sacralized. I adapt here the work of Russell Belk et al. (1989) on sacralized consumption. The sacred is something that does not belong to this world. When certain objects are separated, removed from ordinary human use, they attain the status of the sacred. They are distinct from ‘profane’ or ordinary objects of everyday life. Such objects invoke strong emotions, commitment and responses: fear, devotion, adulation, even revulsion. It is important to note that such a sacralization may not be connected to religion at all, but the rendering of an object into something otherworldly, distinctive from everyday objects, rare and believed to possess special powers. Luxury culture incorporates sacralization as an important mode of hyperconsumption. This sacralization consists of several components. In contemporary times, the sacralization of this parallel world of the elite occurs in much the same way as celebrity culture and advertising. Constant information ﬂows and depictions about the lifestyle of the rich and famous bring this world to our cognition and imagination. Sacralization is a process that involves enchantment—the holding in thrall. Through repeated and considerable exposure to the wealth and lifestyle of the elite, luxury holds us in thrall as something that exists and yet is unattainable by us. The re-enchantment is a process of sacralization where we are held in thrall by the objects and lifestyles, and not the humans alone. As in ﬁlms when we are enchanted, held spellbound, by the sound and visual appeal, the luxury lifestyles hold us in thrall through not their personalities but by the proliferation of goods they own. We wonder not at the people—the Ambanis, the Beckhams, the SRK family—alone, but also the objects/commodities surrounding them. The objects themselves attain the status of wondrous objects because they are embedded in the life stories of the rich and famous. What I propose here as re-enchantment is the masses’ fascination (a fascination constantly catered to) with and wonder at the luxurious

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lifestyles of the rich and famous. I propose that celebrity culture, tabloid coverage of celebrities and even (Page 3) biographies of the elite constitute a structure of enchantment because they spend so much time introducing us to the objects of a celebrity lifestyle. Singularization and Separation

What I term as ‘re-enchantment’ is the construction of a parallel world—adjacent to our ‘regular’ one, but inaccessible. When the oﬃcial website for Rolex, one of the world’s biggest luxury brands, announces, ‘Welcome to the world of Rolex,’ it seems to suggest this paralleling, a world within a world (see www.rolex.com). The objects of this parallel world, acquired at enormous price, become sacralized by virtue not only of their distinctiveness from routine, mass-produced, easily available objects, but also by the symbolic signiﬁcance invested in them. It is neither accidental nor an exaggeration when the term ‘world’ is so frequently used to describe the lives and contexts of big business or ﬁlm stars. It must be noted that it is a not a ‘place’, but an entire world. Thus, Tom Ford the creative director of Gucci (continuing to occupy the position of the world’s No. 1 luxury brand according to the Nielsen’s Global Luxury Brands survey, March 2008)9 stated: [A]dress does not exist in a void, it exists in a world … a store is that world. (cited in Jackson and Haid 2006: 64)

What Ford omitted to mention is that the connoisseur of these brands often occupied such a world too: the world of astronomical wealth and fashion. The parallel world is something we would like to enter or possess ourselves, but remains out of reach—and hence appears magical. If sacralization is the separation of objects from the ordinary, the creation of magical and dream worlds in such a luxury consumer context is sacralization too. Marxist critic Raymond Williams had used the word ‘magic’ to describe the fantasy world sketched out in advertisements and promotional 80

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materials. In his essay, Williams argued that objects in these ads are validated in ‘fantasy’ by association with social and personal meanings. Advertising is a ‘system of organized magic’ (Williams 1996). Williams’ deﬁnition of advertising as a magical narrative can be extended to include the forms of fantasy worlds being created. Re-enchantment, as I call it, is the strategic deployment of the parallel world as a magical space. Thus, Hello!’s palatial houses, the parties of Bollywood, the luxury items sported by Vijay Mallya, are re-enchantments because these representations oﬀer us a fantasy. Re-enchantment sacralizes the parallel world, gives it an aura, by referring to its magical properties, a dreamworld that is more fantasy than real.10 Indeed, it does seem, in many cases, a world that seems to operate on diﬀerent laws altogether (which approximates to the deﬁnition of the fantastic).11 Re-enchantment is the construction of an aura of the unreal around worlds, people, objects and events. Luxury lifestyles oﬀer the imagination a mythic world of excesses, extravaganzas and spectacle where nothing is beyond reach. The symbolic exchanges one reads about and the spectacle of the swanky homes of ﬁlm stars and industrialists oﬀer us a magical world of irrational and inexplicable spending. This is ‘re-enchantment’ because such wealth seems unbelievable, such a lifestyle unattainable. The deliberately choreographed descriptions and rhetoric reveals a world not available to the masses. The community represented on P3 is a reenchantment of the world because it renders a parallel world, one that seems perfect in every sense. This fantasy world is a process of sacralization that renders the objects (depicted) in that world scarce, precious and luxurious. The objects of this fantasy world are to be isolated from, at least in terms of availability and price from routine, mall-available objects. Thus, a catalogue of fashion items does not list the prices of Rolex, Van Cleef, Piaget and Christian Dior watches, Louis Vuitton sunglasses and Fendi bags do not state the price. The silence in this narrative suggests that, for those who care to buy luxury products do not really care for the price, and conversely, if you are one who ﬁrst looks at the price, then these products are not for you (Hi! Blitz August 2008: 136–44). This is a process of singularization, or customization that decommoditizes the commodity. Every single car magazine in India carries 81

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a feature on modiﬁed cars. Dilip Chhabria’s work in Autocar India is an example of how a car is transformed into something akin to a work of art, individualized and therefore sacralized away from any other car (Autocar India, February 2008, pp. 32–33). Roland Barthes, writing about a new model of the Citroën in the 1960s, speaks of the new ‘mythology of cars’ where the earlier obsession with ‘the bestiary of power’ has changed to something more ‘homely’—discreteness, smoothness, simplicity and comfort. It is the attempt to render something as powerful as a car into something attractive that makes the car a ‘purely magical object’ (Barthes 1972b: 88–90). Sacralization is a process through which one’s own identity can be ‘transposed on possessions’ (Belk et al. 1989: 15). Customizing apartments, clothing, mobile phones (the caller tune ‘revolution’), automobiles constitute a mode of sacralization whereby a commodity available in any store—and is therefore ‘profane’—is made unusual, invested with one’s own personality and rendered distinctive. Sacralization relies on quintessence, a premium on uniqueness and distinctiveness (Belk et al. 1989: 15–16). Rare, mysterious and therefore powerful in their attraction, sacralized objects are pursued for their uniqueness. The culture of luxury is rooted in a phenomenon that is particular to late 20th century consumer culture: individualism and the ‘care of the self ’ (we have looked at one manifestation of this in the chapter on health). From looks to brands, customization is the operative word in late 20th century culture (Klein 2000). The pursuit of uniqueness marks a weakening of community, the collective and the group in favour of the individual, the solitary and the unique. This uniqueness is often cast as ‘novelty’. If comfort is the pursuit of routine and functional ease, luxury is the pursuit of novelty. Novelty is anything that interrupts the routine experience (Bianchi 1998). Within consumer culture, luxury is often packaged as novelty or a singularity—diﬀerent from others, and never to be repeated. The culture of luxury is the culture that emerges from and is rooted in this ideology of uniqueness. Matthew Hilton has argued that the morality of consumption in the late 20th century, and an increased concern for the healthy body has resulted in a consumption debate concerned

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with the individual for the individual’s sake (Hilton 2004). Thus, customization and individualization are the markers of the ability to aﬀord these. A crucial and inventive mode of customization is the antiquarian turn in luxury, where a temporal branding of the object takes place, and a diachronic sense of the product’s meaning is invoked. Antiquarianism and Polychronicity

If, as Guy Debord argued (1967), the world of the spectacle is the world of commodities, then the world of elite spectacle is the world of luxury commodities. I am here proposing a hierarchy of spectacle and therefore, of consumption. ‘Ordinary’ or mass consumption, such as that in malls constitutes a now-routine spectacle because of the nature of the commodity and the nature of the shopping experience. Malls and retail outlets do not constitute, usually, luxury shopping. Exclusivity is not the hallmark of the mall. On the other hand, luxury shopping is an entirely diﬀerent order of retailing and shopping: exclusive outlets, personalized service and catalogues, the fashion show. Luxury is the ability to re-invent oneself (prepare a deluxe edition of one’s life) through the use of expensive products. Beauty treatments, fashion and ﬁtness regimes in the age of self-management are increasingly available to the mass market. Luxury seeks to distinguish itself from this ‘common’ pursuit and achievement of good looks and ﬁtness by oﬀering increasingly high-end products. As a result there is a shift in the promotion of products itself. Routine shopping and products are about manufactured commodities. Luxury is also somehow associated with a certain arcane, archaic dimension of cooking, designing or living. It is therefore not a coincidence to see the periodic return of the historical ﬁlm with its lavish, luxurious opulence and fashions. This is the antiquarian turn in contemporary luxury—a phenomenon that has many dimensions. It invokes an older meaning of the brand/sign/object and re-positions the object’s older meaning as valuable today. There is, writes Jean Baudrillard, a ‘status attached to regression in time’ (2008 [1996]: 162). But my point is, it is not a simple ‘regression in time’ at all.

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My argument is as follows: Luxury is: • the co-existence of the past in the present and • the geographical mixing of cultural practices in globalized homes. This is the discourse of polychronicity (multiple times, and therefore ‘untimely’) and multi-spatiality (of multiple geographical-cultural origins) in the culture of luxury. Polychronicity is the simultaneous existence of diﬀerent times within a product—instanced by the emphasis on an antiquated mode of production (handcrafted) or style. Here, the object/artefact recalls the past within the present, and hence is ‘untimely’, beyond time itself. Multi-spatiality is the adaptation of cultural habits and artefacts from multiple locations and cultures. A living room with artefacts from round the world is a multi-spatial arrangement, where the ‘cultural borrowings’ reﬂect taste, agency and luxury. Luxury thrives on exclusive, slow and a ‘humanized’ production process. If necessity and comfort represent manufacture, luxury represents craft. As a result ‘hand-made’ is the slogan of the new luxury, one that I describe here as ‘antiquarian luxury’. The high-end Vertu phone is an example of this ‘antiquarian luxury’, marked by a shift from manufacture to crafting. The ad informs us: Phones that combine craftsmanship and technology … sapphire crystal and space age ceramic with leather and gold … hand-built in England, one at a time. (India Today, 11 August 2008, p. 9)

Swarovski speaks of its ‘hand-set pieces’ (Swarovski, product pamphlet, undated, unpaginated). The emphasis is on the ‘hand-built’, the singularity of the manufacturing process as a means of luxury. The irony, of course, is that ‘manufacture’ as a term of description is increasingly replaced, in the cases of comfort too, by ‘craft’. The Skoda Fabia, not really a high-end car, also declares its product to be an example of ‘craftsmanship’ (India Today, 11 August 2008, p. 15). Devayani carpets claims it is both ‘luxurious and durable’, but not mass-produced; ‘hand-made 84

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with colour compassion’ (Inside/Outside, August 2008, p. 47). Union coﬀee declares: ‘The ﬁnest things in life are crafted by hand’ (Delicious, October 2007, p. 83). Re-enchantment is this obsession with an anti-manufacture state. ‘Craft’, as opposed to manufacture (which gestures at industrialized production), is the new slogan that carries a connotation of magicality because, very simply, with industrial modernity, we have come to associate comfort, style and eﬃciency with machine-made products. The return to craftsmanship as a ‘plus’ is a re-enchantment because it recalls an older form of product formation. Heritage and the polychronicity of materials are important to this aura of a luxury product. The product biography in the case of a luxury object emphasizes timelessness of quality, a tradition of excellence and exclusivity. A product’s history, therefore, is central to its status as a comfort item or as luxury. Klaus Schmidt and Chris Ludlow speak of the Mercedes Benz’s ‘impeccable engineering heritage’, and the company’s Head of Brand Management, Hans-Georg Brehm, writes: ‘The assurance that only Mercedes-Benz with its heritage and capabilities is able to devote itself wholeheartedly to such a comprehensive mission’ (cited in Schmidt and Chris Ludlow 2002: 65). All these citations suggest that the age of a brand adds to its value. Burberry, one of the world’s leading luxury brands, proudly places beneath its company name, a legend: ‘Established 1856’. Orra jewellers inscribe beneath their name, ‘since 1888’. Villeroy and Boch crockery carries its date of origins—1748 —underneath the company name. Hidesign declares that its products are made from ‘real leather crafted the forgotten way’, thus suggesting the revival of a rare, forgotten and therefore valuable tradition (Femina, 27 August 2008, p. 9). Swarovski, in the pamphlet accompanying its products, has a prefatory note from its Chairman, Helmut Swarovski: ‘For more than one hundred years Swarovski crystal has been ﬁlling people’s lives with joy, fantasy and style…’ (Swarovski, product pamphlet, undated, unpaginated). The retrieval of a ‘lost world’ and ancient times in all these adverts lends an air of magicality. The atavistic revisitation of older styles of architecture, cooking or styling is a form of re-enchantment precisely because it creates an illusion of this return to a former age. The building becomes ‘untimely’, and the rhetoric of ‘timelessness’ 85

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in numerous adverts today signals this ideology of polychronicity as unique and luxurious. Central to the antiquarian luxury move is the heritagization of comfort, commodity, aesthetics and lifestyle. Such a heritagization often begins with the revival of older fashions, architecture and styles. Popular culture, especially ﬁlms, plays a role in showcasing heritage and luxury and constitutes the frames of the ‘antiquarian turn’. The ever-popular, and one of Hindi cinema’s best-known lavish spectacles, Mughal-e-Azam, was brought back in a colour version (2006). Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Jodhaa Akbar (2007) has been a commercial success. It could be argued that the period ﬁlm, especially the mythologicals and the historicals, oﬀer an extravaganza of material culture—of artistic clothing, palaces and furnishings and feasts. Often described as ‘costume dramas’, a sense of opulence marks such ﬁlms. The heritage and historical ﬁlm is an important element in the culture of luxury because it suggests a history of luxurious living and styles. Grand feasts, princely gestures and magniﬁcent buildings become an anterior moment to luxury in the present (even if, of course, the ancient period represented was not consistently happy). Castles as settings in contemporary ﬁlms (even if they are not historical) also provide the inspiration for this antiquarian turn—Black, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and numerous ﬁlms have showcased heritage buildings. Fashions, of course, also build on this opulence, as in Ritu Kumar’s collections. Her brocaded and quaintly coloured-designed work is also showcased against a setting of dancers and troubadours-minstrels who seem to recall a bygone age. Here, opulence and luxury in fashion explicitly links both with antiquity (Femina, 27 August 2008, pp. 34–35). A parallel to Ritu Kumar’s collection is the colonial fashion’s reappearance. It is therefore no surprise to see the English East India Company’s furnishings and furniture being reproduced now (http:// theeastindiacompany.com/). Ritu Kumar makes contemporary fashion’s linkage (and obsession) with a heritage of luxury clear: We have centuries of tradition and aesthetics beﬁtting royalty .... The lure of diamonds has come down to us as a legacy. (Catalogue, Forevermark, undated, unpaginated) 86

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The catalogue of the East India Company Interiors—with the original logo, coat of arms and Queen Elizabeth I herself on it—proudly declares its legacy right on the cover: ‘since 1600’. The wooden furniture is not priced in the catalogue but declares its luxury status loudly (Catalogue, The East India Company, Mumbai). Old palaces being turned into resorts and hotels constitute this new move towards what can be termed ‘antiquarian luxury’. Woodville Palace in Shimla, the setting for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, and the subject of a feature in Inside/ Outside, is one such. Though the furniture, architecture and styling are all ‘old world’, they still provide ‘excellent service’. The feature concludes: ‘It provides a glimpse into a distant era, when privileged lives were diﬀerently lived’ (Inside/Outside, August 2008, pp. 165–75). That the symbol for Rolex resembles a crown—when monarchy is a rare thing in contemporary times—is no accident: celebs and the aﬄuent are the new royalty. Roca designer bath suites from luxury-makers like David Chipperﬁeld, declares in its advert that ‘you don’t need clothes to feel like an emperor’ (Inside/Outside, August 2008, pp. 14–15). Rolex’s Cellini range is available ‘exclusively in platinum or 18 ct gold,’ is tagged ‘Cellini Classic’ (Hello! April 2008, p. 84). The enthusiasm for ‘classic’ or vintage cars and other heritage equipment constitutes a mode of sacralization of commodities based on their temporal distance from the present, and the continued relevance of the past—or what I have termed the polychronicity of the objects. In other cases, the process of sacralization involves being aware of a product’s historical signiﬁcance. Thus, diamonds have been precious, according to one jewellery brochure, since the ancient Greeks and Romans (Forevermark 2008). It is the antiquity of use that makes the commodity precious. Thus it comes as no surprise that Jodhaa Akbar was accompanied by the launch of a jewellery line from Tanishq, and named after the ﬁlm, thus linking antiquity and consumerism within the culture of luxury. As the product narrative of one of the items in the Jodhaa Akbar collection put it: Delicately sculpted elephants’ trunks entwine, drawing inspiration from Jodhaa’s ﬁnely detailed wedding jewellery.12

Luxury that was once the privilege and province of the royalty is now that of the aﬄuent. Luxury is the marker of the new royalty. The 87

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Heritage Hotels group states in its grandiloquent rhetoric of antiquarian luxury: Become a Maharaja for the duration of your vacation, at Heritage Hotels of India. Ride an elephant into a grand courtyard, dine in a magniﬁcent Durbar hall … stay in rooms furnished in opulent luxury …. Experience the royal lifestyle of the Maharajas of India, when you enjoy the luxurious ambience of the Heritage Hotels of India. Stay at a fairytale palace that rises like a marble vision from an azure lake …. With spectacular locations, fascinating histories and an amazing ambience, the forts and palaces of the royal families of India, that have been converted into Heritage Hotels of India oﬀer you a chance to live like a king.13

The point is, for the today’s privileged, such a ‘royal’ lifestyle can still be had, at a price. When Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter, Vanisha, got married in 2004, the tycoon hired a 17th century palace, the French chateau Vaux le Vicomte, for the event. Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar wedded at Sudeley Castle in Winchcombe (England) and the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Rajasthan. SRK bought a heritage bungalow from Nariman K. Dubash and Tendulkar bought the historic Dorab Villa (dating back to the 1920s) in Bandra. Vijay Mallya acquired, at unbelievable prices, the Tipu Sultan sword and, more recently, Gandhi’s personal eﬀects (in the latter case it is not Gandhiana as luxury objects, but the aﬀordability of a symbolically valuable object that constitutes luxury). In each case, there is sacralization reliant upon the polychronicity of objects. The antiquarian turn in luxury is this renewed interest in acquiring castles, chateaus, palaces either as homes or for the hoteliering business—a polychronicity of materials, lifestyles and manners. Tabloids’ continuing obsession with royal families and dynasties contributes to the sacralization of an old world luxury culture. For example, the magazine Hello! proﬁles families and their palaces on a regular basis (see Hello! December 2007, February 2008, March 2008 and April 2008). Architects now incorporate classical and baroque elements from earlier ages and juxtapose them with space-age materials and décor (Nath 2008). They, thus, hybridize luxury itself, never abandoning the ancient period as a time of opulent luxury for the smooth eﬃciency of the present. Luxury, in fact, becomes 88

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the co-existence of multiple spacetimes, a kind of polychronicity of the objects from various places, untimely and very contemporary. Antiques chosen from round the world thus ﬁll the houses of the rich and famous—for antique collecting has always been a characteristic of the wealthy (Cohen 2006: 146–47). Film star Zayed Khan’s home has, notes a report, ‘artefacts from Spain and France,’ Italian statues, an ‘antique brass chandler from Lebanon’ and ‘antique Rosewood furniture’ (Hello! June 2008, p. 18). The collection was always a mark of the connoisseur, as Susan Stewart in her path-breaking 1984 study, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, has shown (see also Cohen 2006: 145–65; Peck 2005: 162–79 and). I suggest that the collectibles in such houses constitutes a ritual of sacralization (as Belk et al. suggest 1989: 25–26), where both the past and the objects from that time are rendered special, separated from the contemporary age and its products. By transference, the person who puts together ornamental and decorative collections acquires some of the prestige associated with the presence of antiquarian materials. The packaging of luxury is the successful promotion and acceptance of the ‘ritual magic’ of being transported to and supposedly experiencing the luxury of a bygone era. Heritage marketing thrives on this ‘ritual magic’ of assuming the old world’s opulence in the present, of generating polychronic and multi-spatial materials. Clearly, the discourse and culture of luxury cut across genres as diverse as period ﬁlms, antiquarian furniture and contemporary fashion in their persistent return to and use of the past iconography of opulence. Luxury’s reliance on heritage is also, again, a re-enchantment process: the creation of a magical world of contemporary fashion through the return to an ancient opulence. Luxury seeks to recreate a former luxury. Heritage is a narrative—a timeline, tracing a tradition from origins in an earlier age to the present. The antiquarian turn in luxury cleverly weaves this narrative into a contemporary one. This multi-weave narrative of luxury consists of the following: • The narrative of antiquity. • The narrative of nostalgia. 89

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• The narrative of preservation. • The narrative of contemporaneity. While no designer would dare abandon the super-functionality of contemporary technology, the ideal seems to be to promote the present luxury as a logical extension of the past’s opulence and lavishness. Goldand diamond-studded phones recall the bejewelled attire of royalty, an excellent example of the multi-weave narrative of the antiquarian moment in luxury. Baroque designs in highly-eﬃcient, techno-loaded homes and oﬃces are a nostalgic return to ornamental opulence without abandoning functionality. As the Heritage Hotels of India write-up deﬁnes so grandly, it is a ‘fairytale palace’ with ‘fascinating histories’. This is re-enchantment of modernity through a recourse to antiquarian luxury. Rituals of Sacralization

Sacralization is perpetuated through particular rituals. In luxury culture a dominant trend is the fashion show showcasing the season’s line from Armani and Yves Saint Laurent. Rituals also include tabloid coverage of celeb events like the Cannes ﬁlm festival, the Academy and Filmfare Awards, product launches and others. In the process of this ritual, we ﬁnd emerging the paradox of luxury culture. We can discern within the individualistic consumption of sacralized luxury culture the tension between ghettoization and communitarianism. While luxury relies on uniqueness, on a separation from the mass/ community, this pursuit of uniqueness via excessive expenditure and use itself unites the wealthy into a new community. Sacralization here is the creation of a separate world of consumers through rituals of partying, fashion displays, public events and information-dissemination about lifestyles. Celeb consumption is both private (because they do not shop where everyone else shops, and they shop for goods that nobody else can aﬀord) and public (everybody discusses what they wear). Securing privacy, while also ensuring public visibility, is a key feature of luxury consumption.

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Sacralization rituals also, often take spatial forms. Luxury housing in India, according to one feature, is worth Rs 2,000 crore (Hello! June 2008, p. 75). Ads for luxury villas and housing now invariably project vast, non-crowded spaces and what I have termed ‘secured isolation’, almost as though luxury is characterized by the absence of crowds and a concomitant availability of open spaces. ‘Space’, in such housing, ‘doesn’t restrict perspective,’ writes the report on luxury homes (Hello! June 2008, p. 75). This secured isolation is luxurious because it is rendered safe: gated communities, security measures and constant surveillance (Nayar 2008b: 203). Luxury is, therefore, the desired separation from the masses—in terms of taste, physical distance, fashion and habits. Ironically, the cultivation of ‘rich’ tastes and isolation leads to its own form of communitarianism—and this is what I have identiﬁed as the paradox of individualistic consumption. If consumption is a mode of classiﬁcation, as Douglas Holt (1995) argues, then luxury consumption separates the big players from the ordinary. Celebrity culture has a great deal to do with this form of ‘classiﬁcation’ based on consumption, fashion and style. Sacred objects, social theorists argue, unite people with a shared commitment (Belk et al. 1989: 7). From this assumption it is possible to argue that the commitment to luxury, display and style is a unifying factor among the elites. Page 3 people (P3P) portrayed in newspapers and glamour magazines constitute a community in themselves, united in their fashion, shopping and purchasing power and spectacle. Gated communities and luxury villas seem to now inevitably oﬀer club houses, play areas and common facilities (not seen in more middle-range housing in India). There is a sense of community among the well-heeled, so to speak. P3 write-ups also tend to show the same faces, the ‘regulars’ on the party circuit. What we see emerging in the culture of luxury is a new community that is clearly separated from the masses and other forms of community. Yet ironically, other than excessive spending there is nothing that marks the wealthy as a community—which would include shared beliefs, territorial loyalties and roots, customs and traditions. Thus, there is a simultaneous abandonment of the community and the creation of one, but a community based entirely on spending and spectacle. The culture

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of luxury also builds on individual sensations/tastes/styles, moves beyond the individual to a collective. What I am proposing here is: luxury is a peer-group, collective state where excesses, high-end goods and style become markers of class and social belonging. If comfort works at the level of the individual and the family, and stays within it, luxury starts with the individual, but widens into a social context—of the wealthy, the well-connected and the powerful. Luxurious lifestyles, excessive spending and exclusivity—of fashion, taste, habits—are what link celebrities, wealthy business families and leading politicians. Studies have, for instance, shown how high-end SUVs (costing US$ 55,000 and above) became markers and makers of a community of SUV owners in the USA (Schulz 2006). Our ‘unpacking’ has shown the imbrications of many ideologies— from hedonistic self-indulgence to heritagization—within the culture of luxury. The culture of comfort, located between necessity and luxury, emphasizes the utilitarian, functional and economic dimension of objects. Comfort is the seeking of sensory pleasure and is situated at the intersection of the three economies—ﬁnancial, cultural and moral. Unpacking the culture of comfort reveals the construction of a narrative between the object-context and the user’s internal state of comfort. This ‘level’ of comfort is increasingly associated with an excessive ‘stylization of life’ itself. With stylization, consumer culture conﬁgures several shifts, from use to display, function to artistry and utility to aesthetics. Stylization involves the making of an intertextual narrative that results when two narratives—of brand biography and self-branding merge into each other. Stylization carried to a habitual performance marks luxury. Luxury is packaged primarily as stylized indulgence for some individuals who use it as a marker of self-identity. The culture of luxury involves ﬁrst, the de-moralization of luxury characterized by an ideology of indulgence. Luxury is packaged in two primary modes: ornamentalism and of ‘reenchantment’. The ﬁrst underscores excess and style over utility. The second involves the sacralization of objects, including a careful plotting of antiquity—what I have identiﬁed as the emphasis on the polychronicity of the objects—and rituals of sacralization that mark objects out as isolated and therefore unique.

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Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

There has also, of course, been a problematic slide in the nature of objects from necessities to comfort and even luxuries—a point this book does not address, but which is signiﬁcant nevertheless. A good example would be of drinking water. The increased pollution (not to mention depletion) of water resources has ensured that safe drinking water is now a luxury—and we need to buy bottled water. Drinking water, for so long a necessity, is now a luxury item if we were to seek safe water. The only safe water, if at all, is bottled. For a view of material culture as indispensable to the formation of the human subject see Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987). I adapt the notion of the supplement from poststructuralist thought. The term ‘de-moralization of luxury’ has been used by various commentators (Peck 2005: 8, 347; Sassatelli 2007: 36–37 among others). For a critique, see Daniel Miller 2001b. The standard work on decorative art remains, in my opinion, that of E.H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979). Here, I signal my departure from Pasi Falk’s use of the term ‘supplement’ to speak of luxury only as excess (1997: 105). I adapt the work of Zygmunt Bauman (1993) and George Ritzer (1999). The Nielsen ranking of luxury brands is as follows: Gucci, Chanel and Calvin Klein (both at second), Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Versace, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Prada and Yves Saint Laurent. See www.nielsen.com/media/2008/ pr_080227.html (accessed on 21 August 2008). Beryl Langer (2004) has argued that marketing of toys often depends on the creation of a fantasy world for the child, but also sacralizing childhood. Tzvetan Todorov (1975) deﬁnes the fantastic as a world where the laws of the ‘normal’ world do not apply. See http://www.tanishq-jodhaa-akbar.com/ja_collection_zoom1.asp (accessed on 26 August 2008). See www.heritagehotelsofIndia.com (accessed on 23 August 2008).

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Chapter 3

Life, the Bubble-wrapped Edition Cultures of Risk

Growing AIDS Threat. – The Tribune, 4 July 2003 With the monsoons arriving, you become more susceptible to water borne diseases. And we ensure that you get only the safest and purest water every time. Read through the following information areas and keep your family safe and healthy! – Write-up on Eureka Forbes Water Puriﬁers.1 Himalayan Meltdown Catastrophic for India. – The Times of India, 3 April 2007 Your computer might be at risk. No anti-virus software or ﬁrewall is installed. – (Annoying) Message on desktop after PC is switched on.

I

n one of the most unforgettable passages in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970 [1961]), the character Yossarian worries about his health. The passage is worth quoting in all its extensive glory because it captures the culture of bubble-wrapped lives as no other: There were lymph glands that might do him [Yossarian] in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of

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the crotch. There even were diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them …. Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his ﬁnger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about …. Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself into the hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists and nurses seated as one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with a knife poised at the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting away the moment it became necessary. (Heller 1970: 186–87)

In this breathless, maniacally paced description, Heller captures the discourse of risk that haunts us. What Yossarian seeks at the end of the passage is a bubble-wrapped life. From global climate change to bacteria-ridden water, our everyday life seems fraught with hidden and not-so-hidden dangers. We are threatened from within us, as well as outside us. There are hazards from eating, drinking, walking or doing nothing at all. There is a hazard waiting to happen to our economy, our nation and our bodies. Disaster lurks in the air, in water, in the land and in our bones. We could get cancer from doing nothing, or typhoid from consuming polluted water. We might get obese from lack of exercise, or we might develop respiratory problems from jogging through polluted city streets. We share the anxiety of our community, group and neighbourhood about ‘anti-social elements’, drug-peddling among our children, religious fundamentalism and state indiﬀerence. Everyday life, it would appear, is increasingly a battle against assorted enemies. Our anxieties might be individual (my body), group (my family), community (neighbourhood), nation (India) or race (human). This is the culture of risk and we need to be ‘bubble-wrapped’ against an assortment of imminent threats and risks. ‘Risk’ comes packaged to us everyday, in multiple forms—from glossy brochures of insurance

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companies warning us of the risk of heart disease and attendant heavy hospital bills to the dry economic column that warns us against investing in mutual funds, from Al Gore’s vivid and scholarly depiction—enlivened with humour—of the ‘inconvenient truth’ of global warming to ﬂag-waving fundamentalists who see our cultures as being at risk from globalization.2 Risk is the culture of everyday life now. But what exactly is risk? What are its mechanics of operation, or how does it permeate common discourses of the everyday and our imaginations? In other words, how are we made aware of various kinds of risks and what are the consequences of such a ‘packaging’?

Risk Society Risk is Everywhere. – Outlook Traveller, 2007 Alone and Vulnerable. – Headline, Lotika Sarkar case (The Hindu, 5 April 2009)

To begin with an example of the narrative of risk, a document, ‘The Effects of Nuclear War’, produced by the Oﬃce of Technology Assessment of the US government (Oﬃce of Technology Assessment 1979), can be read as an exercise in risk culture. The document had sections like ‘A nuclear weapon over Detroit or Leningrad’ where it sketched out scenarios of nuclear explosions in metropolises. Another section, ‘Other LongTerm Eﬀects’, spoke of radiation poisoning and the dangers. But there was also another section fascinatingly titled ‘Incalculable Eﬀects’. In this section, discussing the environmental and agricultural (speciﬁcally food production) eﬀects of nuclear war, it declares: ‘It is not possible to estimate the probability or the probable magnitude of such damage’ (Oﬃce of Technology Assessment 1979: 775). Take ﬂying as a second example. As the plane taxies on the runway preliminary to take oﬀ, the stewards explain to us the safety features of the aircraft. In the ﬁrst instance, the extent of damage from nuclear war cannot be predicted, according to a document prepared by experts.3 In the second, 96

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we are given exact modes of ensuring safety if something disastrous were to happen. Both deal with risk. Risk is hazard, and is predominantly characterized as a negative aspect of life (as opposed to the risk-taking of, say, adventure sports). Every product you buy entails a certain amount of risk. This risk is built into the system-product. When you switch on your personal computer, there are several things that can go wrong—from the moment of your typed-in command to what appears on screen. Ulrich Beck (1992, 2000), who ﬁrst popularized the ‘risk society’ thesis, argues that risk is a structural feature of any system in the industrial age—though more recent critics have traced the idea and ideology of risk back to the early modern period in Europe (15th to 16th century) when authors and painters depicted apocalypses and disasters concomitant with utopias (see Glimp 2008). A system produces hazards that cancel out the established safety systems or the calculations of risk. In other words, despite the safety devices and attempts to calculate the possible dangers in a system, hazards exist and disasters happen on a scale that we cannot exactly predict. In the case of nuclear disaster, with examples of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in our mind, we visualize the risk of this form of power. We read possible scenarios of nuclear war. In the case of the stewards’ ﬂight safety instructions (and the manual), we are simultaneously, and implicitly, called upon to reﬂect on the risks involved in say, landing on water, shortage of oxygen, etc. Ulrich Beck goes on to argue (giving us less cheer in the process!) that we have moved beyond the mathematical models of predicting risk. Indeed, it is interesting that we can think of risk only in the context of safety mechanisms and predictions. What allows us to reﬂect on risk is, ironically, the safety features. Thinkers on risk culture have suggested that we are increasingly aware of risks. We are increasingly aware of more and more things that can harm us. What is important is that risk is a matter of perception and interpretation. Risk awareness is a way of seeing things: Is this likely to harm me or my family? However, this awareness of risk does not remain the same over time for either an individual or a society/culture. For instance, an adolescent on a motorcycle ﬁnds speed exhilarating, even as he is aware of the risks of high-speed driving. However, as a 97

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middle-aged driver, this same person is aware that risk is shared—by his family members. Socially, and with developments in science and medicine, our awareness of the nature, degree, cause and palliative for risk has changed. From the germ theory of disease in the 19th century to the discovery of genetic anomalies that can induce diseases, we are made aware of a million possible risks to our bodies. We live in a set of economic, social, cultural and political conditions where there is a sense of uncertainty. This uncertainty is often manufactured for us in the form of representations of disaster, or risk deﬁnition. Other thinkers have argued that risk awareness is a particular mode of understanding the self and the world: the self is what is at risk in the world (Lupton 1999). This means that the endangered self (the selfat-risk) has to act in order to alleviate the risk. Risk is linked, therefore, not only to the sense of danger, but also to the call for individual action. Risk entails the responsibility to act so that risk is averted or minimized. On a larger scale, a community, culture or group might also be called to action in order to thwart and avert what it perceives as a risk.

Imagination and the Becoming-real The Max New York Life Insurance advert that ran on Indian TV in 2008 showed a woman racing through her home calling out to ‘Sanju’, ostensibly her partner. She does not receive a response and is growing frightened by the minute. Rushing out on to the terrace garden she perceives a spilt teacup and the listless, slack ‘body’ of Sanju in the arm chair. Fear writ large on her face she approaches, hesitantly, afraid of what might see. She taps him on the shoulder and says softly, ‘Sanju?’ Her expression suggests that she does not expect him to respond because he is lying there dead. He leaps up and says, ‘You frightened me.’ The entire rhetoric of the ad looks at a future when such terrible things as losing your partner might actually happen to any one. Insurance is the bubble-wrap that we need to acquire to safeguard our lives. Take as another example the debate around Lotika Sarkar, the 87-year old, former distinguished professor of law, who has now lost

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her home to (allegedly) conniving ‘friends’. The case made headlines through early-mid 2009, and The Hindu carried a detailed report on it (Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, 5 April 2009), tying it in with analysis of the conditions of the elderly in India. T. Ramappa writes in this connection: Unless this [elderly] person makes a proper legal disposition of the property, with honest and competent legal advice, while he/she is still physically and mentally alert, he/she will not leave a legacy for his son but a problem in the form of litigation by competing claims of relatives or land-grabbers. (Ramappa 2009)

The writer invites us to imagine a situation of property disputes here, and the warning of such a risky condition is implicit in the narrative. This is what invokes fear, and an awareness of the risks involved. Insurance companies thrive on the fear that the future can always be frightening, terrible and disastrous. United India Insurance depicts a sheathed sword and declares: ‘At United India Insurance, every risk has a cover that ﬁts perfectly’ (Outlook Traveller 2007). The ambiguous rhetoric suggests that the sword itself is an insurance (as a weapon), or that the risk of being cut by the sword is minimized by sheathing it. In fact, an interesting feature of risk is that it is always so in the future. Risk is something that can happen, that may happen. Therefore, central to risk analysis in ﬁnance or science is the probability of something disastrous happening, and mathematical models are put in place to study, say, the stock market to calculate risks. And, having calculated it, one prepares possible means of averting or reducing it. It was interesting to see the eﬀorts made by ﬁnance companies during the global ﬁnancial crisis of September–October 2008. ICICI Prudential sent out SMSs to assure customers that their market credibility and liquidity remained intact. The SMS read: AAA (Ind) rating by Fitch Ratings as on September 30, 2008—the highest possible ﬁnancial rating that can be provided to an Indian company.

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And: ICICI Pru Life has been ranked as the ‘Most Trusted Brand’ amongst private life insurance companies in the ET Brand Equity Survey 2008.4

This becoming-real feature of risk has two basic moments. One, ascertaining and recognizing the probability of an event. Two, visualizingimagining the probable magnitude of the event’s outcome (Douglas 1994: 31). Thus the woman who expects to ﬁnd her husband dead in the chair not only imagines such an event, but also has to, suggests the ad, realize the enormous consequences attendant upon her partner’s decease. Thus, risk is always in the process of becoming-real. When it manifests —actually happens—it is not risk any more; it is a disaster (Beck 1992, 2000; Van Loon 2002). This future-orientation of risk is central to our perceptions of it, our actions to alleviate the degree of risk and our representations of it. Thus, after the Gurgaon school shooting of December 2007, the editorial in The Hindu noted in its editorial of 14 December 2007: Not changes in the law, but strict enforcement of existing regulations and the exercise of great responsibility by gun licence holders should be the ﬁrst steps if Indian schools are not to endure similar horrors in future.

It is important to understand here that risk is inextricably linked to imagination. ‘Representation’ of risk is basically the stimulus to imagine risk. • Insurance companies ask us to imagine high education costs for our children, death, loans for marriages and home ownership. • Medicine expects us to imagine what can go wrong with any of our assorted body parts. • Financiers expect us to imagine the disasters that might come to mutual funds or the stock market.

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The task of ‘packaging’ risk is primarily to do with this imaginative component. The rhetoric of advertising or science is geared towards provoking us to imagine scenarios. Thus, when the Life Insurance Corporation of India asks you to take a ‘[l]ife risk cover i.e. ﬁnancial protection to the family in case of an unforeseen event,’ what it wants you to do is to foresee, in your mind’s eye, an ‘unforeseen event’.5 Risk culture relies on this paradoxical seeing of the unforeseen, and cleverly appeals to the cultural rhetorics of the family, where the family is projected as something of unimaginable value. Death or accidents are always to be prepared for. Ironically, therefore, the unforeseen is what is constantly seen (or shown to us). Risk culture is the invention of scenarios of disasters based on the calculation of probabilities. As for instance in the write-up on insurance in a prominent magazine: ‘Insurance plans for children are designed to provide the much-needed security for their future in your absence’ (The Week, 22 March 2009, p. 56). In this invention of scenarios, medicine, propaganda and commerce are aligned with literary and artistic creations. Where the latter seek to create (usually) beautiful or perfect worlds, the rhetoric of risk asks us to imagine disasters. ‘Packaging’ risk is this process of setting a context for imagining disaster. The language of risk is basically, like literary texts, a language that begins with: ‘what if ’ or ‘imagine’.

Information and Risk Risk awareness and risk control are possible only when we recognize the threat and its causes. This recognition of risk entails a very important move via language: the risk factor has to be made visible. Risk is therefore about communication. Historians of medicine have shown how the sanitation drives of 19th century Europe were inspired and informed by the discovery of germs (by Louis Pasteur and others after him) as causal factors in illness. With the germ theory of disease, there was a heightened awareness that the risk to health comes from invisible things, that is, bacteria. Scientiﬁc writing, both scholarly and popular, therefore, described the sources of

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tuberculosis, plague, cholera and other diseases. They also identiﬁed locations of such diseases and vectors (leading to a genre called medical geography), where, for instance, they mapped the tropical lands as carrying cholera and malaria.6 Risk never appears to us in its pure form. Our awareness of risk is made possible through a process of mediation where experts, information and advice mediate between intangible threats and us (the site of danger, the possible victims). Risk culture is a culture of mediation, where mediation is the packaging of speciﬁc elements as risks. • Scientists provide information about the causes of a particular disease, or at least [as was the case with the famous Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy/Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the UK in the mid-1990s] speculate on pathogens, transmission mechanisms and cure. • The government puts together data from scientiﬁc organizations and test reports before embarking on an oﬃcial course of action. • The media picks up both the scientiﬁc and government opinions and publicizes them. • Other actors—priests, politicians, interest lobbies and pressure groups—also begin to participate. • The layperson receives all this mediated information. In any risk or threat situation, these are various ‘actants’ that function together. Such actors constitute a network where laboratories, the pathogen, the state, the media, the moralists and the layperson come together. What is crucial is that there is no one strand that we follow when we read a report on say, obesity or AIDS. We, the lay people, are involved as actors in a process that rely primarily on communication and information exchange. Risk is delivered to us through this process of communication that could be scientiﬁc, mystic, religious, legal, administrative-bureaucratic and plain commonsensical.7 Apocalyptic visions are oﬀered about global warming, AIDS, globalization, nuclear war, aliens and practically everything.8 What I am proposing, following Robert Stallings (1990) is that even though the risk event itself—the tsunami of 2004, the Bhopal gas 102

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tragedy from 1984—is not constructed, it survives through a process of mediation and communication. Media creates the anxiety, fear and threat around an event, and keeps it alive. As Stallings puts it, risk is ‘created and recreated in discussion of events that are seen to undermine a world taken for granted’ (Stallings 1990: 82). Risk is this series of texts—scientiﬁc, imaginative, dystopian—produced about past events and possible events. These texts bring to our consciousness (and the eye) hidden and possible dangers. Through these texts, an immaterial, invisible source of threat is rendered visible for us to recognize and act against. Risk culture is about this process of translation—from the intangible and invisible into the visible and concrete. This translation involves a particular set of processes where experts (the scientiﬁc community, analysts and commentators) inform us (the lay public) about the threats in store for us. Through translation, ‘sequences of events, of causes and eﬀects’ are made visible (Van Loon 2002: 51). Translation is the mediation of risk. Mediation also means that the same technoscience both reveals and conceals the risk. Thus, software engineers, hardware engineers and the software itself tell us what can possibly go wrong with our PC, and, simultaneously, tell us how we can avert the risk. Thus, experts can evoke scientiﬁc sources to grant certain legitimacy to the representation of risk, while also suggesting modes of using the same sources (Microsoft Help!) to alleviate the threat. Risk perception is, thus, about communication, and the media plays a large role in this act. It selects what items to report, interviews ‘experts’, structures the debates around the events, and in general cultivates an atmosphere where the potential threat remains visible. If risk culture is based on communication, it means that there is a language of risk.

The Language of Risk Risk is a matter of perception, and our awareness of risks is dependent upon how certain situations are made visible to us. Take for instance, our warning-sign cultures: • Cigarette packs and their statutory warning signs. • Medicines and their Schedule H warning. 103

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• The beating heart in advertisements for safe cooking oils. • Toothpaste advertisements and their wriggly worm-like things. Each of this is a representation of risk. Some suggest dangers of use (cigarettes, medication). Others suggest sites of potential risk (cooking oil adverts). And yet others show us graphic images of risk (toothpaste advertisements). Thus, the wriggly worms in the toothpaste advertisements represent the risk to our oral cavity. We recognize these wriggly creatures as things that can cause infection, induce pain, and generally make life miserable. The advertisement shows us the cause of dental disasters by pointing to these wriggly creatures. The advertisement speaks the language of risk. Disease is the rhetoric of risk. In other words, risk is a matter of representation, language, rhetoric and discourse. We have to be made aware of through particular kinds of signs—statutory skulland-bones signs indicating poison or danger are the most common— of the risk factor. There is, in short, a language of risk. The wriggly creatures—of no identiﬁable species, or even remotely resembling the actual causal agents of tooth decay—are imaginative representations of so-called ‘dangerous’ life species. These visual representations are the texts that generate risk culture, and risk consciousness. There is no risk without a language, or a discourse. The language of risk informs perceptions of risk, both individual and collective. It is important, therefore, to decode the language of risk because risk entails a course of action. Risk identiﬁcation and risk aversion are political acts, loaded with great signiﬁcance for individuals or groups identiﬁed as potential criminals, for instance, or as threats to the social order. When post-9/11 the US government identiﬁed Arabs as potential threats to America, it condemned a mass of people to a specific category: risk factors. Even popular TV programmes like Crime Scene Investigations (also CSI: New York and CSI: Miami) and a series of shortlived science ﬁction TV programmes dealing with aliens invading the US changed their rhetoric after 9/11, shifting focus from crime solving to questions of justice and punishment of criminals—all of which contributed to the discourse of threat, risk, fear and of course increased surveillance and military intervention (Dean-Ruzicka 2009; Takacs 2009). As a practical-material consequence increased surveillance, documentation 104

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and legislation made the lives of ordinary, law-abiding Arab Americans diﬃcult. Here we see how risk operates: A sense of risk → Identiﬁcation of risk cause → Action to control risk cause

This sequence has to do with language and discourse because the law, society and the individual must feel threatened enough by this risk-cause in order to support surveillance and prohibitive–punitive measures. The fact that all discourses are schismatic—evidenced by the protests against identifying/categorizing all Arab Americans as potential terrorists—does not change the main argument: there are cultures and cultural conditions in which particular people/groups are identiﬁed as risks. Risks provoke action depending upon the nature of the risk and its process of acquisition. Regina Lawrence (2004) looking at the emergence of obesity discourse in the US suggests that the perception of health risk varies if the risk was acquired voluntarily (for example, through smoking) or involuntarily, if it aﬀects one or many, and whether it originated in the individual or the environment. Lawrence notes that health risks that are involuntary, universal, environmental and knowingly created are more conducive to public policy debates and changes. Thus, the campaign against smoking in public places across the world was spurred by the discovery that many people were involuntarily at risk from passive smoking. On the other hand, the discourse against obesity has seen the health risk of fat as something acquired by the individual. Ultra Violet radiation sickness demands a greater campaign because all of us are involuntary victims to the ozone layer depletion and it aﬀects large numbers of people.

Demythifying Risk All cancers are genetic in origin…. A cancer occurs when something causes a mutation in the gene that limits cell growth or DNA damage. – ‘Tackling Risk’, The Hindu, 4 June 2008, p. 3

The ﬁrst requirement for a risk culture to develop is the rendering into simple terms the process of threat and disaster. 105

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As lay people, we are not really concerned about the ﬁner physiological processes of our digestive, neurological, circulatory or reproductive systems. Therefore, we are also unaware of what can go wrong with each of these except in vague terms like ‘heart attack’ or ‘indigestion’. That a ‘heart attack’ (a misnomer, as physicians would tell you) or ‘indigestion’ involves a long and often extremely complicated process where the physiological operations of the circulatory or digestive organs and system break down is something we do not know about. The physician is the one who actually details the risks involved. X-rays, blood tests, ultrasounds and biopsies are agents that bring our risks home to us. What they do is demythify our bodily processes for us. The epigraph to this section is an example of how complex processes like genetic mutation, cell growth or cell destruction are rendered intelligible, or demythiﬁed. Demythiﬁcation is integral to risk cultures. It explains the causes of risk, the sources from where risk emanates or spreads, the misconceptions about the risk, the preventive-curative mechanisms that one can adopt to avoid/alleviate risk. Most importantly demythiﬁcation makes risk part of our everyday life. Demythiﬁcation works at several levels, and caters to a wide spectrum of people and groups. Thus a volume portentously titled Bioterrorism: Psychological and Public Health Interventions (Ursano et al. 2004) gives a more informed reader a detailed account of anthrax, pneumonic plague, small pox and other agents of biowars. Reprinting information from a Blue Book from the Centers for Disease Control and its Biological Diseases/Agents Listing of April 2002, the editors map public health planning measures, populations at risk after bioterrorism, possible mental health outcomes after a bioterrorist attack and treatment or global warming. Global warming, therefore, can best be seen in the map of annual mean change in temperature over the last 1,000 years. While the graphs prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 may not be readily comprehensible, a lucid commentary (McGuire 2002) on the same graphs, targeted at the non-specialist reader does demythify for us the process of climate change. Science becomes a mode of cloaking danger.9 Probability and statistics are modes of rendering into numbers the depth of risk involved. A key element in this demythiﬁcation is the increasing availability of statistics, maps, models and charts about any potential risk. An early 106

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newspaper report on obesity in India informed us that ‘a whopping 10–14 per cent of the adolescent population worldwide is aﬀected by this disease’ (Datta 2003). The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) helpfully organizes AIDS statistics from around the world in a country-wise format.10 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) releases maps of global warming for 2007.11 Such statistics and maps serve the purpose of communication, and allow experts to act at a distance. It is crucial to identify the nature of such representations. The data and their representations (maps, graphs and statistics) are themselves impervious to change or alteration (that is, the said graphs stay this way). But, these graphs can also travel into various contexts. They link up with prognostications of doom, the administrative machinery, newspaper and media coverage of global warming and inform the debates even among lay people. In other words, maps and hard data are cogs in the mechanism of communication where they retain their nature but can be transported between ﬁelds. They combine with other elements—reports, commentaries, counter-claims, artistic representations, political speeches—to eﬀect an entire discourse, public debate or uproar about the risk, but all the while retaining a measure of immutability. Such data can be used by professionals, commentators (a good example here would be Al Gore’s ﬁlm on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, which makes extensive use of hard data and maps), prophets of doom, media, hysterics, the informed reader, artists, administrators and policy makers. Data and maps here are what Bruno Latour (1988) called ‘immutable mobiles’: they are mobile packets of information that serve communication, but themselves remain untouched by the mechanics or processes of transmission. Immutable mobiles are central to risk cultures because they constitute the language of risk. Risk comes to us mediated through such processes of communication. The language of risk, I suggest, is the eﬀect of a convergence. We rarely meet a discussion of risk that does not involve ‘immutable mobiles’ (hard data) to which has been added expert opinions, media representation, political-administrative opinions and the layperson’s version of it. All of these converge to create this culture of risk, and it becomes increasingly diﬃcult to disentangle the various strands: 107

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• Where does a particular ‘bite’ of information come from? • How much of this information has been mediated by experts, the media or the state? • Under whose authority has a particular bit of knowledge been circulated? • What are the ‘irrational’ myths about/around this bit of knowledge (for example, the common misconceptions about AIDS)? Obesity discourse about youth, for instance, mixes opinions from WHO, hard data about obese youth, graphical representations of fat people, opinions from nutritionists, and the lay-but-informed parents. Studies show how there is, because such a discourse, an increasing demand for surveillance of children prone to obesity as integral to ‘public health’ studies, even though counter-arguments against such a mechanism of intervention that has potential psychological risks also circulate (Lake 2009). These demands are based on the circulation and appropriation of the ‘immutable mobiles’ by various groups—the scientiﬁc community, parents, newspapers, health writers, the state, etc. Every group appropriates particular versions of the ‘immutable mobiles’ and generates its own language of risk and concern. The paradox of the language of risk is that maps, stats and tables such as mentioned earlier appeal to the rational, reasoning human— who reads the future in ‘expert’ or reliable stats, but this very reasoned response has to be edged with anxiety.12 What generates anxiety is not always a hysterical report on nuclear war. Hard scientiﬁc data such as the one Al Gore presents asks us to collaborate with the scientists in recognizing—via a process of statistical reasoning, mathematical logic and rational thought—the risk. However—and this is my key point— for risk discourse to be eﬀective it cannot stop at reasoning, logic and rational thought. These must be accompanied by emotions. The language of risk thus moves between twin poles of: • ‘hard’ data to which we need to respond as rational human beings who can ‘see’ the disaster waiting to happen and • intense emotional responses to impending doom. 108

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Watching AIDS victims or the tsunami disaster, we need to understand the medical and geological conditions as ‘informed’ readers, but at the same time, react emotionally to these sights. Risk is clearly a mix of the ‘objective’ and the aﬀective, and the language of risk has to work at both levels. Thus, to return to the MAX New York Life Insurance ad, the woman who reacts hysterically to the possibility of her partner’s death must be rational enough to put away money.

Embodying Risk I have already spoken of risk culture as something that requires translation as a component of mediation. This translation more often than not requires the embodiment of intangible and invisible risks. This is most often seen in cases of health risks. Good health can be embodied through representations of people having fun. Thus frolicking men and women or families at leisure are embodiments of good health, careful lifestyle and risk aversion. The language of health risk, I suggest, requires a body. Embodiment here is taken to mean the giving of a body, casting risk as a body. • The beating heart in cooking oil adverts gives us the bodily locus of life—the heart. • The processes of decay of our oral cavity require a ‘body’—the teeth and gums—to be represented. • The man who, chasing the petty thief who has just snatched his wife’s purse in the TV ad, is soon exhausted. It is immediately connected to a weakening heart. The disease-causing bacteria or the weak physiological process (both invisible) manifest and take shape here as the tiring body and the decaying tooth. What embodiment does is to take an intangible risk-cause or riskaversion event/thing and places it as a body for us to see. Risk, as noted before, is a new way of dealing with the self and the world. The body is the primary site of our interaction with the world. If the world poses 109

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risks—from tobacco smoke to pollution to bacteria—then the ﬁrst point of contact with this risky world is also our body. Therefore, it becomes necessary for us to better equip the body to deal with the world. Embodiment is this process through which we re-do our body’s negotiation of the world via a recognition of risk. This embodiment is often used metaphorically. For instance, the advert for Agarwal Packers and Movers depicts a man rowing across shark-infested waters (The Hindu, 2 June 2008, p. 4). His expression of concern at being surrounded by creatures that would, in all probability, consume him is the concern for his body, his self. Here the threatened body stands in for the threatened body of goods an individual or family might possess. The man’s transport across the shark-infested waters is a metaphor for the risks involved in transporting personal belongings. Embodiment can also work at the level of the nation or race. The image of the body politic that emerged in early modern England often saw the nation’s body politic as being under threat from Jews, foreigners, Catholics—all of whom were symbolized as diseases (Harris 1998). AIDS, as numerous critics have noted, often carried connotations of national identity (Das 2004; Waldby 1996). Thus, India becomes the body that is being invaded by AIDS in this early account: AIDS in India is not in the nature of an invasion but merely a mild incursion and can be stopped from extending its deadly grip if appropriate action is taken swiftly. (Nisha Puri, cited in Das 2004: 176)

The same essay was categorical in identifying the cause: ‘AIDS in this country has been brought in by foreigners’ (Das 2004: 176). Samuel Huntington, the author of the notorious ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory (in his book of the same title) is clear that America, American identity, and the American way of life is at risk as a result of immigration, multiculturalism that has diluted the American ‘creed’ of democracy, individualism and liberty. America might become something else altogether, he warns: ‘We Americans [in the wake of 9/11] were not sure what we were, and uncertain who we were becoming’ (Huntington 2004: 11). Throughout his new polemical work, Huntington

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treats America as a unitary, coherent body at risk from internal as well as external risk. He sees the American national and cultural body as fragmenting, changing shape and invaded. A parallel closer home would be Raj Thackeray’s vitriolic attacks on non-Marathis, where he represents Marathi culture and Maharashtra state as being under threat. In rallies across Mumbai in May 2008, Thackeray spoke ‘against the north Indians saying that he will not allow them to destroy Maharashtra’s culture’.13 One report stated: He [Thackeray] appealed to the local populace of Maharashtra to preserve the rich culture and language of the state and to ensure the economic and social growth of the local people. He even blamed the Marathi speaking people for the confederacy by the north Indians to control the Marathi culture. (Ibid.)

The national body, or the body politic, in both Huntington and Thackeray, are imaged and imagined as being at risk. In the case of computer and information technology-related risks, risk reproduces itself, like the virus. Ironically, computer viruses use the very software put in place by the risk-management system to replicate. Cyberrisks, as Van Loon points out, cannot be traced to an origin because cyberrisk works on the principle of dissemination. This means risk-management in the case of cyberrisks is of a wholly diﬀerent order (Van Loon 2002: 160). It is signiﬁcant that even in such a case, we need an identiﬁable ‘cause’, one that possesses a body, albeit a body of code. This is the computer virus, which takes on the form of a rapidly proliferating, lifelike ‘body’ that enters/invades the body of the PC to wreak havoc. This becomes yet another instance of the embodying of risk. Risk, very clearly, needs a body.

‘Emotional Imaging’ and Moral Panics Risk solicits a response. The nature of this response depends greatly on the language of risk: How is risk mediated for us?

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Emotional Imaging Risk, in addition to legal, scientiﬁc and political responses, more often than not, generates an emotional response. Risk is primarily, I suggest, an aﬀective phenomenon. Risk discourse’s eﬀectiveness depends on how much aﬀect it can generate. Social theorists have observed that the role of newspapers has changed from investigative journalism to ‘emotional imaging’ (Boyne 2003: 33). This has major consequences for risk cultures. If risk is projected as something distant but disastrous, then our responses are suitably muted. If there is a global risk theme such as climate change or attacks by aliens, then it requires a relevance to a local context for it to generate adequate responses. Thus, converting the globe or Earth into ‘home’ in the rhetoric of environmentalism (in the 1990s) was a brilliant move. To describe the Earth as being at risk is not likely to evoke the same degree of hysterical response as saying ‘your home is at risk’. It might be possible to develop an empathetic identiﬁcation toward a distant disaster or risk but in an age of ‘compassion fatigue’ we have quickly tired of these. What brings global warming as disaster close to us is not the plight of penguins or melting ice caps, but that we now experience hotter summer days. Hence, adverts that focus on risk invariably use the cultural rhetorics of the family or home. When in a recent ad for Lizol cleaning ﬂuids, the lady ‘doctor’ posing with a bottle of the product asks, ‘Is your family living with germs?’, the question is directed at all responsible members of a household, called to worry about at all members of the family (Good Housekeeping, March 2009, p. 83)—and thus plays upon our emotional attachments. Risks need to be culture speciﬁc in order to arouse strong emotional responses. Such emotional responses are very often constituent of ‘moral panics’.

Moral Panics The Pune rave party, resulting in the arrest of 270 youths (including students, a few foreign nationals and software engineers) in March 2007 sparked oﬀ a variety of debates. Here are a few of the responses: 112

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At the heart of the present crisis of the urban youth lies the insuﬃciency of traditional models of ethics to govern lives of the young in contemporary India, prompted by late capitalism and a dominant consumer culture. (The Hindu, Metro Plus, 28 March 2007) It made one puke to learn that Pune city, once the seat of learning and erudition in Maharashtra, has now become a centre for ‘rave parties’ of the student community. Drugs on the soil made sacrosanct by the likes of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Lokmanya Tilak and Veer Savarkar is what our youth has made of modernism born of globalisation. (Lavakare 2007) The youth should not waste their surplus income on things that ruin their health and our culture. (Letter to the Editor, The Hindu, 8 March 2007)

On 12 December 2007 at the Euro International school in Gurgaon, Haryana, 14-year old Akash Yadav and 13-year old Vikas Yadav shot and killed a 14-year old student Abhishek Tyagi. NDTV reporting this incident said: ‘The recent incident lays claim to the rising instances of juvenile crime in the national capital region’ (Pandey and Kain 2007). Responses to the incident immediately went into moral panic mode, ﬁnding various causes, from globalization to the spread of the media. Here are a few: Without a shadow of doubt, we are well on our way to globalisation. There will be no looking back now. The incident shows how children are being groomed by their parents and teachers, how inhuman they are becoming, and what eﬀect our media have on our children. It is unfortunate that the electronic media have done more harm than good to society. Teachers and parents together with the media should share the blame for Tuesday’s incident. Children lack good role-models both at home and school. With neither parents nor teachers to emulate, they are swayed by the media which project umpteen number of negative role-models. (Letters to the Editor, The Hindu, 13 December 2007)

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It was of course inevitable that somebody identiﬁes the culprit: the West. So we have: ‘Teenage gun culture of the West is taking deep root in the minds of our young’ (The Hindu, 14 December 2007b). These are moments when a cultural crisis is perceived. At stake here, as these comments suggest, are Indian morality, values and traditions itself. There is no attempt to see beyond the moral dimension. Westernization, wealth and ‘liberalism’ are immediately identiﬁed as the culprits. Thus, the school shooting at Gurgaon, one respondent claims, is partly the result of aﬄuence: ‘Students from aﬄuent families, in particular, are becoming more violent’ (The Hindu, 14 December 2007b). Another respondent echoes this view in a letter published the same day: ‘The money aﬄuent school children spend poses another problem. They develop a tendency to view everything in terms of money’ (The Hindu, 14 December 2007b). This is a moral panic. Moral panics are connected to risk cultures because they build upon a culture’s anxieties and speculations about the direction their culture is taking. In other words, moral panics bring to the surface the hidden tensions of a society caught in its transformative processes. In the rave party case, what we see is an anxiety that young people now possess disposable income unimaginable by their parents’ generation—and they seek to spend rather than save this income. In post-liberalization India, there is more disposable income available to those in the age group of the twenties and thirties than ever before, and causes a major shift in social and cultural dynamics. The opinions expressed clearly reveal an anxiety about this shift. What we have, therefore, is a moral panic, coded as: ‘What is India’s youth coming to?’ A moral panic is generated when a situation, individual or group of people is perceived as a threat to a culture or society’s values. Such moral panics often have a brief but highly visible presence in the media. The representations of the moral ‘crisis’ elicit response from so-called guardians of morality: from politicians (who thrive on moral panics) to priests, teachers and media persons. Solutions are oﬀered by social commentators and ‘experts’. This could include laws, new regulations and awareness programmes. Eventually, the condition that created the panic disappears, but might be resurrected any time there is another such context. In the case of the rave party we can see all of these features present in the responses: 114

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• • • •

A situation of yuppies with disposable income. Identiﬁcation of ‘causes’. Extensive media coverage in all national newspapers. Comments from professors and lay persons alike.

Moral panics are almost always located in institutional contexts: media, the Parliament, pressure groups (Crichter 2003: 168). They are intense while they last, but are short-lived. Moral panics, argues Chas Crichter (2003: 174) usually consist of the following elements: • • • • • •

The source of the threat explained. The nature of the threat to the moral order. Likely victims of the threat. Campaigners against the threat. Remedies. Ultimate responsibility for protection from the threat.

The discourse of moral panics is also hierarchic (Astroﬀ and Nyberg 1992). It moves from a discourse about a speciﬁc problem to a discourse about the extent to which the problem aﬀects the innocent and constitutes a moral threat, and ﬁnally to the discourse about evil in general. This is a process of saturation (Joﬀe 1999: 92). Saturation is when a particular event is invested with symbolic meanings that circulate in that culture. Thus, a rave party drug scene is saturated with multiple discourses such as morality, youth culture, money and westernization. Each of these has particular symbols that come together to saturate the description, responses and interpretation of the Pune scene. These symbols include: consumerism, drugs, Western music, dancing. Each of these symbols, as we note in discourses against global culture among Indian youth, stands for the evil that is the West. The West rarely comes to the discourse for its art forms, country music or advances in clinical medicine. Instead we see McDonald’s, rock and roll, punk and Hollywood ﬁlms as ‘inspirational’ in diverting Indian youth. This is saturation, where otherwise incongruous elements enter the discourse to ensure particular responses to the event. This saturation 115

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converts the singular event into a moral panic, and identiﬁes evil at a larger general level. In the rave party case, the debate moved from the 270 youngsters caught to ‘Indian youth’ in general. The case becomes symbolic— actually a synecdoche, a part standing for an entire whole—for the corruption of Indian youth itself. A rave party comes to stand for the depravity of youth across India as a whole. This larger discourse is one about evil identiﬁed earlier. It is no more the Pune rave party we are speaking of here. Rather, we are speaking of a malaise that aﬄicts a large section of India’s population. Moral panics and their discourse of larger or more widespread evil, rely on such an inﬂationary rhetoric. It is only by proposing that Pune is the proverbial tip of the iceberg that a general social anxiety is opened up. That is, in the subsequent debates about the Pune rave party, very little of local, historicized or speciﬁcs are (or have to be) used. Using Pune as a launch pad, we can speak of ‘Indian’ youth itself. Pune loses its speciﬁcity in the moral panic it generates. This is the crucial feature of risk culture—one event can always be used to speak of larger social evils. It is in the nature of moral panics that the actants in the process—from the media to social commentators to lay persons—to open up the debate beyond the immediate case. In order to do so, the rhetoric of risk often does something else: it sees the case as part of a larger pattern. It sees the case as one more event in a series of evil events. Every disastrous event is linked with former ones, and used to predict future ones. Risk discourse takes a single discrete event—an utterance— and converts it into part of a gigantic text. Here, what we see is the construction of a large text, an archive of disasters and risks. The recent cyclone in Myanmar (May 2008, Cyclone Nargis) evoked comparisons with the 2004 Tsunami, any industrial disaster brings back Bhopal and Chernobyl (1986).14 It is by locating the present event as part of a continuum that social anxieties circulate. Thus, a letter to the editor of The Hindu following the Gurgaon school shooting was emphatic in seeing the incident as part of a series: ‘The gory incident cannot be seen as an isolated act of child rage’ (The Hindu, 14 December 2007b). Moral panics ‘package’ one crisis within a series of similar, or related, crises. Moral panics and risk discourses often occur during moments of social transition. The moral panic over the depravity of Indian youth, the ‘loose’ morals of the Indian woman or the criticism of the IPL’s T-20 116

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tournament with its cheerleaders (though the last is not really a moral panic, the responses it evoked through April–May 2008 shares characteristics with moral panics) come at a time when we see massive changes in economic independence of the Indian woman, the higher income for youth and the new forms of entertainment–business–sports links. Social theorists have argued that when older forms of social bonding, relationships and aﬃliations break down and boundaries blur, there is a moral panic that calls for a greater reinforcement of boundaries.15 The return to ‘spiritualism’, the revival of the older generation of national leaders and the call for a greater introspection into ‘our’ traditions are actually calls for greater border policing: ensuring that ‘our’ tradition is not contaminated (that is, our borders invaded) by ‘others’. Once the risk has been identiﬁed and embodied, ‘produced’ and anxiety levels raised, the package now oﬀers another discourse—that of the expert.

The Culture of the Expert Risk, as we have seen, is about the interpretation of signs, where the signs suggest danger. • The climatologist tells us the consequences of the meltdown of polar ice caps. • The cardiac specialist tells us of the cumulative eﬀects of cholesterol build-up in our arteries. • The insurance company tells us of the liabilities one might incur in educating one’s children. Everything in risk culture depends on the process of evaluating the degree of risk and the magnitude of potential damage. Evaluation, as Mary Douglas persuasively demonstrates, is a political, aesthetic and moral matter (Douglas 1994: 31). If your electricity bills are high due to air-conditioning, then, suggests the Bluestar ad, you need to call in the experts. Applying for a housing loan from a bank, you have the bank’s oﬃcial architect, legal expert and others examining the prospective home before they issue the 117

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loan. These are basically evaluations of risk—whether of high bills or illegalities in construction—done by ‘experts’. However, even experts are not always in agreement. The degree of risk involved is often rated diﬀerently by experts. The denialists of global warming, for instance, claim that threats from the situation have been exaggerated. Those who deﬁne or interpret risks—the experts—are often aware of what other such experts have been saying. In other cases diﬀering expert opinions and scientiﬁc uncertainty get glossed over in favour of a pre-determined story (or metanarrative) of risk, causes and aversion modes so that a public policy can be put in place. Thus, even as scientists diﬀer over the link between UV radiation, global warming and enhanced cancer-risks, these diﬀerences are abandoned due to the dominant and agreed-upon story of risk and preventive behaviour (for a study of this form of public culture’s meaning making see Garvin and Eyles 1997). Risk deﬁnition and interpretation is a public debate (or discourse) where opinions are often sharply divided. Even the personal view of the experts can come into play here for the precise reason that s/he is an ‘expert’. In risk culture, therefore, even the private speech of the expert becomes a critical component of public discourse. These studies and reports symptomatize the culture of the expert where evaluation is at once political, scientiﬁc and social. The ‘experts’ has now assumed diﬀerent forms. New Age gurus, quacks, mystics and illusionists also serve as experts to particular kinds of people. Certain communities and communes (such as the Amish in the USA) hold science in distrust. India’s continued reliance on Ayurveda and native systems of medicine (called alternative medicine) means that ‘Western’ systems of technoscience and medicine are distrusted by these practitioners and believers (say, Baba Ramdev). The consequence is that these groups and individuals perceive a greater amount of risk in science. Studies have shown that those who continue to rely on folk superstition or are converts to New Age beliefs often see greater threat in science (Sjöberg and Wåhlberg 2002). The ‘experts’ construct information by weeding out the ‘useless’ components. They revise and represent the data for public consumption. This scientiﬁc ‘story’ of AIDS, obesity, global warming or nuclear disaster then becomes a social story. That is, data and constructed storylines of risk become public messages. When the National Family Health 118

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Survey (2006) identiﬁes men and women in Punjab, Kerala and Delhi as more prone to obesity it locates a medical condition. However, it is signiﬁcant to note that the ‘scientiﬁc’ study does not restrict itself to nutritional values or Body Mass Index—what it does is to locate obesity with speciﬁc cultural contexts. The Survey writes: Obesity, the other side of poor nutrition, is a substantial problem among several groups of women in India, particularly urban women, well-educated women, women from households with a high standard of living, and among Sikhs. (National Family Health Survey 2006)

The report makes a social point here—about standards of living— and unites scientiﬁc study with cultural commentary. A more recent study, conducted by the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) and reported by The Economic Times on the eve of Women’s Day, 2009, stated that 68 per cent of working women in India suﬀer from lifestyle diseases, including obesity, depression, chronic backache, diabetes and hypertension. The report quoted several sections of the study: Also hectic schedule of balancing workplace and home, along with balancing between social and personal requirements, lead to women ignoring their health. According to the chamber, 77 per cent of respondents said they avoided routine check-ups. Women play vital and multiple roles, especially those who are employed, as a balance needs to be maintained by them both at home and workplace, thus ignorance of healthcare can have multiple implications on her surrounding environment such as her family, workplace and social network. (The Economic Times 2009)

The study references cultural, social and economic contexts of the woman’s ailments. It links lifestyles (heavy work schedules, lack of exercise and inadequate time for meals), socio-cultural conditions of domesticity and family in order to paint a horriﬁc portrait of women’s health. Numbers are crucial to the culture of the expert because they suggest a calculable probability, a convincing story rather than a messy subjective account. What is not given to the public discourse of risk is that 119

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these numbers and stats have been constructed out of a vast amount of data. The scientist asks: How can I best describe this condition from the mass of data that I have? She/he therefore puts together a narrative with numbers that conveys the story she/he wants to tell. Expert advice leads to political, administrative and social policy. That is, the culture of the expert is central not only to the recognition and public awareness of risks, but also to practices that are used to avoid or minimize them. The ‘packaging’ of risk, relying upon the imaging and become-real of risk, embodiment and the ‘culture of the expert’ also has one ﬁnal element: risk practices of blame-apportioning and risk aversion.

Risk Practices The recognition of risk demands and generates responses in a wide variety of forms, from administrative measures to mass hysteria. Perceived threats are to be neutralized and measures put in place to avoid similar things recurring in the future. Risk perception is therefore never distinct from practice. In order to understand the mechanics of risk and counter-practices, we need to understand how risk causes are packaged.

Risk and Blame It is important to realize that risk perceptions can be (and often are) engineered by interest groups (such as politicians), elites (such as those who worry about anti-social elements targeting the wealthy) and others (such as Greenpeace that oppose nuclear power). Fundamentalist groups engineer social anxieties in the face of events such as the Pune rave party by suggesting that the event was the consequence of Westernization of our youth. This argument helps them to push their agenda of stricter moral policing—often translated into restrictions on women—as a preventive against ‘depravity’.16 Very often, as thinkers have suggested, the elite generates moral panics to distract attention from a bigger crisis for which they may be partly responsible (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994). The 120

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Ramar Sethu debate of April–May 2008, would be a case in point. The debate over the bridge—mythical or historically proven—occupied the front page as newspapers follow the court arguments of S. Parasaran, the Government of India and the emotionally-charged responses of people. What is interesting is the prediction of widespread social unrest among Hindus should the government refuse to ‘protect’ the bridge. The arguments being made through furious letters to the editor mention the fact that this is a matter of belief rather than historical veracity or juridical decisions.17 This is moral panic in the making, perhaps engineered by particular organizations that saw it as a plank for the 2009 general elections. The timing of this issue and related moral panic suggests this. What is important is that this subject has come to occupy the imagination of people across India. The moral panic, here, cleverly deﬂects attention from what ought to have been of greater concern: the inﬂation and rise in prices of essential commodities [incidentally reported right below a piece on Rama Sethu (The Hindu, 8 May 2008, p. 10)]. Religion can always be calculated to create anxiety, and, therefore, moral panic. In this case a cultural-religious risk becomes an eﬀective means of deﬂecting attention from economic risk. However, it is not true that moral panics are exclusively engineered. Risk debates and moral panics are never just elite-engineered (for political gain) or a spontaneous expression of a cultural anxiety. In fact, the elite engineering of risk or panic would not work without an underlying cultural anxiety. Purely political explanations of moral panics are bound to fail for the simple reason that any manipulation of a society’s consciousness must appeal to an underlying sentiment, fear or anxiety. Ideological manipulation—such as the irrational fear of our geographical and political neighbours—cannot work eﬀectively without building upon current global trends of the fear of the ‘Islamic terrorist’, for instance. When George W. Bush, the then President of the United States, and Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State claimed in April– May 2008 that global food crises stem from greater consumption by Indians, he was again appealing to a First World anxiety: of immigrants, the Third World and the erosion of ‘white’ supremacy.18 Without this underlying grid of cultural-psychological anxiety, the text’s ideological 121

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manipulation or political engineering of mass sentiments will not signify risk. This underlying grid or subtext is also a process demythiﬁcation of risk—this time through blame-apportioning. I have already suggested that demythiﬁcation is central to the public imagination of risk. However, demythiﬁcation is only one component of risk. A related move to demythiﬁcation in risk discourse and moral panics is the construction of identiﬁable villains and causal factors. This is the other side of risk: blame or scapegoating. Blame could assume the form of myth-making where mythic causes—especially groups of people, sects and practices—are identiﬁed as part of the writing of risk. In the 19th century, syphilis was associated with black women and prostitutes. The names given to this disease shows how blame is integral to risk. The English called it French Pox, the French termed it Morbus Germanicus (German disease), the Florentines called it Naples sickness and the Japanese knew it as Chinese disease. The Indian called it feringhee roga (white man’s disease).19 In each case the blame for the dangerous disease was attributed to an ‘Other’, preferably one’s cultural and political enemy or rival. While India does not become the US’s ‘Other’, the threat of the immigrant-as-Other was the identiﬁable subtext, the grammar if you will, of George W. Bush in his speech, in the same way that he used the Islamic-terrorist-as-Other for post-9/11 surveillance, war and excessive militarization of the Middle East. Scapegoating is a mechanism within risk discourse where the society is rid of its dangerous, unwanted or impure elements. This means sending away the presumed, attributed cause of the chaos or disaster. By pinpointing a source within our culture as the cause of the chaos, risk discourse absolves the culture itself of all blame. Thus Hindu fundamentalists would see the Muslim as the cause of social unrest, thus ﬁnding in the entire community a scapegoat for everything. The First World nations would point to immigrants as the main cause of all problems plaguing them. Indira Gandhi used the famous image of the ‘foreign hand’ (a reference to the USA) as a scapegoat for India’s crises. During the Nazi years, Hitler engineered hatred by suggesting that the Jews were to blame for Germany’s problems. Of the people arrested and sought for at the Pune rave party, a ‘red corner alert’ was issued for the foreigner supposedly present there (DNA 4 March 122

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2007). Raj Thackeray claims that Maharashtrians are unable to ﬁnd jobs because of North Indians. Raj Thackeray went on to claim, according to one report, that ‘Uttar Pradesh and Bihar had a plan to take over Maharashtra’ (Menon 2008). We have already noted how aﬄuence, the media and the declining standards of school education have been seen as causes of the Gurgaon school shooting. Another periodical, Global Politician, identiﬁes India as posing a threat to Bangladesh in the form of AIDS transmitted by Indian security forces posted in the Northeast. It goes on to state: This also reveals the truth that Indian soldiers are morally bankrupt and India oﬃcially allows them to be bankrupt through commiting [sic] such immoral and illegal act of sexual relations. (Abedin 2005)

The process of blame apportioning is a puriﬁcatory ritual, where we invest a person, event or thing with all the evils of that culture and impose punitive measures on it.20 In each of the cited instances, a causal agent is identiﬁed and risk attributed to the agent’s very presence. It appears that Thackeray wants the Maharashtra culture to be cleansed of the non-Maharashtrians. The letters to the editor after the Gurgaon school shooting seem to suggest that aﬄuent people’s children might have to be kept out of schools. Moral panics invariably work on this principle of exclusion and eviction—and this is a group sentiment. What is clear here is that risk is always already informed by a group sentiment. Numerous social theorists have argued that when faced with particular problems which have no antecedents, individuals draw on already circulating ideas and ways of thinking—in other words, let themselves be inﬂuenced—by their group’s thinking (Joﬀe 1999: 10). Very often, the scapegoats—the ‘accused’—may have very little to do with the crisis, but social engineering relies on the established stereotypes of the ‘Muslim terrorist’, the violent Bihari, the treacherous Chinese, the lawless youth, etc. Stereotyping ensures that a readily recognizable cause is available to generate panic. A good example would be the witch hunts that occur periodically in parts of rural India. Following is one report on the condition:

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Police in Jharkand receive around ﬁve reports a month of women denounced as witches, but nationally the ﬁgure is believed to run to thousands. These incidents usually occur when a community faces misfortune such as disease, a child’s death or failing crops, and a woman is suddenly scapegoated …. The belief is that shaming a woman weakens her evil powers. And because these crimes are sanctioned by the victim’s community, experts say many of them go unreported. (Prasad 2007)

Women are routinely classiﬁed as witches and tortured and killed. The report makes it clear that the assault on women classiﬁed as witches is usually provoked by matters that have nothing to do with witchcraft. The following news item cites a development organization’s report on the subject: A Seeds [the organization] report explains that the ‘witch’ label is also used against women as a weapon of control; branding a woman is a way to humiliate her if she has refused sexual advances or tried to assert herself. And the deep fear of witches can also be whipped up to grab a woman’s land or settle old family scores. ‘It is easy for inﬂuential villagers to pay the ojha to have a woman branded to usurp her property,’ states the report. (Prasad 2007)

Material connections between those blamed for the chaos would be tenuous at best, or even non-existent, as the example just cited. Scapegoating and blame-apportioning reveal the paradox in the packaging of risk language. The paradox of scapegoating is that while elites engineering moral panics claim evidence for the material link between particular groups and chaos, they are actually appealing to sentiments and emotions. On the one hand risk discourse seeks rational thoughts on probability, cause–eﬀect sequence and ‘hard data’ (evidence). Yet, for Thackeray’s rhetoric to be eﬀective, what he appeals to (and needs) is not a rational response but emotional ones. Thus, scapegoating is never a rational move, or one based on empirical studies. It thrives on an aﬀective language of blame.

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The rhetoric of blame in the packaging of risk attributes evil, wrongdoing, social unrest and economic crisis to an Other. This could be an Other who is outside the immediate geographical or cultural milieu (as in the case of Indira Gandhi’s ‘foreign hand’ or George Bush’s 2008 tirade against India’s eating habits). What is frightening, however, is that increasingly, risk discourse has turned inwards, seeking the Other within our own cultural, social and geographical set-up. Thus the Thackeray tirade is not against the ‘Other’ states of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar, but against the UP-ites and Biharis within Maharashtra. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ﬁnds the Muslims in India as the culprits for everything—from population growth to terrorism.21 Blame in risk culture means that any individual can always ﬁnd a scapegoat drawn from a collective neurosis about the Other as a cause for her/his crisis. Since risk involves mass communication, it is almost certain that several such individual opinions (constituting a mass opinion or public space) can come together to target an Other. Blame is often connected not only with the elite that engineers risk awareness and moral panics but also with the ‘expert’. Why do ads for toothpaste, fairness creams, cooking oils, all require actors masquerading as doctors? There is an implicit assumption that once approved by the medical fraternity, the product is ‘safe’. The reliance on expert opinion for everything, from food to foot and mouth disease, means that the discourse of risk is tightly regulated by an institution—whether it is the Indian Medical Association (whose stickers adorn the Eureka Forbes Aquaguard) or the environmental scientists cited by Greenpeace.

Risk Aversion Risk, as I have suggested, entails action. Avoiding risk is now a central feature of public health, environmentalism and the stock market. The individual as well as the collective work toward minimizing risk: risk is packaged as a condition that needs to be managed. At an individual level we have become managers—of our health, looks, lifestyle, future, career and ﬁnance. This means avoiding risks in any of these areas. We are asked to:

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• manage our cholesterol levels to avoid the risk of heart problems, • manage our ﬁnances to avoid the risk of debts and • manage our weight to avoid the risk of obesity. Lifestyle magazines, advertisements for various products and services, banks, insurance companies, even the government oﬀers advice on how to ‘manage’ these aspects of what once used to be everyday life. There is a deﬁnite politics here. If consumer culture promotes a politics of the autonomous human subject who is free to make choices and take decisions, risk cultures demand that the individual act to avert risk. That is, the discourse of risk encodes a politics where the individual is a free agent, a manager and decision-maker who must do something about imminent risk. It places the individual human subject at the centre. This is a cultural rhetoric of individual destiny, choice and agency, but one which seems to grow out of a Western view of the individual-centric world. The discourse of risk, I propose, participates in a discourse of managerialism—but a managerialism that is not only about organizations and careers but about everyday life and the self. We are witnessing a ‘how to’ phenomenon now: ‘how to’ manage careers, relationships, professions, leisure, politics, parenting, ﬁtness, the body, etc. Lifestyle magazines are cultural texts that provide a ‘How to’ for self-representation and everyday life management (Hancock and Taylor 2004; Henry 2006). They oﬀer suggestions and ‘tips’ on style, ﬁtness, gadgets, ﬁnance, travel and relationships in order that the individual—encoding the politics of the individual free subject, of course—can manage these aspects of everyday life better. They aim to teach us skills to do what we do on a regular basis so that we can get better results everyday. Numbered steps can presumably help you lose weight, get better sex, make more money and occupy your boss’ chair. The discourse of risk is often implicit in the rhetoric of management, because to attain a ‘full life’, as suggested by this rhetoric, one needs to avoid risks. While we work at attaining all these, we also work to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, cholesterol, bankruptcy, employer animosity and social antagonism. Hence: 126

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• Healthy people have a better chance of experiencing fulﬁlment in their careers, family and social life (as suggested in ads for cooking oils and health food). • Healthy children have a better chance of doing well at school (as suggested by many health drinks ads). In the Naukri.com ad, the man who can be abusive toward his boss is the one who has taken the precaution of having another job ready. The risk he takes in abusing his boss is therefore one that has been hedged-in, averted and minimized through a precautionary move. It is important to note here that risk aversion is a task, or even a duty. Contemporary social theorists have observed that risk discourse has generated a new form of the human self—one that deﬁnes life as an enterprise of oneself (Robertson 2001). In other words, life is a project one embarks on to constantly manage and work at, and thus, improve. The prudent man saves for the education of his children (Max New York Life Insurance). The prudent woman ensures a happy family by serving non-oily food. In each of these, we see the individual embarking on a project of self-improvement. Risk, thus, creates a new form of the self: the managed self, and demonstrates an ideological subtext of the autonomous individual subject. This projection of the managed self is also coloured by another ideological subtext: that of gender. The cultural rhetoric of the family places the burden of the family’s health on the woman. The social expectation (which is a political matter) that the woman is the one responsible for the family’s health—and will therefore seek the healthiest oil—achieves a signiﬁcant alignment. This alignment is of domestic consumption and gender roles, and is thus an example of the cultural politics of domestic consumer culture. The woman is projected as possessing a ‘domestic autonomy’—the term is Pauline Hunt’s (1995)—and therefore, of individual agency—in choosing health and healthy consumption, for her family. She manages her self when she manages the health of and alleviates risks for her family. The managed self is one that averts risk through the ‘right’ lifestyle choices—from consuming Nutralite and Sugarfree to health insurance. The control of excess is central to risk aversion, and is a matter 127

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of conscious and individual choice. In order to understand this concern with fat-free oils, cholesterol and body-shapes, take the obesity issue in India. Obesity as risk is framed within multiple discourses. The ﬁrst is obviously medical-biological. Nutritionists and physicians will inform us that a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 30 indicates obesity. Researchers caution us that ‘cardiovascular disease in Asians is associated with insulin resistance and diabetes doctors might need to evaluate new biomarkers for heart disease’ (Mudur 2003). These are medicalized understanding and framing of obesity, and do not quite project it as a lifestyle problem. However, there are other discourses in which obesity and its risks are not simply nutritional problems but a matter of lifestyle, and therefore of individual choice.22 I have already cited the National Family Health Survey which identiﬁed obesity as a problem aﬄicting ‘particularly urban women, well-educated women, women from households with a high standard of living, and among Sikhs’. This frames obesity not within a biological context alone (which would be the nutritional aspect), but as a cultural feature. A 2005 Observer article by Amelia Gentleman (2005), citing a survey by the respected All India Institute of Medical Sciences, noted the increasing ‘epidemic’ of obesity in India. What was interesting in this article was the way obesity in India was framed in cultural, economic, social and biological terms. It opened with the following statements: India is facing an obesity crisis among its newly wealthy middle class as millions of its rural poor still struggle for enough to eat. As the country becomes richer, many people are becoming fatter and, like Westerners, they are seeking medical help.

It noted that ‘Seventy-six per cent of women in the capital, New Delhi, are suﬀering from abdominal obesity’. It then added: The problem underlines the vast divide between India’s thriving urban areas and the impoverished rural regions, where millions are struggling to feed themselves. Around 45 per cent of Indian children under ﬁve suﬀer from malnutrition, says the World Bank. 128

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And towards the end: With obesity come related problems, from diabetes to heart failure. An estimated 25 million Indians have diabetes, and this is forecast to grow to 57 million by 2025. (Gentleman 2005)

The article marks obesity as a cultural problem—that of the new rich, of indulgent lifestyles and economic prosperity. While it mentions the medical-biological problems involved, the emphasis on obesity as a cultural marker and a class-problem frames it diﬀerently. One physician quoted in the article says: ‘If you are rich, you can pick up a phone and order a pizza. You have a car, so you dont need to walk anywhere.’ Another physician who treats obesity states: ‘People are snacking in a new way. Many children no longer take lunch-boxes to school. They drink cola and eat burgers.’ The article adds: ‘Families now spend more than ever on eating out and buying processed food’ (Gentleman 2005). The entire article thus sees obesity-related risks as those that characterize particular classes who do not alter their luxurious, unhealthy lifestyles. In its conclusion, another article in the prestigious British Medical Journal, noted that ‘80% of their [Malaysian children’s] leisure time was spent watching television or on indoor games’. Leading on from this ‘fact’ of children’s’ lifestyle, a physician declares: ‘We’re heading for a disaster’ (Mudur 2003). Once again, the medical discourse of obesity risk dovetails into a cultural critique.23 A cardiologist writing in the editorial of the Calicut Medical Journal warned that lifestyle diseases were no more the province of the aﬄuent First World. He noted: In the yester years, life style diseases were diseases of the aﬄuent and uncommon in the developing world. Gone are those days and now they are an important threat to developing economies, draining a good chunk of their scanty health budget. (Francis 2008)

Here, the doctor rejects the contention that lifestyle diseases do not occur in India. There is an implicit suggestion that with aﬄuence and development lifestyle diseases are also commonplace here. In some cases, cancer and other feared diseases have also been projected as lifestyle diseases (Musso and Wakeﬁeld 2009). 129

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A diﬀerent example that embodies the same cultural rhetorics of lifestyle diseases comes from a report on AIDS in India’s call centres. The New Zealand Herald reported: A new AIDS threat is rising in India’s numerous call centres, where young staﬀ are increasingly having unprotected sex with multiple partners in aﬀairs developed during night shifts. (The New Zealand Herald, 23 June 2008)

All these articles, in many ways, become critiques of a lifestyle. Some castigate India’s new rich for being inattentive to health matters and proper nutrition. In eﬀect, the discourse sees obesity risks as the failure of the individual to watch what she/he eats. This frames obesity risk within the individual paradigm—it is not involuntary, or a disease that comes from the environment, but something that results from an individual’s choice of lifestyle. In other words, obesity risk is situated within the discourses of individual choice and the ‘managed self ’ I identiﬁed earlier. The ‘managed self ’ is the politics of consumer culture—which posits an autonomous individual at the centre as a free agent. In the case of the AIDS report, it attacks the call centre workers for promiscuity and unprotected sex—once again a comment on the lifestyle. In the age of health and ﬁtness consciousness—there is no newspaper or magazine that does not carry a ﬁtness column today—the conscious adoption of a healthy lifestyle is not simply about the individual managing of risk but being a participant in a cultural movement. What I am proposing here is a simple (enough) thesis: By averting risk through healthy living practices, consuming the right things, investing wisely and dressing appropriately (to avoid what has come to be called ‘wardrobe malfunction’) I ﬁt into the culture of ﬁtness and well-managed bodies and subjects. The stigma associated with obesity, for instance (something pointed out in the British Medical Journal essay cited earlier), is a critique of indulgence and a life of luxurious excess. The frequent references to India’s general poverty juxtaposed with the narrative of upper class obesity in all these writings is also a criticism of those uncaring individuals who consume in prodigious quantities while the rest of 130

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India starves. Excessive consumption, therefore, marks out the obese as a lesser ‘good citizen’! Like the emergence of a ‘consumer citizen’—one who is a good citizen because she/he consumes—the managed self is a good citizen—and this is its politics.24 She/he is suited to the age and culture: ﬁt body, ﬁnancially sound, forward-looking and responsible. I see risk as central to the creation of such a citizen. In other words, even the individual choice of a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid risk is a social and political gesture because it becomes a part of a cultural ethos of ﬁtness and prosperity. The discourse of individual choice is the politics of consumer culture whereby an ideology of responsibility, duty, care and social role is marketed to the so-called ‘free’ individual in order to persuade her/him to make a choice. In contemporary culture this ‘managing’ of the self and risk are packaged and commodiﬁed. You manage your ﬁtness, your ﬁnance, your child’s future, your marriage by taking recourse to various products and services: safe cooking oils, insurance, household goods and appropriate safety devices. Risk aversion culture, aligned with the culture of selfmanagement almost always comes packaged with other such elements that can be purchased. Risk too is a commodity, and considering its very nature, you buy more in order to keep risk at bay! Risk is thus packaged for us in various forms—mediated by experts, cast in a language of embodiment and emotion, driven by statistics and hard data, calling upon us to imagine a future disaster, enabling a moral panic through the identiﬁcation of causal agents, and ﬁnally, asking us to ensure that threats are alleviated by taking charge of our self and lives. Risk moves from being a threat to a justiﬁcation for particular kinds of action—what I term ‘bubble-wrapped’ life.

Notes 1 2

See http://www.eurekaforbes.com/products/healthcare/healthcare.php (accessed on 8 May 2008). A study of life insurance marketing in India notes that several advertisements carried the message of the family’s safety and security (ICFAI Centre for Management Research 2006: 36).

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Packaging Life 3 In a self-reﬂexive way, I must also draw attention to the fact that this chapter (and book) develops its proﬁle by citing experts (scholarly journals), statistics and evidence. These are what lend authority to this author, even as the author critiques the culture of the expert! 4 SMSs received by Anna Kurian, 4.30 p.m., 20 October 2008. 5 See http://www.licindia.com/nri_centre.htm (accessed on 8 May 2008). 6 During the 19th century India was mapped for its diseases. Medical geographies such as J.R. Martin’s Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (1837) and J. Fayrer’s On the Climate and Fevers of India (1882) pointed out ‘risk areas’. In the 20th century, research has located health within speciﬁcities of place and culture (see Gesler and Kearns 2002). 7 I am working here with Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory in Science in Action (1987). 8 AIDS in particular has attracted a substantial portion of apocalyptic prophesying and rhetoric. See Düttmann (1996) and Long (2005). 9 See http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/gr-climate-changes-2001-syr.htm (accessed on 8 May 2008). 10 See http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html#45 (accessed on 8 May 2008). 11 See http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/ (accessed on 8 May 2008). 12 For a reading of this rational-emotional component of risk discourse in the case of nuclear power, see Corner et al. (1990: 112). 13 See http://www.india-server.com/news/raj-thackeray-again-targets-north-788. html (accessed on 15 April 2009). 14 The ‘tragedy’ of the Myanmar ﬂoods, wrote one report, reminded ‘the president [of Indonesia] of the December 2004 tsunami’ (Higgins 2008). 15 For a summary of such interpretations of moral panics see, besides Crichter (2003), Arnold Hunt (1997). 16 The frequent debates on ‘appropriate’ clothing for women engineered through violent protests and harassment of women by the Shiv Sena, the Bajrang Dal, the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and more recently the Sri Rama Sene in India, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan indicate that the woman’s body (and its fashions) remains the locus of regulatory and regimentary social norms. This situation is, however, not unique to India, and recent studies have shown that debates over what has been termed ‘porno-chic’ (women’s socalled titillating clothing) is severely dichotomized even in Europe—where ‘deviant’ clothing for boys is seen as an instance of the freedom of speech, whereas similar clothing for girls becomes the subject of potential social regulation (see Duits and Van Zoonen 2006). 17 One letter warned that the government was likely to hurt ‘the religious sentiments of a billion people’ (The Hindu, 9 May 2008, p. 10).

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19

20 21

22

23

24

This was what Bush said at World Wide Technology, Inc., Missouri: ‘There are 350 million people in India who are classiﬁed as middle class. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.’ See The Tribune (5 May 2008) and The Hindu (4 May 2008). For an account, see Susan Sontag’s classic work, Illness as Metaphor (1990, originally published in 1979). Also see Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation (1988) and Health and Illness (1995). Scapegoating, as Mary Douglas famously argued in her Purity and Danger (1966), often results in the sacriﬁce of the scapegoat in order to purify others. An accused BJP MLA blamed the Muslims for the Ahmedabad riots (The Times of India, 25 November 2003, available online at http://www.timesoﬁndia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/314286.cms, accessed on 8 July 2009). Until 1985, in the USA, obesity was an individual problem, a matter of lifestyle. In 1985 a National Institutes of Health panel declared obesity a public health problem, thereby forcing the government to address it as a matter of public intervention and health policy. However, the debates about obesity as a medical condition have not been put to rest. Thus, critics have asked questions of obesity that merge the medical with the socio-cultural: ‘Is obesity the end product of impairment, or is impairment itself? … Is obesity the result of an addictive personality (where food is the addiction)? Is “addiction” a genetically pre-programmed desire for food or the mere inability not to know when one is no longer hungry?’ (Gilman 2004: 234). Obesity discourse and the culture of ﬁtness and slim bodies is a highly gendered discourse. Women are under greater pressure to look good, and the routine debates about anorexic women in beauty contests suggests that fat and the feminine remain cultural issues in most cultures. For a study see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (1990). The term has been used by Mike Featherstone (1991).

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Chapter 4

Life, the High-speed Edition Cultures of Mobility India Today Rides on Hero Honda. – Tag Line, Hero Honda Motorcycles Move On. – Tag Line, Fastrack Watches The Road Ahead and Business@the Speed of Thought – Titles of Bill Gates’ books

M

obility is the dominant metaphor, theme and politics of the late 20th century.

• We speak of the upward mobility of the middle classes. • Cellphones enable communication and entertainment on the move. • Naukri.com oﬀers us help in career mobility. • Fastrack watches advise us to ‘move on’ in our relationships. • The state prepares roadmaps for development. • Capital ﬂows across the world in the age of globalization. Mobility is sought after, desired, promoted, cheered and projected as the most desirable condition of human life. It involves personal choices, institutional support, policy-making, ﬁnances, plans and technological devices. Mobility becomes synonymous with success, development and connectivity. Mobility could be: • Vectoral in the sense we are governed by both, speed and direction (say in road maps for tackling infectious diseases) or

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• A random, rhizomatic networking of people via Orkut or Facebook. Mobility could be about the actual physical act of transportation— automobiles, mass transport systems, pedestrian traﬃc. Or it could be a metaphor to show changes in class demographics of a nation: the middle class of an earlier age generating yuppies who ‘move up the social ladder’. It could even be used to discuss relationships, as in the Fastrack watches ad where it urges the young man to ‘move on’ from a failed relationship (aired on TV in 2008). Young India, says the Airtel ad (aired on TV in 2009) ‘impatient’, shows speed, change and ﬂuidity. Our images and metaphors seem to capture a fact of life itself: movement. Images of roads, maps, travelling, speed and movement are all around us. The ‘high-speed’ edition of life that the title of this chapter underscores is about both movement and its pace. Mobility is projected —packaged—as something to be desired, something inevitable and something beneﬁcial and something that can be acquired. In this chapter I explore some of the conﬁgurations of mobility. I move across kinds of mobility—from mobile connectivities in the virtual to the physical aspect of automobile culture to cultural mobilities of food and styling and ﬁnally to what I take to be the main icon of mobility (both literal and metaphoric): cosmopolitanism. I want to see how mobility comes packaged to us in many diﬀerent contexts, in many diﬀerent shapes, and with very diﬀerent consequences. My ‘inquiry’ is into the manifestations of mobility in contemporary life. The discourse of mobility, by which I mean the kinds of things that are said about mobility, but also the hidden metaphors, suggestions and politics of mobility, is what concerns me here. ‘Packaging mobilities’ is the process by which movement and change—for I assume, in Einsteinian fashion, that movement in space is movement in time, and that motion is change—become desirable qualities, products, processes and events in everyday life. ‘Packaging’ indicates the promotion of mobility as a desirable feature of human life, but also the fact that it comes to us in very diﬀerent forms (packages). Indeed the word ‘pack’ itself once meant ‘to carry in any manner’ as in ‘to carry or convey in a pack’, indicating mobility.1 135

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Packaging mobilities demonstrates how we live in a culture of mobility, where every aspect of life seems to be permeated with images, ideas, acts and metaphors of mobility. Theorists speak of ‘ﬂows’ (Castells 1996) and ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) in this, the informational age. Imperialism itself has been recast, without territorial limits or a governing centre in a de-centered, perpetually shifting condition of ‘empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000). This is the age of mobility and movement, of diverse types, degrees and eﬀects. Mobility, in short, is more than about simple, physical displacement or motion. Increasingly, of course, mobility is informational (data, images, music, capital) and in fact, critics have argued that automobility and information technology (now increasingly taken to also include mobile phones with Internet capabilities) constitute two of the chief forms of mobility that alter notions of the public and private: in short, alter the conditions of home, work and social life, and the world itself (Sheller and Urry 2003). This chapter signposts some of the most signiﬁcant of these forms, manifestations and discourses of mobility: connectivity, consumption, automobility, cultural mobilities and cosmopolitanism.

Mobile Connections ‘I can call you up from anywhere.’ ‘Eighteen countries,’ he reminded me. Just in case, though he gave me his number in Tokyo and his oﬃce number in Tokyo. He gave me his fax number “at home,” his fax number “at the oﬃce” and his home and ofﬁce numbers in Hong Kong. He gave me his fax numbers in both places, an 800 number for his voice mail, his mobile number, his mother’s fax number, his oﬃce fax number in London, and his E-mail address. He even gave me toll-free number for calling his voice mail from Japan. Somehow, that left no room in my address book for his name. – Pico Iyer (2000: 113)

Connectivity is arguably the most dominant term in the late 20th century’s culture of mobility. Metropolises across the world thrive on connectivity: the connectivity of stock exchanges (perhaps the most 136

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important of all), newsrooms, scientiﬁc databases, entertainment channels and, ﬁnally, personal communications. Manuel Castells (1996), in his epochal works on the information age, has described this as the space of ‘ﬂows’. ‘Flows’ imply movement, and is a good term to describe the traﬃc of information, humans, cultures, products and capital in the late 20th century. It also implies connectivity—via roads, people and electronic communication—between places and regions. ‘Flows’ is about mobility. Connectivity is mobility because it captures the movement, exchange, intersection and crossing (legitimate or illegitimate, formal-institutional or informal, political-collective or individual-personal) of news, ideas, products, capital, identities and politics. Connectivity is the transmission of concrete objects (via road or rail transportation) and ‘immaterial’ things such as sentiment (smiley icons transmitted via email or SMSs) or data. Connectivity must be seen as a process that facilitates the movement of goods, products or abstract qualities like sentiment. Connectivity, in other words, is about a process that creates routes for goods, ideas, news, money or sentiment to ﬂow. In fact, the discourse of connectivity sometimes explicitly references communications and networking as integral to national progress. Thus the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology advertising for faculty positions has as its main visuals a satellite launch, the earth with linked geostationary satellites in place and two people in front of a monitor (watching the satellite launch). The tagline says: ‘Guide the Trajectory of National Progress’, suggesting that communications and networking—mobility—are the key elements in progress, itself mapped as ‘trajectory’, indicating directed movement (The Hindu, 2 June 2008, p. 7). Here, the cultural rhetoric includes an appeal to a commonly accepted idea of national progress, development and communitarian roles. Most signiﬁcantly, connectivity must be seen as a process that links places, people, ideas, objects, groups, nations and capital through the act of movement (whether physical or electronic). Mobility is, therefore, not simply the displacement of something from Place A to Place B. Rather mobility is what connects Place A and Place B, or Individual A and Individual B. It is a process rather than a ﬁnished product that occurs between two or more points. Mobility from the late 20th century could very well be a synonym for communication itself. 137

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Within this process of generating routes and forms of communication, two modes stand out as the most signiﬁcant developments in late 20th century culture of mobility: the mobile phone and online social networking. I take these two as iconic of mobile cultures because I see them as paradigmatic of a new form of mobility itself: one that allows individuals and groups to transcend—move across—geographical and physical barriers to ‘be with’ somebody else elsewhere as never before. Communication facilitates community, as Raymond Williams has argued (1961: 55). Synchronous communication—instant messaging, cellphone conversations, Twitter—constitute a culture of mobility because they help individuals move across, over and beyond vast spaces, cultures and nations. We travel in the act of communication, even as we stay in the same place. Mobile communications and electronic networking are geographical modalities. That is, they are modes of occupying two geographical spaces at the same time—a radical act of mobility. Instantaneity is the culture of this speed-of-light connectivity.2

Cell Phones and Multiple Mobilities What exactly does a cell phone provide us with? As numerous ads suggest, one does not have to be out of touch from business, family or love ever. A cell phone is connectivity that ensures what James Katz and Mark Aakhus have termed ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz and Aakhus 2002: 301–18). This is connectivity on the move. Mobile relationships traverse space through the cellphone. Mobile phones enable what I call ‘immaterial mobility’. I use the phrase in two senses. First, immaterial mobility is the phenomenon where your movement through space ceases to matter (except in terms of signal coverage). That is, your physical location, movement and posture have ceased to matter, except in a purely technical way: it is immaterial. In the second sense, I see cell phones as enabling a connectivity without a movement. What moves is something immaterial: electronic waves and signals. What moves is information as signals, arranged in patterns (data packets). A new form of mobility is literally at hand. It involves the acting together of the material, technological, economic and social structures of the information age (including the handsets, the 138

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transmission towers, the band width, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and its policies and the social contexts of communication), or what is termed ‘informatics’ and the immaterial signals that constitute information. This mobility is made possible by the intersection of the ‘materiality of informatics and the immateriality of information’ (Hayles 1999: 193). ‘Immaterial mobility’ is the mobility of the information age, where we move cocooned in an atmosphere of electronic signals, shifting between ‘alien’ signals (that is, not our own), while our handset plucks out ‘our’ signal to set us on the immaterial route to connecting with whoever we want to connect with. ‘Immaterial mobility’ intersects with ‘real’, material life and cultures of the everyday in very signiﬁcant ways. Earlier, mobile phones were devices used by people who traversed large distances in the course of their everyday work—policemen, sales personnel, doctors. That is, people whose jobs required excessive mobility where the ones who used mobile phones (car phones, initially, then pagers). In other words, the mobile phone was a supplement to their already considerable mobility. From the 1990s, this has changed, where immaterial mobility is not necessarily connected to the routine mobility of people’s everyday lives. Immaterial mobility is not a supplement but a constituent of even routine mobility (evidenced by ordinary situations like people in supermarkets checking with their partners/families at home as to what they should buy, or by the increasing social imperative of ‘never leave home without it’). Mobile phones are now more or less integrated into the everyday life of people. Immaterial mobility therefore results in some interesting developments vis-a`-vis everyday, routine mobilities. The mobile phone’s increasing convergence with Internet technologies, movie-making and blogging makes the handset an interesting site of multiple mobilities. That is, immaterial mobility is the source of multiple mobilities in everyday life. A mobile phone’s ‘immaterial mobility’ alters the experience of material mobilities of work, home and leisure. Diﬀerent spaces can be negotiated in ways that were not possible earlier. People begin their work day at home, and carry their homes with them on public transport, in their cars and to their oﬃces. Mobile phones oﬀer a mobility of ﬁxed spaces where the home connects to the oﬃce via the route of the phone. One 139

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can be connected with ‘home’ on the bus ride returning from oﬃce. Thus, ‘immaterial mobility’ provides spaces of home and oﬃce, leisure and work, a certain amount of mobility because the distance and distinction between the two break down. This gives us a mobile geography, where concrete places that one is physically traversing at that moment merge with the virtual space to which one is connected while speaking. That is, I can simultaneously occupy the space of my home and the city street as I travel to work. When I converse with somebody at home as I commute to work I am carrying my home-space with me virtually. I stay at home even as I commute, I work even when I am commuting. This mobile geography does not do away with the concrete reality of the space one is walking through; what it does, however, is to transform my experience of it because I am in a virtual elsewhere even when I am here. Every space becomes a hybrid space in this through a mobile geography because we combine, say, the tactile experience of walking with the aural experience of listening to a voice from elsewhere. In eﬀect, I am at the same place wherever I am because I am always available on my mobile phone. Social relationships are signiﬁcantly altered with mobile communications. It may not enable the creation of new social relations, but it goes a long way in reinforcing existing ones. I see this function of instant communications and social networking via groups SMSs as an instance of mobile sociability itself. It is now possible to be in constant touch via synchronous communication, with another individual or an entire group. Sociability is made possible even one is doing something else (like work, for instance). What I call mobile sociability is this sense of social bonding, networking and exchange between individuals or groups (one to one, one to many, many to many) facilitated through a speedy communications route. The repeated references to staying in touch with friends and family in the discourse of mobile communication embody the cultural rhetorics of intimate connections. Mobility is, therefore, intrinsic to new forms and a new quality of sociability, and marks the emergence of a new cultural condition. In this new cultural condition, one need never be out of the social network, no matter what activity she/he is engaged in, her/his geographical location or immediate social context. Mobile sociability also describes what is increasingly visible in youth cultures. Intimate communities are sustained through intensive networking. An individual is able to stay connected 140

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with her/his aﬃliating group via the mobile. This means, an individual’s social identity is reinforced through communications. Mobile sociability is therefore an intrinsic component of belonging, social identity and aﬃliation. Mobile phones also alter the private/public distinction with many private conversations being conducted in public spaces. Work intrudes into the home sphere through online work, and the home intrudes into the work or social sphere when we take private calls. As social theorists have put it ‘the information revolution has implanted zones of publicity into the once-private interior spaces of the self and home’ (Sheller and Urry 2003: 117). Actualized in this informational age is, therefore, a mobility that creates hybrid spaces of private and public when it blurs the distinctions between them.

Social Networking and Mobile Subjectivity Rama Bijapurkar in her study of consumer India has argued that Information Technology, Communication and Entertainment (ICE) are instrumental in ‘shaping a new India’ (Bijapurkar 2007: 180). If this is true, then one of the most signiﬁcant developments in metropolitan India is the mobility that characterizes social life. MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. have transformed the way individuals, notably youths, interact with each other. Social networking sites are extraordinarily popular applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs). According to the highly respected Nielsen survey, the top 10 social networking sites collectively grew 47 per cent year over year between 2006 and 2007 (AC Nielsen/Net Ratings 2006). Friendship and the reinforcement of existing relations have been rated as the main reasons for joining social networking sites (AC Nielsen 2008a). In fact, the impact of ICE in contemporary India has been signiﬁcant enough for India Today to speak of a ‘wired generation’ (Bobb 2006). ICEs have transformed earning power (in terms of careers), recreation and entertainment options and, most importantly, the sociability of the young. And this sociability is dominated by a virtual existence and traversals. 141

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Mobility, I suggest, is a characteristic of the new sociability. Mobile phones, most self-evidently, constitute an important element in this new sociability making multiple forms of communication available—all on the move. The conﬁguration of social spaces through mobile communications, and the shifting perception of mobility through the access to virtual social spaces is what this section is interested in. Following Sonia Livingstone’s argument, I suggest that the ‘proﬁle’ created on the networking site is less a root than a route (Livingstone 2003). It is neither a proﬁle complete in itself, nor one that presents a coherent self. Proﬁles in networking sites are nodes for people to connect to, link with in the form of responses and conversations. Communication between people on a networking site relies very often upon such proﬁles. Thus the nature of communication and its extent (people reaching out to the individual) depend on the proﬁle generated. To put it diﬀerently, the individual travels outward in the form of a mediated (touched up, selective) proﬁle on the networking site. Networking is the process of extending one’s ‘proﬁle’. If mobile phones facilitated mobile sociability in radical ways, social networking expands on it. The ‘route’ in social networking is constant activity—self and others’ —on one’s webspace. Scholars have argued that like blogs, these proﬁles constitute ‘continual activity of representing the self ’ (Livingstone 2008: 399). The diﬀerence between this situation and earlier eras is that online communication involves a close interface between man and machine, both involved in the act of communication. Such networked bodies are cyborgs. Bluetoothed, networked and implanted (in some cases), the humans of today are cyborgs. They are cyborged because they extend their bodies, consciousness and themselves into diﬀerent domains (virtual) and time zones and across geographical spaces. The social networking site is a parallel world where relationships of this concrete, ﬂush-and-blood one move ahead, reinforcing, collapsing or building. Social networking often involves young people being online for substantial periods of time everyday. It could be argued that this constitutes a new form of subjectivity itself. Subjectivity in networked (cyborged) humans, as Hayles puts it, ‘is seen as part of a distributed system [the cybernetic circuit]’ (1999: 290). Social networking, online communication and virtual lives depend on this extension of subjectivity and 142

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identity into cyberspace. The subject becomes mobile because it is disseminated, at once in the here and now and in the elsewhere of cyberspace. The person at the keyboard is both ﬂesh-and-blood being and the virtual avatar she/he manipulates in cyberspace. To return to Hayles, ‘It is not a question of leaving the body behind, but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly speciﬁc, local, and material ways’ (1999: 291). I see this posthuman dissemination of subjectivity—enabled by ICTs and online lives—as a new form of mobility because it takes subjectivity out of the grounded, limited body and extends it. If, as in traditional communication theory, all communication begins with the individual, and it is communication that generates subjectivity (Gunkel 2000), then what is the subject of communication in the case of cyborg individuals who spend a considerable period of their life in virtual environments? What is important is that cyborg individuals emerge in the act of communication. That is, it is in the act of communication, creating and living online lives and networking that the individual’s subjectivity emerges. This communicative subjectivity emerges ﬁrst as a networked self. The networked individual—proﬁle, responses, feedbacks, and constant updating of the representation of the ‘self ’ online —is not entirely a coherent self because much of this self depends on the communication process online. Such a fragmented, connected, diﬀused online life creates what I call a mobile subjectivity. What I am signalling is a technologically enabled phenomenon where subjectivity and identity increasingly depend on being mobile— constantly changing, updating, connecting—in the circuits of communication, since (as I stated at the opening of this chapter), mobility is about transmission, communication and connection. Subjectivity depends upon being on the road or online. Central to this ‘routes’ model that generates mobile subjectivities is the feedback mechanism. As William J. Mitchell has pointed out, ‘swarms of SMS-equipped youth’ are not very diﬀerent from bees, schools of ﬁsh or ﬂocks of birds. The latter are held together in ‘formation’ through short-range feedback loops. In the case of the SMSequipped youth, on the other hand, ‘the electronic feedback loops linking their actions extend beyond their line of sight, maybe for many kilometres’ (Mitchell 2003: 32). This also means that now, more than 143

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ever before, subjectivity shifts from the individual to the social conditions in which communications takes place. Mobile subjectivity is this condition of what I have elsewhere called the ‘hyperlinked self ’ (Nayar 2009a). The youth (mainly) who connect (almost) exclusively through SMSs and electronic networks make their subjectivities by sending their selves out of their immediate corporeal (bodily), geographical (spatial) and locational coordinates. So then we can move toward a deﬁnition of such a mobile subjectivity epitomized in the avatar of Second Life or Facebook? Here is an autobiographical deﬁnition from a leading commentator on cyberculture: For this particular early-twenty-ﬁrst-century nodular subject, disconnection would be amputation. I am part of the networks, and the networks are part of me. I show up in the directories. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am. (Mitchell 2003: 62)3

Connectivity is all.

Consuming Mobility If life, as ad guru Santosh Desai puts it, ‘is not a condition but a product,’ then it follows that products are manufactured, displayed, sold, purchased and used (cited in Bijapurkar 2007: 178). In other words, we all become consumers of a product called life (assuming we accept Desai’s argument). The world is increasingly ‘consumerized’, so much so that social theorist Mike Featherstone has announced the emergence of the ‘consumer citizen’ (1991). Indian youth represent, according to surveys and reports, one of the world’s largest consumer markets. India topped the 2006 AT Kearney Global Retail Development Index, indicating a sharp rise in spending on consumer durables, apparel, entertainment, vacations and lifestyle products. To use just one instance, Indians are spending 30 per cent more on vacations than in 2002. India’s fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector is the fourth largest sector in the economy with a total market size in excess of US$ 13.1 billion. According to the highly respected AC Nielsen Consumer Conﬁdence and Opinions 144

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Survey (a bi-annual study, the most recent one, in October–November 2006 was conducted with over 25,000 respondents from 45 countries, including 15 from the Asia-Paciﬁc region), India is at the top of the consumer conﬁdence index for the fourth time in a row (AC Nielsen 2006; India Brand Equity Foundation 2007). India’s sudden emergence as the world’s consumer capital led the India directory at www.mapsoﬁndia. com to describe the country as a ‘shopper’s paradise’, going on to declare: ‘[T]he whole country is a shopping mall’ (Maps of India 2007). Time magazine announced a ‘new breed of consumer in India—young, increasingly wealthy and willing to spend on everything from mobile phones to speakers to French fries’ (Schuman 2003). Finally, of course, it is interesting to see that mobility is coded into the very marketing terminology of consumer goods: Fast Moving Consumer Goods. Consumption is linked to mobility in several ways. To begin with, it has increasingly become tied to connectivity, even in India. Reports show that more and more of the younger generation prefer to shop online (AC Nielsen 2008b). And connectivity, as we have seen, is intimately connected to mobility. However, consumer culture creates what can be called mobile consumption. My focus on mobile consumption relies primarily on the organization of shopping within the city (malls, in particular) and the features that link mobility with the act of consumption. Consumption, at a very basic level, is linked to the act of walking, looking and browsing. Mobility is intrinsic to the shopping experience, especially in contemporary mall cultures, and generates mobile consumption. The mall combines the stroll with shopping: you walk down pathways in this controlled space and look in through shop windows before deciding on a visit a store. The mall is actually an enclosed, carefully monitored street (Backes 1997). The earlier pedestrian on a city’s thoroughfare is transformed into a stroller-cum-shopper inside the mall (Abaza 2001). The mall’s spaces of mobility are radically diﬀerent from that of the city because it is more organized—with marked pathways to walk on, sit and sell. Designated places for rest, leisure and entertainment are in sharp contrast to the traditional chaos of the Indian street (here there be no cows!). It is also a highly secured and sanitized space. The entrances 145

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are guarded and closed-circuit televisions (CCTVs) monitor all movement. ‘Undesirable’ elements are kept out and potential threats quickly neutralized by security guards. Unlike a ‘free’ street of the Indian city where everybody, theoretically speaking, is entitled to walk anywhere, the mall circumscribes mobility. The mall has changed the space of the city because what once used to be free, common space is now privatized when it is taken into the mall. The mall also organizes the views encountered during this mobility. As I have argued elsewhere, malls constitute a new form of hyperreal spectacle, a fantasy zone with little ‘locale’ (as in local culture) and excessive cosmopolitanism (Nayar 2008b, especially Chapter 4). Rachel Bowlby in her study of modern shopping has noted that the urban ‘passer-by’ when transplanted into the countryside (in literature) is distracted from commercial and city concerns by the pastoral sights (Bowlby 2000: 52–54). I suggest that mobile consumption within the space of the mall distracts the consumer from the normal conditions of walking in a city—the buildings, the potholes, the traﬃc, the vehicles (in India deﬁnitely something to watch out for) and local landmarks—and directs the attention mainly to store fronts and windows. I am proposing here that mobile consumption entails a diﬀerent set of cognitive experiences from that of walking in the city and heading to an old-fashioned store (where one does not stroll through). This new set of cognitive experience of mobile consumption involves a lesser awareness of the structures and technologies of visibility. Shop windows bring the goods and products, and the fantasy worlds within, into prominence while themselves becoming, literally and ﬁguratively transparent. We do not notice the windows, only the things within. Hence, one of the most signiﬁcant architectural features of malls is to have as many reﬂecting, see-through surfaces as possible. This is a key element in the structure of mobile consumption where we are invited not to buy, but to ﬁrst buy and consume with our gaze. If mobility in the city is aligned with a combination of aural, olfactory and tactile features and needs, then mobile consumption demands a primacy of the visual and mobile consumption is primarily about visual cultures. The shop window is not simply aesthetic, it is persuasive, and seeks to inﬂuence a change in your mobility: from walking away to walking into, mesmerized by what your eyes behold. 146

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Yet, another crucial link between mobility and consumption in the case of modern shopping comes from the organization of human encounters. Malls invite strollers, those walking for the aesthetic pleasure of looking and desiring, but not necessarily buying. It becomes a place that organizes encounters with strangers, but under regulated circumstances. Mobile consumption is also about these regulated encounters with strangers within the aesthetic spaces of the mall. Indeed, shopping itself includes, to a great extent, secretly watching what others are buying. The wistful look, the envying look, the appraising look, the contemptuous look and the aimless stroll meeting strangers, is part of the shopping experience, and, I suggest, a part of mobile consumption. It becomes a form of sociality itself. This new form of sociality of mobile consumption approximates to what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has termed ‘proteophilia’. Proteophilia (derived from Proteus, the Greek god who could change form at will) prompts aesthetic spacing that encourages play, aimlessness and wandering, in contrast to cityspaces that seek to impose order (Bauman 1993: 164, 168, 172). While Bauman used the concept to describe strollers (or what are called ﬂâneurs) in the city, I believe the notion is easily applicable to strollers inside malls. The pleasure-seeking stroller inside the mall traverses multiple forms—looker, purposeless wanderer, potential buyer and voyeur. The proteophilic mall encourages aimless wandering, frittering away time, attracted by the visual displays put on for us to consumer. Unlike the city streets—other than in special ‘spots’ for lingering like Mumbai’s famous Chowpatti or parks—and roads, the mall promotes lingering. Mobile consumption is proteophilic because it does not actively seek movement from place A to place B, rather, it encourages random movements across the highly aestheticized space. Unlike a city’s thoroughfares that are more or less ‘directed’, mall paths are meant to be traversed erratically, combining various directions, tangents and multiple trajectories. Mobile consumption is not about ‘heading to’ particular destinations (just observe the lingering walk of people inside malls), rather, it is ‘walking around’ (a term used most often to describe this form of locomotion). Mobile consumption is proteophilic because it is aesthetic and ludic: playful, often (but not always) purposeless and shape-shifting within aestheticized and controlled spaces. 147

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I would now like to shift the focus on to another aspect of mobile consumption. This is also a shift from ‘micro’ patterns such as mall cultures and their mobilities to larger global ﬂows of objects and consumers. Globalization has meant, for many countries, the availability of global brands and products. Commodities, as several studies have shown, possess not only economic, but also symbolic and social ‘values’ (Appadurai 1986). The intrinsic worth and meaning of objects is something that often becomes hard to deﬁne—for instance, the selfesteem generated by a Blackberry mobile, a BMW or a foreign holiday. Value is often culturally determined, and can be shared across a peer group (thereby deﬁning what is ‘in’ or ‘cool’ among, say, college youth). It is important to understand that ‘consumption’ in such cases also involves the image or sign of the product: the Golden Arch of McDonald’s—now, apparently, having surpassed the Christian cross as the second-best known signiﬁer on earth (Kinchloe 2002: 146)—or the Nike swoosh. This has, in some cases, had political consequences, primarily in the battles against McDonalds and Walmart in various parts of the world and the use of the presence of globally circulating brands in the battle for self-respect, nationalism, identity and local cultures. Mobile consumption here therefore refers to: • The movement of goods across nations and cultures. • The consumption patterns that refuse to be ‘immobilized’ by national or cultural identities and boundaries. Globalization has sharpened these two ‘movements’ within consumption. Thus, in an earlier era, Gandhi and others linked consumption to national identity: Swadeshi was an attempt to restore the primacy to home-made cloth rather than imported ones. The BJP–ABVP combines’ occasional diatribe and violence against ‘Western’ wear or icons (from jeans to Madonna to Valentine’s Day) are examples of the resistance to mobile consumption. Or, to put it diﬀerently, these are attempts to immobilize consumption via the attribution of particular meanings to globally circulating goods and icons. Mobile consumption, characterized in the globalized age by McDonald’s, Levi’s, Ford, Kelloggs and other goods, clearly generates an anti-mobile consumption movement. It is possible to 148

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conclude, therefore, that mobile consumption can easily be linked to issues like self-determination (as Sandra Dudley has shown in the case of Myanmar), national and cultural identity and social processes (Dudley 2002). It is also signiﬁcant to note that globally circulating cultures get ‘indigenized’ and ‘localized’. As I shall argue in the section on cultural mobilities, one of the key features of globalization is the way in which global objects begin to acquire local features, colours and meanings.

Automobility The most visible form of mobility in contemporary cultures across the world is the automobile. Indeed in ‘car cultures’ like the USA, it is the dominant form of mobility itself. Magazines like Autocar, Motoring and Top Gear and advice columns in newspapers generate a discourse of cars as icons of automobile culture in India. The unveiling of Tata’s Nano in 2007 immediately altered the thinking about cars in India. The Maruti, which transformed the Indian car market in the mid-1980s, was promoted as the ‘small family car’. The Nano, whose pricing (at that time priced at Rs 100,000), makes it the most aﬀordable car in the market, is being described as ‘the people’s car’ (The Telegraph 2008). Debates about its impact have been raging since the launch—with many sections arguing that it would clog the already congested Indian roads. Here, I am less interested in the automobile per se than in the condition, consequences, discourses, nature and contexts of automobility, even though my examples are mainly drawn from car cultures. Following contemporary social theory, I believe that we should stop treating the car simply as an object.4 Instead we need to see it as a complex interlocking system involving machines, humans, infrastructure, cultural views and social conditions. In other words, an automobile must be seen as an instance of automobility, where automobility involves cultural, social, technical and political elements in a dynamic relation. The ‘packaging’ of automobility involves the plotting, combining, conﬂation and negotiation of several elements that impact upon the everyday life in 149

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crucial ways. Admittedly not all the elements are relevant or visible in all cities or locations, but they remain in the peripheries, waiting to be actualized. I see automobility as linked to, generating and facilitating many other aspects of everyday life: • • • • •

Mobile autonomy (agency and autonomy). The autonomous geography of mobility (geography). Mobile eﬀects (the mobile consumption of places). Aﬀective mobility (emotions). The automobilization of space (the changes in the social, cultural and political deployment/organization of space around the automobile).

Automobility is packaged in multifarious forms: in technical magazines such as Autocar (India) or Motoring, advertisements for various models, reports and advice on vehicles in specialized columns in newspapers, car scenes in ﬁlms, newspaper reportage and writings on road conditions, new vehicles and traﬃc problems. These discourses of automobility—the ‘package’—often encode speciﬁc notions of power, class, gender, age and cultural identity. Thus, most car ads showcase youthful owners than senior citizens, male drivers rather than female ones, and heterosexual families rather than queer ones. They encode speciﬁc ideas of emotional appeal and lifestyle. There is, therefore, a politics of automobility, some of which this section explores.

Mobile Autonomy Automobility refers to the dual condition of autonomy and mobility, any autonomous mode of mobility (Featherstone 2004: 1). It was ﬁrst used to describe engine-drawn machines of transport, and has increasingly come to refer to cars. Autonomous mobility, or what I shall call here mobile autonomy (derived of course from automobility’s roots) has several components that extend my earlier arguments about mobility being more than about simply displacement.5 The car itself, as studies of the US youth culture have shown, represents freedom and agency, but also ‘draws young people into a culture of spending … since their desire 150

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for freedom more often than not carries signiﬁcant social and ﬁnancial costs’ (Best 2006: 138). Three ‘cultural logics’ of the car are visible in India.6 The ﬁrst cultural logic is of elitism and class distinction of the 1960s and 1970s (with only the Ambassador and the Fiat’s Premier Padmini being the main players in the market). The car was a unique feature, a source of pride and a marker of class. From here, the cultural logic shifts to a relatively cheaper and more eﬃcient model with the mass-produced, function-driven (rather than stylized) Maruti in the mid-1980s. This is the cultural logic of functionality and utility, or what David Gartman has called ‘mass individuality’ (2004: 177). With liberalization, we enter the third phase of automobile culture. Foreign vehicles manufactured in India, easy ﬁnancing, higher salaries in the 1990s meant that there was a rapid expansion of automobile culture. We now see a veritable explosion of varieties in this phase: sportsutility vehicles (the notorious SUVs), eco-cars (the electric Reva), multipurpose vehicles, hybrid cars, saloons and the continuing presence of the ‘small car’. It is also the period of saloon cars with luxurious ﬁttings and more technological features. This cultural logic is one of exclusivity or diﬀerence perhaps as an answer to the popular (ubiquitous), utilitarian Maruti. The low-end Maruti faced competition from the Indica, the less-successful Daewoo even as high-end varieties from Ford, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai radically transformed the landscape of motoring. Middle-segment cars like the Swift and the WagonR continue to command a substantial following. The Nano threatens to make one more shift—to the lower middle class by manufacturing what is arguably the cheapest car in the world. It must be remembered that of the several political issues associated with consumer culture, the autonomous human subject is perhaps the most pervasive (Hearn and Roseneil 1999). The automobile ﬁts into the larger (discursive but also material) context of individualism. The automobile represents a ‘privatization of mobility’ (Gilroy’s phrase), where it diﬀers substantially from mass transportation systems like buses, trams and trains (Gilroy 2001: 89). In this, it marks a step in the segmentation of places. Cars divide people, just as mass transport systems bring people together. Automobility in such cases is a ‘fragmentation of the social’ (to adapt Chris Jenks’ phrase, 2005). When we think of the 151

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card-playing community on local trains in Mumbai, the acknowledgements of regular commuters on a route on buses or trains elsewhere, and the sheer hustle and bustle of a mass transport system we can see how mass transportation promotes a community-feeling, a democratization of the public space through a participation in a group act. In sharp contrast, automobiles with their ‘privatization of mobility’ enables the user to withdraw from active participation—bodies together, conversations with fellow travellers—in the public space. Instead, what we have with the automobile is a self-contained experience and navigation of the public space—closed oﬀ, secured, governed less by the vagaries of the transport system and other travelling bodies. Automobility here refers to the autonomous agency that one acquires when driving a car (subject of course to the traﬃc and other road conditions). In terms of the social order, automobility marks a signiﬁcant individualism with its withdrawal from the mass. Such a discursive move is a political one, for it signals a politics of the individual. This withdrawal from the mass and the acquisition of autonomous agency—what one could term mobilizing agency—is ironic because the term ‘mobility’ originally had connotations of the lower class ‘mob’ to be distinguished from ‘nobility’ (Jain 2002). The ‘automobile’ here is an interesting shift from these earlier meanings because it represents an exclusivity (a nobility of being mobile, if you please!) rather than a ‘common’ mob. It is within this discourse of exclusivity and power that we can read Honda Accord’s ad campaign for its new model. The visual, in hazy green, shows light streaming down from the cloud and falling exactly on the moving car, resembling something out of science ﬁction (alien landings) or a divine light on the chosen. The text reads: ‘Enjoy bold performance in the all-new Honda Accord. LEAD.’ Exclusivity, motivation, power and ability are all encoded in the semantics here; the moving car, the selective lighting, the reference to ‘bold’ and ‘lead’ (The Hindu, 28 May 2008, p. 22). In the new dynamics of Indian consumerism the cultural rhetorics of success, achievements, personal fulﬁlment dictate the language of this ad. Automobility is in contrast with the commonality of the mass. This exclusivity of automobility might very well be linked with the increasing alienation of the younger and metropolitan generation—except those

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involved with political parties—with political culture, as contemporary news reports seem to suggest (Pradeep 2006). This exclusivity of mobile autonomy is, ironically, in contrast with the excessive connectivity of the electronic age.7 It could be argued that the resistance to and anxieties over the Nano (from 2007–2009 till date) proceed from this potential erosion of the exclusivity of automobility: a low-priced car would mean that plumbers, carpenters, grocers—the working classes, normally dependent upon either their two-wheelers or public transport—would also be autonomously mobile. And indeed, this did prove the case when Maruti Bhandare booked a Nano on the ﬁrst day of bookings, reported on 11 April 2009. And Bhandare is a cobbler from Mulund, Mumbai (The Hindu 11 April 2009).

Autonomous Geography The car is not simply a machine that transports us from Place A to Place B. Once upon a time this may have been the case: the car was an autonomous agent of mobility. What the car has now come to mean is mobile autonomy of a wholly diﬀerent order. The car is any enclosed potentially mobile space that allows one to enjoy multiple communications and entertainment platforms in private (Featherstone 2004: 2). Radio and Compact Disc (CD) players, TV, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones and, in the case of police vehicles, cabs or ambulances, two-way radios are now integral to the car. What I propose here, extending and expanding Featherstone’s argument, is that mobile autonomy is more than about physical displacement. Mobile autonomy in the car is the mobility of the phone, the TV and the PDA. It means enjoying music, carrying on a conversation, getting one’s work done, preparing for a domestic shopping expedition—all on the move. Automobility, as I see it, is the convergence of mobility with different forms/devices of entertainment and communications. This is the new mobile autonomy bestowed upon us by the car. The car becomes the centre of all your communications (with either home or oﬃce) or a space of relaxation and entertainment. In short, a mobile

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communications and entertainment centre which is autonomous of the place in which the car is situated at the moment—a sort of autonomous geography of mobility. On my way to the place of work every morning (I usually use public transport, if I can say this without sounding self-righteous) I often pass cars (saloons) with people working in the rear seat: phone to their ear, laptops open, ﬁngers darting over the minimalist keyboard or working things out on the small screen of the PDA. The automobile has just become a space of work: mobile oﬃces. The TV installed in the head rests of cars converts the car into an entertainment lounge for those sitting in the rear. What I am calling mobile autonomy is the ability to enjoy the pleasures of entertainment or engage in the rigours of work while being disconnected from any place such as home, work or the theatre. The home, theatre and opera travel with you—they have all been collapsed into the autonomous space of the car—and you are free (autonomous) to use and enjoy them. Entertainment has gone mobile with(in) your car. The automobile is increasingly packaged as something that extends your work, home and leisure space—where you can do your ‘regular’ routine, whether it is listening to music or working. The host of additional features and the discourses of luxury in car adverts transform automobility into a desirable experience that replicates or even enhances the comforts of your life. It is important to note that the driver experiences a certain amount of autonomy by being inside the car. What is ironic is that with increasing computerization, the driver’s autonomy becomes dependent upon the computer chip. Weather sensitive wipers, light sensitive headlights [the Adaptive Headlight System or Andrew File System (AFS)], speedsensitive cruise control and fuel ﬂows, reversing sensors, distance and impact sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS) monitors, warnings about seatbelts, doors and windows all make the driving experience radically diﬀerent. The driver needs to rely less on her/his cognition and recognition of the conditions—turning on the wiper when it starts to rain, for example—and lets the car take over. If the automobile presents an autonomous mobility, then what we can see emerging is a new order of autonomy: the machine becomes autonomous of the driver’s instructions or commands and responds on its own. Concomitantly, the driver’s autonomy—agency and control over the machine—is eroded as 154

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the car-driver linkage takes a diﬀerent turn. Nigel Thrift has proposed that the intelligent human driver—non-thinking machine distinction breaks down when the car begins to think because of its software (Thrift 2004). ‘Intelligent cars’ means, in Jörg Beckmann’s words, ‘a shift from automobility which functions around independence to the autopilot hybrid which suﬀers isolation’ (Beckmann 2004, emphases added). By ‘isolation’ Beckmann means the withdrawal of the human driver from the conditions in which s/he is driving: the car engages with the conditions and responds accordingly on her/his behalf. The driver becomes an automaton, driving according to dictates of car software—an increasing reduction of the autonomy component of automobility.

Mobile Effects The automobile also generates a new order of experience. In India, one has to only drive a few kilometres on the National Highways to discover this. The highway bursts with life: dhabas, small eateries, petrol stations, tea vendors, fruit sellers, tyre and vehicle repair workshops, hotels, barbers, cigarette stores line the highways in most places. Such a system of automobility represents a whole new order of ‘circulation, communication and consumption’ (Merriman 2004). I see this as a system where being mobile on the highway means intersecting your life, however temporarily, with a diﬀerent order. The space of mobility here is the space of driving through multiple cultures, communities, languages and natural settings. Automobility here is the mobile consumption of places. There is another crucial way of seeing the link between automobiles and place. Kevin Hetherington deﬁnes places as ‘mobile eﬀects’: ‘a nonrepresentation that is mobilized through the placing of things in complex relation [sic] to one another and the agency/power eﬀects that are performed by those arrangements’ (cited in Merriman 2004: 146). An automobile thus mobilizes places by connecting them. Places come into being through the intersection of multiple kinds of mobilities: communication networks, transport networks, migration of people, the automobiles and the circulation of goods and services. Places circulate and are constructed through these processes. Places are, in a sense, a via of mobilities. Automobiles thus generate mobile eﬀects: they generate places. 155

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Automobility is also packaged as a mode of acquiring a personality, and discourses and representations of automobility use stereotypes and iconic images. The Innova ads on Indian TV (2007) depicted Aamir Khan playing multiple roles, all while driving the Innova. The new Innova ad, with the vehicle in bright red, suggests the aggressive, independent career woman, as reﬂected in her choice of the massive car. The latter is also an unusual ad because in most car ads, women are only wives, mothers or partners, rarely independent career women. Such ads clearly position the car as object or possession, along with the woman inside it, though never in the driver’s seat. The male is obviously in control, of the car as well as the woman. In the Scorpio ad, the man at the wheel beats the women, and seems to be gloating. The intrinsic link between maleness, mobility and vehicle is forged where he seems to win the race with such ease. In the Mitsubishi Pajero ad, a lion looks suspiciously at two porcupines, quills all ﬂared. The tagline says: ‘If you were there, you could see it’ (India Today, inside back cover, Tourism Special edition, August 2007). The vehicle is advertised as ‘ready for anything’, and suggests that you could actually drive into the wilds to see such scenes. Ford’s SUV, Endeavour, has a one-word tagline: Freedom. It is depicted standing on a desolate and icy terrain. The write-up reads: ‘Unleashing the New Ford Endeavour’. It is further described as possessing ‘beastly power’, ‘raring to go’, and ‘armed with revolutionary torque’ (inside back cover, India Today, Tourism Special, August 2007). The four-wheel drive, the terrain and the language of violent power are indicative of the toughness of the vehicle that allows one to go anywhere. Maruti’s Grand Vitara announces that ‘the world is your playground’, thus showcasing unhindered mobility—play, exploration and wandering. It asks us to ‘make the world your personal playground. Play it your way’ (The Hindu Magazine, 30 September 2007, p. 8). In all these cases, freedom to travel—be mobile—is linked with the automobile that helps you ignore the conditions of mobility, or create conditions of personal mobility, as long as one is within this automobile. ‘Freedom’ here is the autonomy of the vehicle that is crucially independent of terrain. The car is no more a simple mode of transport: it is a style statement, it is about one’s personality and individuality. Even the Nano, 156

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considered more a utility vehicle than a style statement, cannot afford to sacriﬁce the appeal aspect (or the ‘Wow!’ factor, as it is now called). Thus the write-up on the Nano says: ‘styling is one area where there is no compromise’ (Autocar India, 9.6, 2008, p. 11). Autocar reporting on Mercedes’ 20,000th car describes the vehicle as a ‘prized brand’, thus suggesting that it is not economy or ﬁnance alone, but lifestyle and cultural capital that are linked with the automobile.8 In order to add to the vehicle’s contribution to one’s individual identity, users take recourse to many fringe (non-essential to the driving experience) acts. These can include bumper stickers (I see, on a daily basis, a Scorpio with a bumper sticker that announces ‘Fuhrer’), emotional declarations (‘Dad’s Gift’), witticisms (‘Heh heh, not so close, I am not that kind of car’), extra chrome ﬁttings that add to the bulk (especially noticeable in the case of larger vehicles like Innova and Scorpio), musical ‘reverse horns’ (which could range from devotional tunes to Vande Mataram) or other body modiﬁcations. I am suggesting here that an automobile enables its owner/user to extend her/his personality on to the public visibility. The owner/user may not be known to the other road users, but the vehicle does the talking through these signs inscribed on the car itself. The owner may not even be visible (if, illegally, the car has darkened windows), but the car is rendered hyper-visible with these accoutrements. The car becomes the vehicle for imposing or at least making visible, one’s identity upon the public eye. Or, as Hyundai Verna puts it, ‘An eye-catcher and a stare-grabber par excellence.’9 In other words, the automobile enables the identity/ personality of the person to move out, or extend, from within—the private, family-space, intimate space—to the outside, to traverse roads and public spaces, to be in the public eye. Of course the Scorpio makes this a gendered thing when it urges you to ‘muscle other cars into submission’, with the new model, ‘armed to the teeth … with new muscles that turn other cars into submissive wimps’ (India Today, 20 April 2009, p. 13). In all these cases it is not about the car alone, but the car and the self. The automobile facilitates a mobility of identity itself. When you travel in a specialized car that stands out in the mass of cars in public space, you inscribe your identity on that space too. 157

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Affective Mobility Part of this identity within the discourse of automobility is the emotional aspect of the automobile. The pride one takes in the vehicle, the self-conﬁdence or the sense of family are, in most adverts, linked to the emotional ﬂows that circulate around the car. When the Hyundai Verna asks you to ‘feel it’, it suggests that there is an emotional link between man [sic] and machine. This conﬂates the discourse of automobility with that of aﬀect, even as it merges the material (car) with the emotional-psychological, and proposes that driving is not simply an experience of mobility but one of aﬀect as well. An apposite way of viewing this emotionalizing of the car in cultures of the automobile would be, in Mimi Sheller’s terms, as ‘automotive emotions’—the ‘embodied dispositions of car-users and the visceral and other feelings associated with car-use’ (Sheller 2004: 223). The drive is almost always converted into a physically and emotionally satisfying experience: Hyundai’s ‘Feel it’, Honda Accord’s ‘The power of bold performance’ or the sheer colourcoordinated luxury suggested by the Hyundai Getz ad. In the case of big cars, what get emphasized are size, luxury and power. In the case of smaller cars such as the Maruti or the Santro, we are given maneuverability, mileage and comfort. These are variable discourses of automobility that are designed to appeal to speciﬁc desires in you: the need for power and size rather than economy, or the desire for comfort and economy rather than brute force. Most, of course, sexualize the experience of driving. Thus Stanley car upholstery places a burgundy red saloon car on a dark background. The car is lit from the inside, but everything else is in dim light. The tagline reads: ‘Experience her like you never have: fully dressed’. The gendering of the vehicle is aligned with the sexual (‘experience her’), and both accentuated with the ‘fully dressed’ (Autocar India, 7.5, 2006, pp. 14–15). Once again, the discourses focus on the aﬀective elements.10 When the Maruti promotes itself as a family car (and most car ads show a family) it once again foregrounds the emotional ties, or what Daniel Miller appropriately termed the ‘humanity of the car’ (Miller 2001b: 1–5). It is almost as though mobility is about connections—especially emotional—between individuals and the form of transport. Thus, 158

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the Hyundai Santro advert shows how the wife calls on her cell phone and gets the home decorated when on their ﬁrst drive in their new car. The car becomes the cause for celebrations, an emotional moment for all. Cars are now packaged as enabling particular emotions, and pleasurable sensations. In ads with parents taking children for a spin (the Maruti Omni where the daughter practices her tabla inside the vehicle, for example), the car represents a concentrated space of emotions. The car seems to be one element within a family’s ﬂows of emotions, almost as though it centres the aﬀective energies of the family. If, as material culture studies argues, objects possess ‘narrative elaborations’ (Hoskins 2006) when emplaced within the life stories of humans, and if objects and humans are constitutive of each other through a series of ‘object protocols’, as I have argued elsewhere (Nayar forthcoming), then the car possesses an aﬀective ‘narrative elaboration’ within the life story of the family. In other words, a material-technical object becomes instrumental in the ‘immaterial’ emotional mobility (ﬂows) of the family, even as emotional ﬂows eddy around the car. This is what can be called the aﬀective mobility of automobility: the discourse that converts a car into an object of emotional attachment, but one which facilitates the emotional ﬂows within a family to circulate in particular ways so that the family as a unit is emphasized. Announcing to the world that the car was ‘Dad’s Gift’ is a way of declaring sentiment, and thereby humanizing the car. Road rage—a common feature of city driving today—is also a signiﬁcant aspect of the aﬀective mobility of the automobile. Descriptions such as ‘the thrill of driving’, the ‘joy of the road’ or the fear of a dangerous route (seen in the Mountain Dew ad where two men have to drive a jeep down a steep mountain), all capture the emotional component of automobility. There are other subtler references to the aﬀective element of automobility in the discourse of cars. The repeated semi-erotic gestures of tactility— caressing of the upholstery, the sleekness of the vehicle’s body—charges the car as a sexualized object that demands an emotional response (arousal, desire). When the girl on the motorbike races Shah Rukh Khan in the Hyundai i10 ad, the classic paradigm of the desirable man is reasserted—and linked with the well-established image of the ‘most famous man on earth’, SRK—once again. ‘Next time I will catch it,’ she declares 159

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at the end of the race (which she loses). The semantics of the ad deliberately collapse SRK with the car: What is the object of her pursuit—the car or SRK? The sleekness of the car stands in some kind of ambiguous, perhaps homologous position of the sleek, leather-clad woman (the leather of course is racing costume, but also represents some exotic kind of sexualized look). The woman is the prototypical predator—and she is obviously not Indian—from whom SRK manages to escape due to the sheer superiority of the car. This is the aﬀective mobility of the i10. In similar fashion, a ‘masculinization’ of the car is visible in the Maruti SX4, whose tagline runs ‘Men are back’. A write-up introducing it described it as ‘stylishly muscled’. It then goes on to highlight the car’s features almost exclusively in terms associated with the male body, with a smattering of odd feminized terms like ‘this babe’. The terms include: ‘bullish brawn’, ‘strong presence’, ‘meaty steering wheel’, ‘bulging haunches around the wheel wells’, ‘seriously tough cookie’. The essay itself (or rather ‘test report’ as it is called) is titled ‘Brainy, hardcore bruiser’ (Darukhanawala 2007). The sexualized, gendered and violent connotations explicitly link the vehicle with the male. Material and tactile sensations translate into emotional pleasure. The car here seems to embody emotions. Or, as Mimi Sheller puts it: ‘… “feelings” are embodied and performed in the convergences and collisions between emotion cultures and material cultures’ (2004: 223). The crucial word is of course, ‘embodied’: emotions—individual or familial—are embodied in the car. An aﬀective mobility has emerged.

The Automobilization of Space Automobility cannot be seen as the inherent feature of the car alone. It is the mixture of humans, machines, roads and places (Sheller and Urry 2000). Road signs—traﬃc signals, ‘No Parking’ and other signs, govern the use of the vehicle in any place. • The state issues documents (driving licences) that authorize you to drive. • The state penalizes (sometimes) you for breaking the law while driving. 160

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• Roads and infrastructure (bridges, crossings) facilitate driving. • A car does not drive itself, it needs a human (or a computer) driver. We need to see automobility as the consequence of the conﬂation or intersection of all of the above. This also means that the experience of automobility is dependent upon the following: • • • •

Quality of the machine. Road conditions. Rules governing driving. Nature of public space.

The experience of driving in the more ordered spaces of say the USA or the UK—though UK perhaps has the most sign-posted and instructionridden roads anywhere in the world—is radically diﬀerent from that in Indian cities. Tim Edensor, thus, points out that motoring in England involves a near-constant view of steeples and church spires, and the motoring landscape becomes a ‘faithscape’. In case of India, Edensor (2004: 114) lists, among others, the following features of the road conditions that govern the experience of driving: • Excessive and unnecessary use of horns. • Lack of regulation and even widely-observed conventions (rearview mirrors, for instance). • ‘Biggest vehicle’ syndrome. All this means there is rarely uninterrupted driving. Edensor’s description of the situation is worth citing in full: Because of the varied speeds and multi-directional routes adopted by road-users, pedestrians and animals, car drivers in India have to be constantly aware of the ﬂow of bodies and vehicles which criss-cross the street, veering into and emerging out of courtyards, alleys and culs-de-sac. These roads contrast with the highly regulated, singlepurpose … spaces of Western highways, where conformity to rules and modes of centralized regulation endure. (Edensor 2004: 114) 161

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This is the Indian automobility, so to speak. We cannot, clearly, speak of ‘automobile culture’ but rather ‘automobile cultures’, just as Daniel Miller speaks of ‘car cultures’ (Miller 2001b). There is, as Tim Edensor suggests, a link between driving and national identity (2004). A common feature now of railway stations in metropolises is the reorganization of space around the automobile. For instance, the railway stations in Hyderabad and Chennai allow cars to proceed right up to the main entrance while autos and two-wheelers have to park at a considerable distance. Parking is arguably the most beleaguered aspect of road and urban planning in Indian cities today. Since 2006, hardly a week has passed when parking, traﬃc congestion and vehicular air pollution have not been subjects of news reports and analysis by everybody from the Police Commissioner to the ‘common’ road user in Hyderabad city, and a few campaigns to close business establishments without adequate parking (The Hindu 23 November 2006; 14 September 2007; The Hindu Business Line 21 September 2007). Thus, automobile use is very deﬁnitely linked to the infrastructural and social contexts. Indian cities also seem to be closing oﬀ spaces for pedestrians and slow-moving vehicles. Most complaints about road conditions are generated by vehicle users rather than pedestrians or hawkers. It seems that an automobilization of public space is underway in Indian metropolises. And this has nothing to do with the automobile per se, but the cultural and social logic of car cultures. Automobility here is governed by, and is the consequence of, particular regimes of power and disciplining that regulates where speciﬁc forms of vehicles and modes of mobility (slow vehicles, walking) can be ‘performed’. Automobility is here a performance that is subject to directions (road rules), the stage (infrastructure, organized spaces for parking, a hierarchy of parking), the characters (policemen, traﬃc wardens, parking lot attendants, drivers, vendors) and multiple scripts. These ‘scripts’ are: road signs that tell you where to go or park, the speed you can drive at, the directions for walking or particular destinations, the prohibitions (‘No Entry’, ‘Army Vehicles Only’), the transactions—we can call them conversations—between the vehicles on the road (and sometimes abusive exchanges between drivers) and the choreographies of pedestrians, diﬀerent kinds of vehicles and structures. Automobility is a performance 162

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that accounts for all of these: scripts, stage, rules and characters. What is important is that all of these are culture speciﬁc, and every culture develops its own scripts and rules, just as the characters who drive vary from country to country (the polite hand-wave in the UK to the aggressive New York taxi driver to the bully in the Scorpio in India). Automobility is, as this section has demonstrated, a conﬂuence of various ideologies (class, gender, privatization), desires (power, control), stereotypes (masculinity/femininity, sexuality) and disciplinary regimes (autonomy, road signs, the law). The culture of automobility is thus not restricted to the material object of the automobile but is a set of processes and events—of mobility—that emerges because of the convergence of social, technical and cultural processes.

Cultural Mobilities Culture travels, cultures travel. All cultures except the very remote have been inﬂuenced by other cultures. From architecture to cuisine, philosophical ideas to costumes, cultural forms adapt, adopt, inﬂuence, appropriate, indigenize other cultures. Assimilation and travel are integral to the growth and change in cultural forms. Thus the Mughals brought the marvellous Islamic/Persian-style architecture to India, even as kings like Akbar sought to understand Hinduism in order to create a syncretic religion. In the USA, ‘cool’ began to adapt African-American ‘hip hop’ styles in the 1990s (Pountain and Robins 2000), ‘chicken tikka masala’ —a dish that is not really found in India—was declared ‘Britain’s true national dish’ by the then UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (in 2001), an ironic throwback to the historical fact that England set out on its colonial mission with the initial aim of getting a slice of the spice trade (BBC News 2001). Christopher Columbus was also driven, we now discover, by the desire to acquire cinnamon, and when spice rates fell due to greater imports, its use as a luxury item declined among the upper classes around the mid-17th century (Braudel 1981: 222; for America, see Dalby 2001). To go further back, the European Renaissance of the 14th–16th century was at least partly driven by the massive exchange of artistic ideas across cultures, both European and Asian (Hoerder 2002). And of course McDonald’s is now everywhere. The top grosser in Brazil, 163

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Japan, Russia and South Africa are all American or American/British ﬁlms (Sayre and King 2003: 29). But how does one study the mobility of cultures? One way would be to speak of the new spaces of cultural artefacts like cuisine or fashion. To locate a cultural artefact in a new geographical and cultural space is to map that artefact’s journey. Thus, ‘chicken tikka’ seems to have travelled from India to Oxford Street, London and beyond, and as at least one commentator discovered was being exported to India (BBC News 1999). Another way would be to see how people consume different kinds of food when they are travelling. Is experimenting with alien, exotic and ‘foreign’ cuisine a part of the travel (mobile) experience? Think of the adaptation of jeans with the Indian kurta as a fashion trend among college youth, and you have another example of a cultural artefact that has travelled and been assimilated. In order to explore the mobility of culture—what could be called the circulation of culture—I shall look at speciﬁc artefacts and events that seem to move across spaces and cultural sites to occupy (colonize), or be assimilated and indigenized by local cultures.

Food Mobilities I’ve been listening to a language of which I understand only one word— ravintola. It means restaurant. – Anjum Hasan, on Finland (2007b)

What is the link between food and mobility? Food constitutes an important element in our negotiations with geography and hence, of mobility. Smells of the kitchen indicate its location in the house, for example. Eating sections are variously labelled (from college canteens to the ‘mess’ to the plush hotel dining room), and enable one to negotiate space. Travel columns and guides inform us where we can eat and drink in any place. Perhaps the ﬁrst word a traveller acquires in a new country (as the epigraph to this section shows) is the one for restaurant! Tourism is intrinsically connected to food. Advertisements and billboards announce eating places on streets, at points of transit and transportation. Places 164

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are linked within these topographies and geographies of production and consumption. Food geographers look at the sites and political economy of food (global production zones, marketing, transportation, import policies, pricing, crises and famines)—but that ‘macro’ analysis is not my intention here. Another way of looking at food geographies is at the very local level: the supermarket, the shopping mall and the entertainment centre with its food outlets. Take as a simple instance the sales of products like alcohol or cigarettes in supermarkets. Is alcohol something we can pick along with the groceries? Why are the cigarettes (usually) kept separately often in closed shelving? Why do we need separate stores for retailing alcohol? These are regulated spaces of food, geographies of consumption where the consumer citizen can only go if she/he meets certain criteria—mostly age, since alcohol and cigarettes are not sold to people under a ‘legal age’. Specialized stores selling halal meet, beef or pork constitute a diﬀerent geography. The ‘India store’ or ‘Chinese’ outlet in European and American cities constitutes a diﬀerent organization of food consumption and retailing. The farm produce sections in the commons—held on particular days—are also a special form of food geography. Food consumed at various levels—the body, home, community, city, region and nation—enables the construction of identities: individual, community or group, regional and racial. When Aparna Karthikeyan explores Starsbourg, she is drawn to the local market: ‘Row upon row of wooden cabinets, selling oh, just about everything … crisp pretzels and fragrant crepes, smoking tureens of mulled wine, roasted chest nuts in twists of paper …’ (Karthikeyan 2008). She thus marks a country with its local oﬀerings of food. Food consumption thus locates us within particular geographical (home, community/neighbourhood, region and nation) as well as cultural spaces (diaspora food, cosmopolitan food). Food, Mobility and Liminal Spaces

Food, as theorists have argued, is localized in terms of both production and consumption. Hotels, the kitchen, dining rooms are geographies of consumption where designated places exist for eating and drinking. These are destinations for consuming food. You go to a hotel, the mess hall or 165

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the canteen for food. That is, these are vectoral routes of mobility around food and consumption: people move with a sense of direction towards the eating place. But what of eating places between places—eating centres that are not destinations themselves but occur between the point of origin and the destination, an eating place en-route to other places whose signiﬁcance is precisely in the fact that they occur between places? Take, as an instance of this kind of eating place the ubiquitous roadside dhaba in India, invariably called ‘Punjabi dhaba’ or sometimes more expansively ‘North Indian dhaba’ even when it is in the deep south. The dhaba is a fascinating intersection of cultures without being aﬃliated to any one. It mixes time and space because it lacks a particular cultural ‘locale’. The dhaba represents only movement, displacement and cultural mixing. It is a transit space where mobility and its sudden interruption (lunch or dinner halts for long-distance buses, transport trucks and other highway travellers). Dhabas are not connected to locality or history; they seem to be linked only to the fact and space of transport, or mobility. And they are spaces of food consumption. The dhaba, I propose, is an excellent example of ‘food mobilities’ (Sarah Gibson’s term) where the space of eating is intimately linked to, aﬃliated with and an adjunct of the space of mobility rather than any other space (Gibson 2007). It is the ultimate liminal—border crossing—space attached to people only in terms of food produced and food consumed. The common appellation of ‘Punjabi’ or ‘North Indian’ further de-localizes it. The people who come there are also not attached to it except as consumers. There is no attempt to locate the dhaba in any other context (unlike, say, a historical building or a museum or even a street in a new town). The dhaba is at once a place and a non-place, and the site of the intersection of food and mobility. Go-go Food

Food is as much about what is eaten as about where it is eaten. That is, the spaces of consumption are as signiﬁcant as the nature of food consumed. Railway or airline food—food on the move—evokes particular kinds of responses (often revulsion). ‘Packaged’ food served on trains and ﬂights are foods to be consumed while technically mobile. 166

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This is some kind of ‘oﬃcial’ food, as opposed to the food you might buy at stations—which are local. More importantly, as writers on food have noted, it is food consumed within constraints of time (when they choose to serve you) and space (of the train or aeroplane’s seating/dining arrangements, as well as the space of the tray). Now of course we are warned by the Indian Railways ‘not to accept food from strangers’—the warnings are voiced through public address systems, printed on tickets and inscribed on ﬂyers/notices inside the compartments. Food laced with sedatives having established themselves as a technology of robbery, food consumption while mobile has become a fraught exercise. Food mobility includes such (mobile) experiences of consumption. The idea of a proper meal, the home as the place of ‘proper’ food, cooked dinners as opposed to eating out or take-away and the implicit suggestion of ‘impersonal’ food-service in restaurants/hotels constitute important elements in the packaging of food mobilities. Hospitality is therefore a discourse that is woven into the fabric of food mobilities. ‘Family rooms’ in Indian hotels respect this (Indian?) need and ritual to dine with the family. It assumes that such spaces within the otherwise commercial, de-localized and impersonal spaces of the hotel are memorials of home. Hotels and restaurants advertise their smiling waiters and cooks, ready to wait upon the customer. Cheerful personnel promise to make your away-from-home experience as ‘homely’ as possible. Travel, declares Trident Hilton Hotels, ‘should bring your family together,’ before suggesting that their hotels ‘oﬀer a wide range of activities in a familyfriendly environment’ (Outlook Traveller, 7.12, 2007, p. 25). Food mobility is part of this ‘range of activities’, and is about the experience of home away from home, of being able to consume impersonally cooked food in settings that recall home comforts. Shahpura Bagh in Rajasthan, Amita Bhaskar discovers, has the ‘homestyle pleasures of an orchard palace’. Here, the ‘personal touch … distinguishes everything’, and a ‘redfaced guest’ is surprised by ‘chocolate cake and champagne’ in honour of his birthday, ‘something casually mentioned during the day’ (Bhaskar 2007). This need to ensure that mobility—that you are not really in your home—is erased through personal(ized) attention and emotion engineering eﬀects (such as the surprise birthday cake mentioned earlier) 167

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makes the fact of mobility a key implicit moment in the construction of the hotel as a food space. The references to ‘warmth’, ‘home-cooking’ or ‘friendly’ are gestures at making mobility invisible in the act of food production and consumption.11 These are, to return to an earlier argument, about aﬀect. Marital responsibilities (especially gendered ones), domestic spaces and the ritual of eating at the family dining table are carefully ‘tweaked’ when the liveried waiters take orders and serve food, the ritual of eating is coded (table manners) and money is oﬀered. The ‘aura’ around the food is partly the eﬀect of these framing devices. Food mobilities are intimately linked to hospitality because mobility is packaged as non-movement (you do not move from home to ‘outside’ because the displacement does not carry a concomitant change in food production or consumption). Food mobilities are in eﬀect, the connections established between ‘home’ and ‘away’ through this process of eating. Consider the ‘take-away’ food phenomenon that has reconﬁgured the Indian consumption pattern. ‘Take-away’ is food on the move. It enables one to check the menu, order, pay and collect without so much as [in the case of drive-in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chickens (KFCs)] as leaving the comfort of the car. This is food for the road, on the road. The outlet is a food provider, but is otherwise a non-place delocalized from everything. The absence of even eating spaces in ‘drivethru’ outlets marks them out as sterling examples of the food mobilities I am speaking of. In terms of geographies of consumption, the take-away and the drivethru radically transform the spaces of eating. Similarly, snack-foods— chips (perhaps the most popular snack food), drinks, sweets, biscuits, etc.—made available in easily disposable containers (cups, packets, bottles and such) enable eating on the go. Food Borders

There is a more nuanced linkage of food and mobility. Food can evoke disgust and revulsion because food, as social theorists have argued, is a bridge between the self and the world: we incorporate food from the outside, we take it in and it becomes a part of us (Deborah Lupton,

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cited in Gibson 2007: 6). Food is itself, therefore, a marker of mobility because it travels from the outside to the inside. The frontier between inside and outside breaks down through this mobility of food. This argument about food borders could be extended to cultures. Food has traditionally been a marker of diﬀerence (of cultures, regions, races, even nationalities). In the age of the great voyages and discovery travellers—the 16th and 17th centuries—travel journals had extended descriptions of food in their account of foreign cultures. During this age, food descriptions were used to reinforce attitudes toward foreign cultures. Thus, the austerity of Turkish food was seen as contributing to their military discipline (in the Ottoman Empire), and the Irish cuisine as a marker of their bestiality (Suranyi 2007). In the great African novels of Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, The Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease) for instance, we discover the signiﬁcance of the kola nut for the community—both as a food item and as a symbol. The take-over of Britain by the chicken tikka masala, ostensibly an Indian dish, was termed as ‘synonymous with breakdown in traditional British values and rise of multicultural Britain’ (BBC News 2001). Food can stand for particular places. Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India (2007) is an attempt to map the culinary geography of India: the speciﬁc cuisine of every state. K.T. Achaya’s books on Indian food (1994, 2002) also attempt to trace the unique history of particular food items in a region’s culture. A food item and a place (region, state, geographical area) thus become synonymous with each other: Kerala and ﬁsh, Bengal and milk sweets, Tamil Nadu and rasam, England and ﬁsh and chips, Japan and sushi, Italy and pasta, Maharastra and bhakri. Tarla Dalal’s cookbook supplied with Samsung microwave ovens (Dalal 2002) marks idlis as ‘traditional recipe … from South Indian kitchens’, but does not feel it necessary to identify the ‘green peas dhokla’ (on the very next page) or ‘paneer bhurji on toast’ as originating in any particular state/ region—thus suggesting that the dhokla or bhurji are well-known and do not require a geographic label (Dalal 2002: unpaginated). It converts speciﬁc cooking styles and food items into universal categories—an excellent example of a literal food mobility. One traveller puts it this way: the ideal vacation would be ‘spent in an elegant European city where the chief activity is spending hours in cafés, drinking coﬀee and eating

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cake, reading, writing postcards, dreaming, etc.’ (Senapaty 2006: 72). Note that the primary activity is food consumption. A deﬁnite plus for a getaway, for one writer is ‘outside of a ﬁve-star hotel, this is the only pace where I’ve had decent scrambled eggs’ (Griﬃn 2007: 74). This food-and-travel experience could take a more expensive and expansive form when people actually take ‘food holidays’, setting out to taste the cuisine of diﬀerent places. [Outlook Traveller ran a special story on such a ‘food holiday’ (7.12, 2007)]. It demands, of course, food guides—and there are plenty of those, such as ‘A foodie’s guide to Singapore’ (Nadkarni 2007). This is a more specialized form of food mobilities: travelling to eat. Cuisine’s spatial and cultural speciﬁcity can be treated as a marker of dwelling, of home for people of that place even when they move out of that place. Food denotes the border between spaces, regions and cultures. Food constitutes a strong emotional and cultural symbol even (especially?) when it travels beyond its ‘original’ spaces (in fact, the Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes ‘comfort food’ as ‘any food that is associated with childhood or with home cooking’). What I am proposing here is: food is often ‘packaged’ (metaphorically and sometimes literally), bundled with sentiments, memories and aﬀects of an ‘original’ home and cultural space, therefore implying that: • the food originates in one place and • it is displaced, moves across borders and arrives for consumption in another. The consumption of ‘Indian’ food in Europe, Italian pasta in India, or more locally, ‘multicuisine restaurants’ where food from diﬀerent parts of India are available categorized according to region. Even small towns in the USA have Indian restaurants. Thus, Eureka in California with a population of 42,000 has two Indian restaurants (John 2008). The South Indian restaurant chain, Malgudi, oﬀers food from the four Southern States, with the menu organized around states and their particular foods. Writer Anjum Hasan in the column appropriately titled (for my argument!) ‘Moveable Feast’ (emphasis added) is surprised by the ethnic menus on oﬀer in Bangalore restaurants where she can choose from exotic items like ‘crab masala fry’, ‘turkey fry’ and Mughlai dishes. 170

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She explicitly situates such an explosion of multicultural cuisine to ‘the collective nostalgia of the North Indian immigrants’ in Bangalore city (Hasan 2007a: 112). This food mobility ‘packaged’ as multicuisine menus means speciﬁc things: • Food is consumed either nostalgically or ‘curiously’ (‘let me see what Tamil curries are like’) in conjunction with their places of origin no matter where they are being consumed. • Food marks the mobility (displacement) of both the food item and the consumer. Thus, ‘food mobilities’ refers not only to the product being consumed but to the places and the individuals too. In other words, food mobilities signify the culture of travel, or cultural mobilities. Food and cuisine become ‘fusion food’ where cultural borders break down in a meal, so to speak. In a recent essay on Indian eateries in the USA, we discover that asparagus was used to introduce the south Indian uttappam to the American palate, and other border-crossing items include lobster vindaloo, chocolate idli souﬄé and tandoori peaches (John 2008). You can now get chicken tikka masala made in olive oil or served with broccoli pulao in the UK (Kumar 2007). The consumption of food from many places—sometimes in the same dish—is an instance of transgressing borders and travelling culture for, as James Cliﬀord reminds us, culture is a site of ‘dwelling and travelling’ (1997: 31). When Outlook Traveller (7.6, 2007) does a piece called ‘Living it Up: Worldwide Luxury’, the cover visual focuses on a food and drinks session in Masai Mara, Africa, thus linking luxury with food. In some cases, people consume food because they remind them of ‘dwelling’ (home and geographical locations of homeland) and erase the sense of travel and displacement (Locher et al. 2005). Food Cosmopolitanisms

Yet it is not the consumption of food from particular places alone that signiﬁes food and cultural mobilities. I began this chapter with the 171

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proposition that mobility manifests in several and diverse ways in our everyday lives. What I want to emphasize about these manifest mobilities is that ‘mobility’ is not just the actual act of travel or displacement. If we argue for mobility as only being about actual displacement, we interpret travel itself very narrowly. Food and cultural mobilities are also made possible through a diﬀerent modality of displacement. Reading or watching Jamie Oliver’s or Nigella Lawson’s cookery shows on TV, a polemical programme on the increasing ‘coca-colonization’ of the world or the visual of large helpings of food on American plates in Hollywood ﬁlms, is modalities of food mobilities where food does travel to us. TV and ﬁlm, for instance, bring exotic food to our drawing rooms (if not to our dining tables). A volume like The Table is Laid: Oxford Book of South Asian Food Writing showcases literary examples of food from different cultural and geographical spaces from South Asia (Thieme and Raja 2007). Finally, details on packets of food products announcing their ‘original’ spaces also constitute an important modality of food mobility. Anzac Biscuits are now marketed in India as Unibic. The package has information that illustrates my argument. These biscuits were ﬁrst manufactured during World War I by the wives and mothers of Australian and New Zealander soldiers to raise the latter’s morale. After the War, they were sold to raise money for veteran support. This legend is retained in the Unibic, that is, Indian version too, but with an ironic twist: the package now declares that Unibic donates 3 per cent of its sales to support Indian jawans. This mixed history is perhaps an extreme example of the modalities I am speaking of here, but is quite illustrative of the other kinds of food mobilities. Another modality of food mobilities is the metaphorization of the world in terms of food. Shonali Muthalaly’s experience of Singapore is recorded mainly in terms of her luggage and her weighing scale, as she puts it, indicating that she ate her way through Singapore (Muthalaly 2007)! In order to see and experience Nice properly, writes Maya Das Pillai, you have to give it the ‘wine treatment’: ‘sip, swirl and savour the ﬂavour slowly’ (Pillai 2007: 8). Pillai thus translates the entire travel into a food metaphor. In the same vein, Sadhana Rao describes Egypt in a food metaphor: ‘Heady Cocktail’ (Rao 2007: 8). Places are imaged 172

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almost entirely in terms of food and its consumption: food becomes a metaphor (and metaphor itself, etymologically means ‘to transport’) of food mobilities. I am arguing here for a kind of food-driven cosmopolitanization—a gastronomic, or culinary, cosmopolitanism—of cultures today, made possible not just by the actual availability of diﬀerent varieties of food items from around the world, but also through the ‘travelling’ of information, visual images, symbols of food from round the world. Food mobilities are an integral part of our globalization because they travel out to us, on our screen, in our newspaper or, more materially, in the food product we consume. It could very well be an immaterial mobility of the food made possible through its ‘packaging’ in the form of such information or images. Central to this packaging of food mobilities and food cosmopolitanisms is the culture of cuisine advice and training. The magazine Taste and Travel, for example, runs a column, ‘Cuisine Watch’. As a case study of this ‘culinary etiquette’, component of food mobilities in globalizing cultures the column is excellent material. In a piece on sushi, the article begins (in a header text in large print) with the mysteriousness of sushi for most Indians: ‘Most [Indians] might not know the diﬀerence between o-toro and choo-toro.’ With this, the agenda is made clear: familiarization with the exotic cuisine of another culture. But why should Indians know about sushi? The answer is provided in the same header a few lines later: ‘Sushi is on the up and rise, especially amongst the slick, well-heeled globo-Indian’. Food mobility has been associated here with class, wealth and power: the knowledge of sushi is necessary if you need to project yourself as part of this club. This is followed by sections titled ‘sushi explained’, ‘sushi locator’ (where can you ﬁnd sushi in Indian cities?) and a detailed pictorial representation of ‘sushi etiquette’ (Taste and Travel, 3.2, 2006: 44–47). This is the political subtext in the packaging of gastronomic cosmopolitanism. Sushi is ‘packaged’ as a desirable item to be consumed, where the ‘meaning’ of sushi becomes ‘exotic’, ‘luxurious’, classy and, therefore, classist. It is packaged as an exotic item whose origins must be known by/to the ‘well-heeled globo-Indian’. ‘Packaging’ mobility here is the packaging of food as a central element in the globally travelling Indian. Sushi and the associated food mobility 173

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are the signs of this travel. Sushi and gastronomic cosmopolitanism is the glamourized packaging of: • political-economic elements like class, • the cultural codes of elitism and • the ideology of knowledgeable global citizenship. Food, here, gestures at a new social order. It could be argued that while local food might be an exotic attraction for tourists, it is the availability of cross-cultural cuisine that makes a place truly touristy. Thus, one of the chief attractions of Macau as a tourist destination, according to one writer, is its ‘cross-continental cuisine’ (Podder 2008). Travellers in Africa’s Masai Mara might be fascinated by the exotic appeal of dining under the open skies with old-fashioned lamps and waiters in local costume (the cover of Outlook Traveller’s sixth anniversary special issue). But the drinks on the table are identiﬁably Western (Gilbey’s) to suit the palate of the Western tourist. Food cosmopolitanism, like food mobility, is a tension between the desire to try the exotic and the comfort of something familiar. The packaging of food is perpetually caught in such a bind of mobility. On the one hand the hotel, tourist resort and travel destination need to oﬀer the traveller something local and exotic. On the other hand it cannot be only exotic and local foods that are served: the traveller might also, invariably, want something closer to ‘home’. This is the reason why any hotel in tourist destinations will advertise multicuisine menus. Moving back to the materiality of food, the consumption of exotic cuisine has been likened to ‘cultural food colonialism’ by some thinkers (Heldke 2001). Food adventures are always initially exploratory: they are driven, like the colonial explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries, by the desire to experience the Other, the diﬀerent and the strange. In a sense they consume and domesticate the Other through the act of incorporation (though the incorporation may have unexpected eﬀects on the stomach of the colonizerconsumer). I tend to agree with this idea of ‘cultural food colonialism’ with a proviso. It is indeed a domestication of the Other, but this domestication often involves a participatory, mutually-transformative and transactional process within food 174

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mobilities. The packaging of food mobilities today often highlights the indigenization of the Other. Chettinad toppings on pizza, McDonald’s burgers with local ﬂavours (in China, it comes with not only Sichuan sauce, but the outlet itself hoists the Chinese and not the American ﬂag) constitute the nativization of the global dish. This packaging also creates local and culture speciﬁc products: the halal burger for Muslim consumers, the McLak salmon burger, the ‘oriental’ chicken salad (Kinchloe 2002: 132, 167) and Indian masala ﬂavours for Lay’s chips are examples of this indigenization process. Colonialism, in its most virulent form, often took recourse to stereotypes of purity, of guarding against the mixing of races. Contemporary ‘cultural food colonialism’, in contrast, actively promotes hybridization, collage and mixing of ﬂavours, though Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, all represent a neo-colonialism in and of themselves—and has been critiqued as a form of both economic and cultural imperialism (Kinchloe 2002; McBride 2005). ‘Cultural food colonialism’ as I see it is about hybridization, and in this, it becomes a crucial instrument of food cosmopolitanisms. In other words, it becomes an example of food mobilities. The adoption of Indian curry as UK’s favourite cuisine is also an example of the cultural cosmopolitanism made possible by food. Diasporic cultures and their literary writings are full of food (I am thinking of writers like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri here), where food from ‘home’ (India) exists in a problematic relationship with burgers, pasta and American foods. Here food is a cultural icon and a means of staying connected to India. One consumes India even abroad through food. Food and Imaginative Geography

Another such sign of cultural mobility via food cultures is the recipe column in cookbooks. When a cookbook introduces out-of-the-routine recipes for things like, say, lobster, the immediate task may be to provide information about this dish. I propose that the consequence of such columns over several magazines and columns is food mobility. If part of the theme and discourse of mobility is connectivity and communication then exotic recipes and informational narratives on 175

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food enable us to travel. Recipe books and columns constitute the imaginative geography of food. They tell us: • • • • •

where to get the particular dish or raw material, how to cook, how to serve, what it will look like and what it might taste like.

This means, even before the actual material act of incorporating the particular food item, we have a foretaste of it. What I have called the imaginative geography of food is the anticipation and expectation of particular ﬂavours, tastes and styles of food. Such an imaginative foretasting —a taste in advance—is a mobility of odours, tastes and sights. It links us to what will happen if we do particular things. Thus, a piece on cooking lobster tells us: ‘It will leave your palate tingling, your tummy full’ (‘Lobster Lore’, Savvy Cookbook, April 2007, pp. 46–51, emphasis added). More obvious forms of such imaginative geographies of food would be the section on ‘international’ cuisine and ﬂavours, exotic dishes in other parts of the world and cookbooks that pay special attention to local ﬂavours (particular wines in France, or the food of the Australian outback). Cookbooks and food columns are a culinary mapping of the world, a discourse that readies you for a new kind of mobility: • within the space of your kitchen/home when you prepare and consume these dishes, • through reading and the imaginative consumption of these dishes and • help you anticipate the pleasures (or terrors) of travel in speciﬁc places. Food and Sensual Geographies

If travel enables one to ‘enjoy’ homely food, then it follows that travellers seek food that they can enjoy. In other words, they seek pleasure. Now, why would a magazine be called ‘taste and travel’? Reﬂecting on 176

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the conjunction of these two events/processes/experiences in the same sentence, one comes to a simple conclusion: taste is central to all travel. What one sees, where one chooses to go, what one buys as souvenirs and what one eats are governed by taste. Taste is sensory pleasure within tourism, and has been so since the earliest times, but gathers its preeminence in the 16th and 17th centuries when ‘gentlemen’ travelled in Europe— termed the ‘grand tour’—as part of their education (Chard 1999). Sensory pleasure is of course the key element in travel (education might be a part of it), and food occupies a central place in sensory pleasure for humans. Thus, Brinda Suri, writing of Haridwar, records her own gastronomic experience: ‘A cheesy fettuccini arrabiata by the Ganda was both strangely out of place and sneakily indulgent’ (Suri 2007). Travel essays in Indian newspapers, as Anna Kurian has argued, speak of exotic eating but rarely mention the problems faced when we travel to a diﬀerent place (Kurian 2009). Outlook Traveller, Taste and Travel and columns in other magazines emphasize the exotic appeal of a diﬀerent dish, but rarely speak of the revulsion, disappointment or the simple longing for ‘home’ or ‘native’ food. Food mobilities are about the sensory imperative of food in travel: the desire for gratiﬁcation and the deliberate elision of discomfort in such writings. Food mobilities are about the gastronomic pleasures of being mobile. In fact, I would argue that food mobilities are the assertion of a certain measure of freedom to indulge taste-buds and gastronomic desires. The extremely lavish descriptions that characterize food experiences in travel narratives suggests a rhetoric of excess, a rhetoric that seems to be pre-determined just as the excess is: one is determined to enjoy and indulge on the tour. Food mobility, here, is the discourse of exotic food and taste that anticipates the sensory pleasure of travel. This sensory pleasure of tasty food complicates the experience of both food and travel. Food mobility expands the boundaries of our known, familiar and preferred tastes on the occasion of travel. Experimenting with diﬀerent cuisines is exposure to new tastes. If travel itself is the experience of the strange and the new, the sensory pleasure of food on the tour gives us a certain amount of stability. The ‘edge’ of the new place and strangers is blunted by the sensory pleasure of good food. Food enables us to meet the alien culture through the act of consumption or sharing. If food breaks the border between the self and outside through the act of incorporation, it also 177

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generates a sensory pleasure that breaks down the barrier between the self and the strange/new world one is travelling in. We incorporate the strange and the new. This is the reason why travel guides direct us to places of good food. Experiencing the Other is contingent upon the pleasure of the Other’s food rather than its horrors. In this intimate act of consumption we prepare ourselves to deal with the completely unfamiliar Other.

Cosmopolitanism Drive Global. – Tag Line, Hyundai Getz

In Pico Iyer’s account of his global locations and identities, The Global Soul, he meets a man from Lahore in a Toronto bar. The man had been educated at Vassar, and his girlfriend was a Christian from Hyderabad, in southern India. His girlfriend’s parents had grown up in Mysore (southern India), moved to England, then to Kansas and then to Nova Scotia, ﬁnally settling down in a village full of other Christians from Mysore (Iyer 2000: 168). This description is of a citizen of the world, whose roots might be in one place, but has blossomed in several. Mixed origins and multi-locational in terms of education, professional demands, property ownership and family demographics, usually multilingual, the citizen of the world is an increasingly visible category. In a connected world, the upper-segments of professionals, especially in metropolises, are all hyper-mobile [undoubtedly, this global identity business is mainly for the well-heeled (Featherstone 2002: 1]. Equally at home, driving on the streets of Mumbai and ordering dinner at an Italian restaurant (a process that requires understanding of what the dishes are) in Manhattan, the yuppie generation of the 1990s is a citizen of the world. They can identify brands, food, rock stars, classical music and own international consumer products from round the world. Their work takes them all over the world, and often log ‘frequent ﬂier’ miles for doing so. They have preferences in airports and hotels, and possess mobile phones ‘SIM’ cards for various places, and a credit card that serves all (or most regions) on earth. They are the cosmopolitans.12 178

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Cosmopolitanism has been a major political concept since the European Enlightenment, and has returned in a big with globalization.13 However, more than the political notions and theories of the ‘citizen of the world’, I am concerned with cultural cosmopolitanisms and, speciﬁcally, with the link between consumer culture, cosmopolitanism and mobility. But it is not just the people who become cosmopolitan: places and cities are also increasingly cosmopolitan. Salman Rushdie painted Bombay/ Mumbai as a great cosmopolitan city in The Moor’s Last Sigh when he wrote: In India all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to ﬂow into our veins … all rivers ﬂowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked all at once … (Rushdie 1996: 350)

Sujata Patel argued that the change of name from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’ by the Shiv Sena in 1995 ‘erase[d] a multi-ethnic and multilingual cosmopolitanism being nurtured in the city, that of a bourgeois class-based modernity, substituting it with a populist oriented ethnic and religious identity’ (Patel 2003: 4). Globalization results in new ways of the everyday life—from shopping to food products available in supermarkets. Everyday life becomes cosmopolitanized when you can now purchase a Hyundai car, munch Pringles while doing so, wearing a D&G dress and Jimmy Choo shoes, checking stocks on your Sony Vaio and the location of the nearest Pizza Hut on your GPS, even as a call on your LG mobile intrudes. Consumer research has established that cosmopolitanism is a ‘consumer orientation’, and deﬁne it as a condition wherein when people regard the world as their market place, consciously seeking to consume products, places and experiences originating from cultures other than their own’ (Caldwell et al. 2006: 126). Everyday life is about the mobilities of these (global, other-cultural) products and services into and around your everyday life. A segment of the population in metropolises across India becomes cosmopolitanized: 179

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• Youth—with similar tastes in music, ﬁlms, fashion. • Lifestyle advocates—with interests in ﬁtness, aerobics, Pilates and the culture of wellness. • Corporate executives—who travel abroad, or work for extended periods abroad.14 Another category would be that of the global activist: people working for the environment, AIDS matters, the tribes and indigenous peoples, etc. Cosmopolitanism has been ‘packaged’ as a desirable condition mainly by culture industries and global capital because it enables the expansion of markets. The much-desired global mobility of products generates proﬁts for corporations situated in First-World nations. Cosmopolitanism must, therefore, be treated not only as a consumer choice, but also as a political economic condition of uneven power relations. This consumer ideology is the concealed element in the glamour ‘packaging’ of the cosmopolitan ideal. Here is a deﬁnition of globalization that gestures at cosmopolitan cultures: ‘Globalized culture admits a continuous ﬂow of ideas, information, commitment, values and tastes mediated through mobile individuals, symbolic tokens and electronic simulations’ (Waters 1996: 126). Global marketing strategies and management principles govern the working of corporations, advertising, sales policies and even the structure of stores. Global capitalism transforms people all over the world into consumers by: • generating wants and desires, • oﬀering desirable images (of say, celebrities and fashionable or ﬁt bodies), • inﬂuencing their wants through these images and • oﬀering products that apparently fulﬁl those wants. This, of course, serves the interests of global capital because ‘wants’ represent potential consumers. Consumer culture can be seen as a medium through which global capital ﬂows. But it is also a medium through which cultural ‘ﬂows’ are made possible. 180

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How does mobility get aligned with and packaged as cosmopolitanism? In order to explore this question we need to take into account the diﬀerent kinds of processes, eﬀects and trajectories of cosmopolitan mobilities.

‘Mundane Cosmopolitanism’ and Mobility As noted earlier, a supermarket or mall is a key element in cultural globalization through their wide array of international brands, products and services. Consumption itself becomes a marker of globalization (Lukose 2005). We are now familiar with Quaker Oats, Kellogs’ breakfast cereal, Nokia phones, MTV, Thomas Cook holidays in Europe [there is, in fact, a globalization of leisure itself, as suggested by Horner and Swarbrooke (2005)] and quiche. With global connectivity, increased world travel and availability of consumer products and practices of eating and shopping, everybody becomes cosmopolitan. This is characterized as ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ (Hebdige 1990) and ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2002). I see ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ as an instance of the great cultural ‘ﬂows’, the swirl and eddy of products around us: • • • •

Hollywood movies French fashion European food American sports

But also: • • • •

SRK in the global celebrity arena Hindi movies in the US Yoga exports The ‘curry’ in UK

Cosmopolitanism is increasingly the mobility of products in our everyday lives. ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is not about Arundhati Roy delivering a talk in New York City or Mahatma Gandhi being voted 181

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the ‘man of the millennium’. It is not about the making of the Indian constitution through a process of inﬂuence and assimilation from other constitutions. It is not about Indian activists in Greenpeace, the participation of Indians in global relief measures or protests in Kerala against the Iraq war. ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is the agglomeration of the global within our reach through the mobility of products and services from across the world. It is the routine mobility of images, services and products within an aﬀordable (at least in metropolises) in our everyday life. It is important to see this cosmopolitanism as being a routine because the routine is often invisible. It is integrated into the everyday life and rhythms of an individual or family’s cycles of consumption and pleasures. Globalization is brought home to us in invisible ways through the mobility of products and services where they become a part of the choices we make routinely in supermarkets, on an evening out with the family or a device we wish to buy. ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is about mobility because it extends our consumer and culture reach. We move beyond ‘Digjam Suitings’ or Binny textiles to multinational products in malls. We shop for products online, and they are delivered from warehouses abroad. ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is about mobility also because it moves our extent and purchasing options beyond territory. We move out, literally, of the old retail store. Multiplexes show us the very latest in Hollywood and world cinema, and move us out of the older ‘talkies’ (in Hyderabad, where I live, numerous old cinema houses are defunct or being torn down to make way for multiplexes), where the multiplexes themselves represent the space of cultural mobilities, a cosmopolitan space of cultural consumption. All this makes us consumer citizens of the world. Within the space of four ﬂoors of a mall, I move between worlds—American Gap to Finnish Nokia to Australian Foster’s. My shopping experience is a cosmopolitan one because I routinely buy and use products that are designed, produced and marketed from beyond Indian borders. It marks my mobility as a consumer when I do so, even if I am not alerted to (or politically troubled by) the demise of khadi (except for high-end varieties), the destruction of the swadesi consumer experience of native textiles and the declining presence of ‘purely’ Indian products.15 I am a 182

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mobile consumer of the world’s products even as the products move towards me. This is the political subtext to the meanings (or myths) that circulate around the term ‘cosmopolitan’ today. It is important to understand that this mobility of consumption within ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ is not a distinct cultural sphere. Urban studies has shown how the circulation of symbolic, that is, objects that are seen as being primarily about value, prestige, pleasure and entertainment (cultural artefacts such as ﬁlms or music) rather than about utility (say, furniture or clothing)—forms is intrinsically linked to the economy (Scott 2001). That is, cities become sites of global economies through the circulation of cultural goods: Hollywood ﬁlms in Indian theatres, Indian yoga in Manhattan and Shah Rukh Khan everywhere. Culture industries of the media (ﬁlm, television, publishing), fashion-intensive consumer goods sectors (clothing, jewellery), services (advertising, tourism, entertainment) and creative professions (graphic arts, web-designing) are crucial to a city’s economy. When advertisements speak of ‘global Indians’—also a fashion line—they treat it as just a cultural process and product and quietly de-link it (for public culture) from the economies of the city that generate, depend on and proﬁt from these products. ‘Unpacking’ cosmopolitanism alerts us to the determinedly consumerist element within the glamourization of the ‘global’ or the ‘multicultural’. This commodiﬁcation of symbolic goods—where these products and services are sold and bought like any other commodity—is integral to a city’s growth and expansion in the late 20th century. In other words, we can now redeﬁne the city as a space of economic ‘ﬂows’ and mobilities where economy and culture are linked in the process of: • local manufacturing (‘under licence from …’), • creative industries and marketing (advertising), • social investment (fashion values, prestige cultures of a product) and • producing and marketing consumer pleasures. Each of these processes must be seen as instances and instantiation of global cultural and economic mobilities. When Gap can determine the fashion scene in college campuses in India, or Ralph Lauren inﬂuences 183

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the up-market clientele with its ‘seasonal’ designs, what we have is a mobile culture that is incorporated into the routine rhythms of a city elite’s consumerism. ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is this mobility oﬀered to a consumer through these processes of globalization, the new forms of economy (dependent upon symbolic goods rather than utilitarian goods). What is fascinating about ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ is that we rarely see the circulation of symbolic forms, whether ﬁlms or a Shakira album as being about economy. In other words, what sustains the circulation and mobility of consumer-pleasing symbolic goods is an invisible mobility of economic ﬂows. We do not see or understand the global trade agreements, the take-overs (except in rare cases such as the arrival of Walmart), the mergers, the lay-oﬀs, the end of subsidies and the slow erosion of local shopping and products in the glamourized world of ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’. To put it another way, ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ is a glamourized, packaged mobility of symbolic and cultural forms that masks more devious, insidious and unsettling mobilities of global capital. By making and marking cosmopolitanism as a consumer’s routine paradise through the oﬀer of multiple foreign brands, contemporary global capitalism erases the dangerous mobilities of exploitative labour, one-sided trade agreements and unethical corporate policies. It is also important to note that it is not simply about elite mobility, but what the geographer Doreen Massey terms a ‘politics of mobility and access’: Who can travel, where and how. Does the migrant labour and the skilled software engineer travel as similar kinds of ‘cosmopolitans’? (Massey cited in Eade 1997: 10). Assuredly not; and one just has to observe immigration oﬃcials at international airports to see the diﬀerence (a point made by Salman Rushdie in his essay ‘Step Across This Line’ [2002: 428]). ‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ is also an interesting form of mobility where the intimate and the domestic intersect with the global and the universal. Mobility of products and services into the home, family or an individual’s personal choices often takes into account the local culture, traditions and customs. This means, ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ accounts for traditional preferences of the family or the individual. Thus, foreign coﬀee brands or Maggi noodles as options are constrained by the family’s customs: ﬁlter coﬀee, idlis or paranthas as breakfast? 184

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‘Mundane cosmopolitanism’ has to negotiate these intimate or domestic contexts and conditions in which men, women and children acquire or use these products and services. Pollock et al. (2000) have proposed that the intimate sphere is linked with cosmopolitanism because the private sphere is increasingly connected with the public realm. Extending this argument, the ‘home oﬃce’ constitutes a link of the home/ intimate with the world/public. In this, the intimate sphere informs and negotiates the public domain on an everyday basis. The sphere of domesticity is no more disconnected from the public. Hence, cosmopolitanism cannot be seen as a feature of the public sphere alone. Also, with the intrusion of the public/global/foreign into the domestic sphere on a day-to-day basis (as noted earlier)—the ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’— we need to locate cosmopolitanism as a feature of domestic life too.

‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’ and the Mobilities of the Local So far we have seen how cosmopolitanism is packaged as a desirable cultural and social condition which masks the hidden contradictions and iniquities of the trade-industrial-political system. The global movement of a Sony or a Kelloggs is more than just the mobility of a product—it is the mobility of a chain of processes, from migrant labour to low-wage Third World worker to global capital’s take-over of local markets and manufacturers. However, signiﬁcant ‘counters’ or even appropriations of such a cosmopolitan mobility of consumption also exist. Non-elite forms of travel and trade in post-colonial nations constitute such a counter. Migrant workers—low-skilled or even unskilled workers: the Filipino nannies in UK, Malayali nurses in USA, Pakistani and Indian labourers in the Middle East—bring with them their own cultural contexts. They are mobile cultural ‘packages’ that also assimilate the culture of their chosen place of work, but do not quite abandon their ‘root’ cultures. In the Middle Eastern context, for instance, the Pakistani labourer and the Indian one might embrace the immediate setting and culture of the Arab world and become ‘cosmopolitan’. They constitute diﬀerent ethnic groups within the Gulf, making it a cosmopolitan place. Yet, their religious traditions and customs are not entirely abandoned. Such a migrant, working-class 185

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or minority presence alters the very nature of cosmopolitanism. This is ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’. ‘Vernacular cosmopolitanism’ is the question of whether ‘the local, parochial, rooted, culturally speciﬁc and demotic may co-exist with the translocal, transnational, transcendent, elitist, enlightened, universalist and modernist’ (Werbner 2006: 2). The vernacular upsets the elitist cosmopolitan. It marks the insidious, subversive and often violently rebellious cultural interaction—which has been named ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ to indicate its violent reprisal of elite or homogeneous cosmopolitanism—with the super-imposed (as in, brought in from the outside rather than adapted from below or within) cultural artefacts or frames (Cliﬀord 1997). Cosmopolitanism is an outlook that relies on the recognition of difference. It is a ‘way of seeing the world’ that recognizes the diﬀerences in culture and tolerates them (Fine 2007: 134). It refuses to see the world in terms of ﬁxed categories, and instead locates inter-subjective, common and shared ‘moments’. When the vernacular, the local and the non-elite negotiate with the global, we have a diﬀerent kind of cosmopolitanism. ‘Vernacular cosmopolitanism’ would be exempliﬁed by not only the resistance to Walmart or Reliance Retail in India, but (and perhaps more accurately) by the appropriation of the global by the local. Every fashion line has a native equivalent that is modelled after the global one. Backpacks with brand labels such as Diesel or JanSport are available in every single city in India—all manufactured locally. Cinema and music piracy constitutes an infringement of global copyright conventions (it might be possible to see international copyright conventions and Intellectual Property Rights as an attempt at forging a cosmopolitanism of sorts) at local levels. ‘Vernacular cosmopolitanism’, like Cliﬀord’s ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ (1997) is often violent and bitter. The scarf issue in France (2004) was such a ‘discrepant’ or ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ where a thus-far assimilated migrant community—Muslims in France—revolted against what they saw as an enforced cultural code (BBC News 2004). This marks a wholly diﬀerent order and modality of mobility. I see ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ as a mobility that thwarts another mobility: 186

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a resistant mobility. ‘Resistant’ mobility is a counter-mobility where local cultures, modes of production, marketing and consumer networks step in to prevent the dissemination or even channels of circulation of global brands and signs. Instead—as is the case with ethnicization of global brands by smaller stores and manufacturing units, or even with local patronage among ethnic communities outside India—they create alternate mechanisms of disseminating the same products (and thereby alter the proﬁts) or create diﬀerent products itself by appropriating the styling of the global brand. Pnina Werbner has shown, as a version of what I am calling the ‘resistant mobility’ of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, how working-class cosmopolitans from Pakistan created routes of travel for cosmetics, food, jewellery, clothing and even brides. These, Werbner argues, created ‘global pathways’ that forged transnational marriages and connections between Pakistani families spread across the world (Werbner 1999). I expand on Werbner’s thesis to suggest that while such ‘global pathways’ are linked to cosmopolitan contexts, they also mark oﬀ a trajectory within the cosmopolitan map. They mark oﬀ a space of travel, consumption and identity within a cosmopolitan ethos of consumerism because they reconﬁgure the objects that travel. What I am calling ‘resistant mobility’ within ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ is not a rejection of the global brand as much as a negotiation where local brands and products try to retain their customer, or modify the global brand to serve the interests of the economically underprivileged. If cosmopolitanism is a mark of the elite, then the resistant mobility of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ appropriates a global brand (made available by cosmopolitan deals and mobilities) to produce cheaper versions for the non-elite. The widespread circulation of JanSport bags, Ray-Ban sunglasses or Nike shoes priced at a few hundred rupees in Indian cities is resistant mobility—a mobile consumption pattern that upsets and subverts the cosmopolitan stores of the mall. Mobility is then packaged for us in diverse ways. It is metaphor and context, a politics and a cultural condition. The high-speed edition of life is one where mobility of various kinds—travel, movement, speed— is the desired life form. Automobiles and shopping, cultural mobilities and cosmopolitanism are manifestations of mobility in our everyday lives. ‘Packaging’ here is the form mobility takes for us: driven by the 187

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logic of consumer culture, the ideologies of capitalism, the technologies of communications and the politics of globalization, mobility remains the dominant theme of contemporary life and culture.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7

It should be clear that I am speaking of urban, empowered mobilities here. Other mobilities—refugees, exiles, prisoners, soldiers, the displaced immigrants —are not part of this study. The refugee or the exile represents mobility of a particular type, and reveals the cultural (and economic) politics of both the originating country as well as the ‘receiving’ one. One needs to only look at the Bangladeshi immigrants in the Northeast, the Narmada displaced, the tribals of Kerala who are losing their lands, the animosity towards the ‘north Indians’ engineered by Raj Thackeray to understand the savage nature of some of these other mobilities. Such mobilities demand an ethical reading of the cultural and other politics of immigration and travel. For a thoughtful study of the refugee as an ‘ethical ﬁgure’ see Aihwa Ong (2003). I am grateful to Akhila Ramnarayan for drawing my attention to Ong’s work. One of the things this chapter does not do in its study of mobility is the culture of speed. Speed, as Paul Virilio and others have argued (1994, 1995), is integral to late 20th century cultures. The revision of Descartes’ maxim is from Mark Amerika’s Grammatron (see http://www.grammatron.com/htc1.0/dialogue.html.). See the special issue of Theory, Culture and Society. 2004. 21(4/5) for some of the best work on ‘automobilities’. Also, see the work of John Urry in Sociology beyond Societies (2000) and Daniel Miller (ed.), Car Cultures (2001b). The autonomy of the car is also, like all technology, raced and gendered. Social theorists have shown how when women learn to drive they very often double their workload because then it is the woman who ends up ferrying children to school or doing the shopping (Jain 2002). Similarly, ‘driving while black’, as Paul Gilroy (2001) has shown, makes them prone to over-regulation through policies of racial proﬁling. I take my cue for the ‘cultural logics’ of the automobile from David Gartman’s ‘Three Ages of the Automobile’ (2004). Car pooling and shared cabs of business process outsourcing services (BPOs) mark exceptions. The former is a community of people who do not use individual vehicles but a community of individuals who know each other already (unlike mass transport). The second is again a form of community-formation. I am grateful to Anna Kurian for drawing my attention to these new forms of privatized mobility. 188

Life, the High-speed Edition 8 See http://www.autocarindia.com/new/Information.asp?id=2062 (accessed on 7 June 2008). 9 See http://hyundaiverna.co.in/verna.asp?pagename=design (accessed on 7 June 2008). 10 For a study of the rhetoric of car advertisements, see Joanna Thornborrow (1998). 11 There are literally dozens of essays on the gendered discourse, the stereotyping of woman’s work and the division of labour embodied in cookbooks. See, for example, Neuhaus (1999), Newlyn (1999), Zafar (1999) and Eves (2005), among others. 12 A cosmopolitan is a ‘citizen of the cosmos’. The Stoics in ancient Greece spoke of it. The Buddhist sanghas, according to some thinkers, were an early example of cosmopolitanism (Dharwadker 2001: 5–6). 13 Major studies of the political consequences and processes of cosmopolitanism include: Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998), Daniele Archibugi (ed), Debating Cosmopolitics (2003), Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006), Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (2007), among others. 14 Scott Lash and John Urry speak of the ‘footloose’ nature of the professionalmanagerial classes of the advanced societies (1994: 29). See also Jörg Dürrschmidt (2000): 60–90. 15 However, it must be noted that even ‘Indian’ products were manufactured on machines imported from other nations—right from Tata steel to Reliance fabric.

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Conclusion Unpacking

T

his book has argued that our experience and perception of health, success, comfort and luxury, mobility and cosmopolitanism are mediated by intersecting, interpenetrating and even conﬂicting discourses circulating in the mass media. The persistent theme of the book has been the link of conditions of everyday life to consumer culture, especially in the informationalism, glamourization and managerialism that constitute the contemporary discourses of health, risk, comfort and mobilities. This is ‘packaging’, the process of meaningmaking for particular ends. Packaging Life underscored the centrality of representation, narrative, image-making and rhetoric—‘packaging’—in enabling discourses to circulate. The semantic scope of the term ‘packaging’, as used throughout the book, works with its adjunct meanings and connotations: ‘bundle’ and ‘deliver’. I have used it to refer to the bundling together of ideas and products, where ideologies of consumerism are entwined with those of self-care or notions of cosmopolitan fashion are aligned with local pride. I have also used ‘packaging’ in its sense of ‘transportation’—the ‘delivery’ of ideas and meanings through images in multiple media forms to the consumer, citizen, community and individual. ‘Packaging’ is a term I use to describe a deliberate, organized act of communication—narration— and the vehicle of meaning production, delivery and reception, where multiple ideologies, purposes, eﬀects are bundled together. Health comes to us packaged as a culture of care and cure when a ‘low calorie edition’ of life is projected as the most desirable form. This packaging generates a ‘healthism’ where a particular condition of the body is projected and promoted as desirable and acquirable. Healthism promotes, I demonstrated, an ideology where the care of the self was a personal responsibility, especially in the age of lifestyle diseases. Health is a state of the body whose norms, limits and deviations are ‘packaged’ for us, and whose ‘achievement’ becomes a consumer ideal.

Conclusion

The chapter on comfort traced a shift from comfort to luxury. In the late 20th century, the chapter argued, the emphasis is on Utility Plus. ‘Stylization’ is central to this condition where the product and the self are both ‘branded’, and luxury becomes an intertextual narrative where brand- and self-narratives merge seamlessly, each feeding oﬀ the other. A de-moralization of luxury has occurred where indulgence is no more immoral, rather it is a constituent of a successful personhood. Products and services are ‘sacralized’ through a bestowing of singularization, including an antiquarianism, where objects are transported and valued across spatial and temporal zones to produce polychronic, ‘untimely’ and multi-spatial artefacts. The chapter on ‘packaging risk’ argued that everyday life is increasingly depicted as risk-ﬁlled—and, therefore, proposes a ‘bubble-wrapped edition’ of life. The discourse, of risk, I proposed, participates in a discourse of managerialism—but a managerialism that is not only about organizations and careers, but also about everyday life and the self. The packaging of risk also includes, I demonstrated, expert cultures, where the solution to the imminent risk is provided by the expert. In the last chapter, I examined a dominant form of public culture: the culture of mobility. We live in a ‘culture of mobility’ marked, primarily, by connectivity as mobility—generating what I have termed the ‘high-speed edition’ of life. It explored the multiple mobilities of cell phones, social networking and mobile subjectivity and the apotheosis of mobility in the late 20th century: cosmopolitanism. If I were to summarize in a phrase, Packaging Life is a study of the culture of management—managing the self, identity, homes, impressions and styles, ideas, emotions, product-use and health. This managerialism is constructed subtly through narratives and representations. The book’s emphasis is clear: everyday life is informed through and through by modes of representation in the mass media that ‘sell’ us products, services, ideas and opinions about thin bodies, luxurious villas, social justice, global warming and inspire, scare or ask us to manage bodies, ﬁnances, leisure, families, mind, emotions, in short, the components of our everyday experiences. ‘Selling’ and ‘consumption’ here are taken to mean more than just the merchandising and passive purchase-use of products and services. In this book, it is taken to mean the making-available of conceptual frameworks, belief systems and an envelope of opinions within 191

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which an individual or group’s thinking, actions, responses and emotional states can occur and, more importantly, altered, sensitized, roused and driven in particular directions. These conceptual frameworks help us perceive the world, and are ﬁrst made visible to us through narrative and rhetoric—language—in ads, political speeches, cinema, product biography and expert advice. The task the book sets for itself is to probe the ways in which our beliefs, opinions and products are packaged for us to consume, practice and trust in. The construction of conceptual frameworks (within representations) that inﬂuence the way we think, believe and see the world whether in the domain of health, risk, comfort or mobility demands an ‘unpacking’ that exposes the regulatory grid and cultural politics of these representations.

*** The process of ‘unpacking’ serves an explicatory purpose, decoding representational practices that we have so far accepted as innocent, whether it is the rhetoric of the expert, the ravings of the hysterical ‘the end-isnear’ apocalyptist, the suaveness of the salesman or the glamorization of thin by ramp-walking models. To ‘unpack’ is to render transparent, and therefore, open to scrutiny, disbelief and, most importantly, interrogation, those processes of meaning-making that convince us to buy, believe, panic, diet and insure. To ‘unpack’ is to unfold the cultural politics that are secreted within entertainment, educational media, dollops of information and the expert discourse of medicine or climate. It is the name of the process of critical examination that tells us exactly how promotional material, information brochures and advice columns build on our fears, anxieties and desires in order to sell, convince, persuade and believe; in short, to consume. ‘Unpacking’ is the exegetical process of peeling aside the façade that makes consumers of us all—whether it is to scapegoat a community, buy a product or mimic a model. The decoding of representations, or what this book terms ‘unpacking’, is ﬁrmly positioned within the discourse studies component of Cultural Studies. None of the everyday structures of thought or action are unmediated or neutral; it is representation and meaning-making that make them appear so. And therefore, ‘to unpack’ is an imperative if 192

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we are to be alert to the cultural politics of public representations in cinema, the soap opera, the health column or the men’s magazine. ‘Packaging’, as this book has demonstrated, encodes particular notions of the family, the individual or ‘India’, even as it constructs ‘roles’ for individuals and collectives. It maps abstract values such as ‘comfort’ or ‘luxury’ onto classes and economic groups, onto particular spaces (urban culture) and practices (clubbing, global cuisine consumption), and thus, engages in politically signiﬁcant cultural rhetorics that organizes individuals and groups into income brackets, consumer types and vote banks. It smuggles ideologies of gender roles, class, success and wealth into advice, reportage, entertainment and education. Forms of representation in public culture blur or cement over the ideological grids of capitalism, consumerism, exploitation or oppression. ‘Packaging’ is the glamorous representation that must be ‘unpacked’ for the politics of popular forms. Constructions—a term to indicate meaning-making and representations—of aged people, the promotion of luxury as a desirable quality, or the emphasis on material success often call into question, reinforce or marginalize individuals or groups that do not ﬁt into acceptable notions and categories of ‘youth’, ‘successful’ or ‘stylish’, and thus, construct power relations between people. All discourses are about power, and are hence, political in the sense that they seek/hope to inﬂuence people’s actions. This could be the consciousness-raising campaigns against global warming, the sympathetic-consideration of a medical condition, the promotion of lifestyle changes via alternative medicine or the whipping up of moral panics around the supposed corruption of Indian youth. Thus, meanings and representations have a concrete interventionary role in people’s thinking and actions—whether in the purchase of a product or the political opinions about immigrants. The promotional culture of consumerism relies on the construction of categories and notions, and is therefore, an exercise in power, for it catalogues, discerns or discriminates among individuals and groups. Promotional culture, or ‘packaging’, appropriates prevalent ‘cultural rhetorics’ in order to persuade its audience. Cultural rhetorics is political for the underlying cultural codes rely on speciﬁc notions of family, gender, class or leisure in order to reinforce, subvert or reject power relations between genders, classes, groups or communities. The woman ‘responsible’ for the health of her family 193

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is deemed, as the chapter on risk showed, for instance, to possess a ‘domestic autonomy’ that allows her to determine the health of her family and thus, choose the right forms of consumption. Gender evidently informs the cultural politics of domestic consumption. When the Idea adverts with Abhishek Bachchan erase all caste, family, spatial and class locations and substitutes these aﬃliations with numbers (the mobile phone numbers), it indulges in a political fantasy of the re-formation of identities. What needs to be ‘unpacked’ in this advert is the packaged naturalization of diﬀerence into an illusion of equality. ‘Unpacking’ is the careful teasing out of these discourses so that we never again look at everyday life and its discourses—the VLCC ad, the helpful insurance salesman or the invitation to luxury—as ‘innocent’. ‘Unpacking’ is the generation of dissident reading practices so that we learn to scrutinize these rhetorical forms of promotional, advice or expert cultures for what they conceal. Unpacking cultural politics is a Cultural Studies project. The task for Cultural Studies, especially of the discourse-studies kind embodied in Packaging Life (and which it packages!), is this unpacking of the political subtexts of narratives about risk, health, comfort and mobilities in Indian public culture in multiple media and genres. These narratives are embedded—or, more accurately, constitute the very stuﬀ of—promotional, expert, entertainment and advice culture. Cultural Studies reiterates the need for a politically alert reading, and Packaging Life’s ‘unpacking’ calls attention to the question of power—in formations of gender relations, class marking, urban spacing or media representations—of ﬁnance, ideas, social organization, domestic conditions and individual choices within these four discourses. Such an ‘unpacking’ has to proceed from a speciﬁc assumption from within Cultural Studies: that acts of representation are political, that narratives are embedded in discourses that have social manifestations, and that rhetoric possesses considerable cultural power and eﬀects on the individual, collective and social imagination. The task of this ‘unpacking’ is to see how such representations codify particular practices of discrimination, support, emancipation or oppression as natural and legitimize power relations among groups and between individuals. ‘Unpacking’ is the process of unravelling the ‘delivery’ mechanisms and ‘bundled’ ideologies of public culture’s representations. It is to offer an interpretive framework for reading those cultural practices and 194

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representations that have always been taken to be, or masquerade as, natural, transparent and obvious. To ‘unpack’ is to tease out the multiple ways of coding power relations within discourses in order to alert us to the endless potential of rhetorical and representational strategies for controlling, altering and surveilling social relations and the cultural imaginary. To ‘unpack’ is to explore the possibilities for emancipation, alternative thinking, radicalism and resistance within discourses and prevalent structures of signiﬁcation by encouraging a dissident reading practice. To unpack is, therefore, a political act.

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216

Index

affective mobility (automobiles), 158–60 autonomous geography, 153–55 automobilization of space, 160–63 biomilitary state, 29–36 brand biography, 62–65 care of the self, 19–23 comfort (definition), 46 comfort, culture of, 47–49 connectivity, 138–41. See also multiple mobilities ‘cultural borrowing’, 63–65 culture of care and cure, 13–23. See also perfectible body; care of the self culture of the supplement, xxiii, 18, 50–54 de-moralization of luxury, 70–74 demythifying risk, 105–09 embodying risk, 109–11 emotional imaging, 112–17. See also moral panics expert, culture of, 117–19 food mobilities, 164–78 food cosmopolitanism, 171–75 food and imaginative geography, 175–76

imagination and becoming-real of risk, 98–101 immaterial mobility, 138–41 information and risk, 101–11. See also risk language; demythifying risk; embodying risk informational culture of health, 6–10 immaterial mobility, 138, 139, 173. See also multiple mobilities livability, 49, 50, 53, 54, 61 managing health, 23–42. See also biomilitary state; technologization of health; medical spectacles. materials of comfort, 54–59 medicalization of the everyday, 4–13. See also healthism; informational culture of health medical spectacles, 37–42 mobile autonomy, 150–53 mobile effects (automobiles), 155–57 mobile subjectivity (social networking), 141–44 moral panics, 112–17. See also emotional imaging multiple mobilities (cell phones), 138–41 mundane cosmopolitanism, 181–85

genomic art, 29

obesity (packaging of ), xii–xiii, 12, 17, 20, 22, 32, 105, 107 ornamentalism and luxury, 74–76

healthism, xii, xxii, 2, 10–13, 15, 16, 42, 190 Human Genome Project, 34–35

perfectible body, 14–19

Packaging Life re-enchantment and luxury, 76–92. See also sacralization risk language, 103–05 risk practices, 120–31 risk and blame, 120–25 risk aversion, 125–31

rituals of sacralization, 90–92 social marketing (health), 36–37 self-branding, 65–68 stylization of life, 59–68

sacralization, 79–92 singularization, 80–83 antiquarianism and polychronicity, 83–90

ultrasound, 27–28

technologization of health, 24–29

vernacular cosmopolitanism, 185–88 Visible Human Project, 24, 25–27

218

About the Author

P

ramod K. Nayar was Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies, University of Cambridge (2000–2001), the UK, the Charles Wallace India Trust-British Council Fellow, University of Kent at Canterbury, the UK (2001) and Fulbright Senior Fellow, Cornell University, USA (2005–06). Some of his most recent books include Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (SAGE 2009), An Introduction to Cultural Studies (2008), Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction (2008), English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), Reading Culture: Theory, Praxis, Politics (SAGE 2006) and Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology (SAGE 2004) besides books on the 1857 ‘Mutiny’, English Literature and Literary Theory. Forthcoming are book-length works on cyberculture and new media, a popular history of the Raj and postcolonialism.