Tony Piro, at Calamaties of Nature, has a great cartoon exposing how commodified forms of rebellion can be quite expensive:
(I cut out the last panel so the cartoon would fit better, view the whole strip here.)
When tokens of resistance can be bought and sold, rebellion becomes something you purchase and perform. The irony is that this, as Piro points out, can actually connect you even deeper to the very structures you want to resist.
Z at It’s The Thought That Counts asked us to submit for commentary a product called the BeBand on sale at Target. The Band is designed for pregnant women and women who’ve recently given birth:
(Note the carefully placed rings! This model is no unwed mother!)
The box says that it will “cover unbuttoned pre-pregnancy jeans,” “hold up too-big maternity pants,” and allow you to “fit into pre-pregnancy pants sooner after giving birth”:
But it’s interesting that that’s the fine print. The large print emphasizes beauty (“Be Belly Beautiful”) and the product is also sold under the name BellaBand.
Questions:
I’ve never been pregnant, is this a new product? If so, is it a useful product or an invented need?
Even if this is a useful product, what do you think of the emphasis on beauty on the part of the marketers?
NEW! (Mar. ’10): Along the same lines, R. Walker told us about a product called Shrinkx Hips:
For the low price of $54.99, “Shrinkx Hips provides constant, even pressure to gently guide hips back to their pre-pregnancy position” (if you wear it for 8 weeks). R.W. said it seems like a torture device, and I rather agree. But hey, apparently it makes you look like that model afterward, so what’s a little pain?
The first Rockefeller Center Christmas tree was put up in 1931, during the Great Depression:
In 1944 the tree was left unlit because of WWII and the need to blackout cities to avoiding bombing.
In 1967, the tree was opportunity for Canada and the U.S. to demonstrate good will to one another. It was Canada’s 100th birthday and, in honor of the milestone, they donated a tree.
In 1971, Rockefeller Center bowed to the environmental movement and agreed to recycle the tree. In the picture below it is being taken to a processing plant to be turned into mulch.
Later, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and Habitat for Humanity would put the tree to use.
In 2007, the tree was lit with LED lights instead of incandescent bulbs in order to save energy. NBC covered the story very favorably, attracting criticism given that it was NBC’s parent company, General Electric, who manufactured and sold the bulbs.
In 2008, signifying its commercialization, a 10 foot tall, 550-lb star made with 25,000 Swarovski crystals topped the tree. Rumor is that Swarovski paid $1.5 million dollars for the privilege, while pop star Fergie had the privilege of helping unveil the over-the-top tree topper:
All photographs and information borrowed from Time.
Way back in June Missives from Marx sent in a link to a story at Dark Roasted Blend about tourism in the rainforest along the Amazon River near Manaus, Brazil. One stop was at a small riverside village where tourists are taken to have an “encounter of two different cultures.” Here’s a photo from the post:
Underneath the photo was the following caption:
A cruise ship arrival is a great event for the small village located on the mouth of Valeria River. The friendly villagers are always happy to welcome all visitors, eager to make contact and get news from foreign lands.
“Friendly villagers” “eager to make contact” and learn about “foreign lands”? It’s an incredibly patronizing description that sounds like it could have been in a travel brochure for the British Empire decades ago.
From the post:
Because of the small space, the visitors are literally poking into the river people’s lives. But they look happy enough to share with us their ways of life: we are being shown their schools, the local market and even the way their houses are made.
They seem to understand that visits like these sustain the little trade they are able to make by selling souvenirs and exquisite crafts. There are very few inhabitants and they are all very proud of their amazonian heritage. Although modern living is slowly making its way through, they dress up with traditional costumes.
Yes, they do understand that the tourist visits sustain their economy. They let people poke into their lives because they need the money. And they dress up in traditional “costumes” (?) because it makes tourists happy and then the tourists give them more money.
The kids, apparently, haven’t learned the etiquette for dealing with tourists. The post has several images of children with labels like “Little Warrior,” with descriptions such as:
They are not used being on display for the large audience and they all look like they would be happier playing, rather than demonstrating their skills. One particular girl attracted the crowds with her beautiful, magnetic eyes. She was demonstrating archery, but her eyes were throwing the real darts.
The poster acknowledges that the children don’t like being on display, but doesn’t think that might mean that a) you shouldn’t then treat them like tourist attractions or b) maybe the adults don’t really like being on display much either but have learned to play along better. I also wonder whether the children are demonstrating “their skills” or whether a kid holding a bow and arrows is part of the play-acting for tourists.
I once went on a river tour outside of Manaus; the one described here sounds almost identical. I felt uneasy about the idea of visiting the village but there wasn’t really a choice (they forced us off the boat at each stop) and my boyfriend at the time was excited, and so we walked around. It was an incredibly creepy experience. The people there were obviously poor, and tourists were walking around gawking at them, feeling entirely comfortable looking right into their yards and houses. I felt terribly awkward; even my boyfriend felt weird and just wanted to leave. I would not say the people looked thrilled to see us. Some did, especially those selling soda at the cantina (part of that “modern world”). But more than one person, mostly children, glared. And it was very clear that they were being nice to us and offering to be in photos with tourists in hopes of making a little money.
The whole thing felt like cultural tourism–hey, Americans/Europeans! Look at these people in their pre-modern villages and traditional “costumes”! Isn’t this a neat cultural encounter? Feel free to roam around and look at anything you want–the jolly villagers are just thrilled to death to have you here!
In another case of this, James T. sent in this video, found at 3quarksdaily:
It’s distressing to see this type of tourism prestened in such a positive light without at least discussing the ethical issues that might arise when relatively wealthy tourists encounter an impoverished group dependent on tourists’ money for some of their livelihood.
Amber W. let us know about the “Consuming Kids” video series, which looks at how marketers target kids, both for their own spending power and for their influence over parents’ spending. Here’s the 7-part series, which is fascinating:
To commodify something is to take something that is not bought and sold and turn it into something that is. In this case, the commodity is a barf bag for pregnant women experiencing “morning” sickness. Be chic while you barf with “morning chicness” barf bags:
Heather writes:
According to the site, each bag is printed with ‘take one day at a time’ as an inspirational message. Pregnancy, it seems, is to be endured – and prettied up. I can certainly understand the impetus to want to be discreet about morning sickness (and the site does note that the bags could be used by anybody with nausea, or for doggie doo!), but I don’t know that there’s a need to ‘cute-ify’ a basic biological process.
Via Visual Economics. Though often presented as the domain of economists, sociologists have a lot to say about patterns of consumption and their effects. Though patterns of consumption and their effects are often presented as the domain of economists, sociologists have have a lot of interesting things to say about this topic.
Birdseed sent in this photo he took at a grocery store in Stockholm (which he posted at his blog as well):
The product is a new beverage, Fanta World Pineapple: Inspired by Jamaica. The two guys in the photo were hired to promote it at the little tiki-style counter. Johan says,
A couple of things leap out at me straight away:
* The continued (post-)colonial association of Jamaica with its plantation produce. The “inspiration” seems limited to the fact that pineapples are grown there for the consumption of the global North. (Canned goods like pineapples still have the charming moniker “kolonialvaror” (colonial merchandise) in Swedish retail jargon.)
* The ridiculous (verging on blackface) stereotypical representation of “Jamaicans” that the kids are suppsed to portray. It seems to have been done with extreme sloppiness – for instance, the Polynesian lava lava (a type of sarong) that they wear has absolutely nothing to do with Jamaica at all, but rather acts to represent an identity-less generalised tropics, dehumanised exotica.
The music was, of course, bad reggae.
I think Johan hits on an important issue here–how often the cultures of non-Westernized countries are mixed together into an undifferentiated image of exoticness–for instance, “tribal” fashion and “traditional” handicrafts often supposedly represent “Africa,” which is a meaningless category given the enormous diversity of cultures, languages, clothing styles, artistic motifs, and so on. But if you put some geometric designs and maybe an elephant on some cloth, it evokes “Africa.”
it’s also interesting that a certain hat shape and dreads have become such easily-identifiable shorthand symbols of Jamaica, and that Fanta is commodifying the idea of Jamaica to sell a product that has no reason to be more “inspired” by Jamaica than anywhere else pineapple is grown–Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, etc. etc. etc.
NEW! These commercials for Malibu Rum similarly commodify Jamaica:
For good measure, here is a print ad referring to the “island” that Malibu Rum is linking itself to:
(I cut out the last panel so the cartoon would fit better, view the whole strip here.)
