Anthropologists understand that work is not just about process, it’s about people. If you lose sight of that, you lose.
Anita Ward, Senior Vice President, Texas Commerce Bank
Economic activity, in whatever form, is central to human societies, so it has always been a key area of study for anthropologists. Most societies now rely heavily on a diverse range of businesses and industries, and all, to varying degrees, participate in a globalizing economic market (see Fisher and Downey 2006). The anthropology of economic life has changed accordingly, and today researchers are involved in examining a host of different aspects of ‘how people make a living’: thus they work with resource industries; a range of service and manufacturing industries; designers and architects; communications and media industries; and market research and advertising companies.
As in other areas, anthropologists think about the internal dynamics of human groups, and also about the wider, external issues that shape these. So when it comes to working with industries, they consider their organizational cultures, and also the larger social and economic context in which production takes place. The most compelling external reality for contemporary businesses and industries is the
in previous chapters, globalization is of considerable interest to social scientists, and many anthropologists have focused on it directly, considering how it affects different communities, demanding new economic practices and disseminating a range of cultural ideas and values.
Globalization is a pattern of economic and cultural change involving mutual influence of previously separate and distinct societies. This is not a new phen- omenon, because the entire period of colonization was one of unequal trans- national economic and cultural exchange. In the postcolonial world, the processes of globalization are made possible by the advent of world capitalism. Multinational corporations are now world powers operating in a world market. On the local level, the flow of investment, profit and consumer goods across borders can provide access to cash for the producers of some luxury goods. In the long run, however, the evidence indicates that peripheral peoples become less well-off because of globalization, while wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a small elite. (Bestor 2003: 367)
Theodore Bestor looked at globalization in the fishing industry, examining how sushi came to be eaten internationally, and how the creation of a wider market affected bluefin tuna fishers, whose catch is now auctioned for vast sums and flown across the world. He underlines the dynamism of the process as well as its capacity for creating new transnational, inter-cultural relationships and internationalizing previously particular cultural tastes:
Bluefin tuna may seem at first an unlikely case study in globalization. But as the world rearranges itself – around silicon chips, Starbucks coffee, or sashimi- grade tuna – new channels for global flows of capital and commodities link far- flung individuals and communities in unexpected new relationships. The tuna trade is a prime example of the globalization of a regional industry, with intense international competition and thorny environmental regulations; centuries-old
practices combined with high technology; realignments of labor and capital in response to international regulation; shifting markets; and the diffusion of culinary culture as tastes for sushi, and bluefin tuna, spread worldwide. (Bestor 2003: 368)
Caren Kaplan (1995) was an early analyst of globalization. She has considered the way that ‘ethical’ corporations such as the Body Shop and Ben and Jerry’s promulgate notions of a world ‘without boundaries’ in which, through multi- national corporations, European traders deal directly with producers rather than ‘middlemen’. The Body Shop proposed that ‘free trade without middlemen means liberation’ (Kaplan 1995: 430). Kaplan’s critique of the way that this advertising represents a multinational enterprise is an important one, highlighting the language that is used and the values about globalization and capitalism that it carries. She looks at how ‘the world’ is represented in these discourses, as a place where there is a flow of culture and capital between the West and communities that are celebrated as ‘native’, ‘authentic’ or ‘tribal’. As an illustration of this rosy view, she examines a joint advertisement by American Express and The Body Shop:
‘Trade Not Aid’ is a way of trading honorably with indigenous communities in disadvantaged areas – not changing the environment or the culture. Instead we listen to what these people need and try to help them with it. What we bring back with us are stories – how they do things, the connections; the essential wisdom of indigenous groups . . . Customers come into the Body Shop to buy hair conditioner and find a story about the Xingu reserve and the Kayapo Indians who collect Brazil nuts for us. We showed them a simple process for extracting oil from the nut, which consequently raises the value of the raw ingredient we use. The result is we pay them more for it, and that gives them an alternative to their logging income, which in turn protects the rain forest. (Anita Roddick. Advertisement in Kaplan 1995)
Kaplan carefully picked apart the messages in this material, which, she says, ‘can be read as the celebrity marriage of entrepreneurial capitalism to bourgeois feminist travel-and-adventure motifs’:
First, the ad copy refers to a site of consumption that can only be in a metropolitan location where information about the Xingu reserve and the Kayapo Indians will be pleasingly novel. It assumes that the customer in the metropole will enter a store to buy a mundane item such as hair conditioner only to procure simultaneously something ‘different’. Secondly, it is implied that consumption leads not only to the pleasure of owning something but to the acquisition of a moral object lesson in Roddick’s entrepreneurial philosophy, a set of practices she calls ‘Trade not Aid’. Trade not Aid emits bits of 1980s-style Thatcher– Reagan injunctions in the 1990s, displaying a savvy, neoconservative message all
the conditions of production through primitivism. The Kayapo, a tribe that is well-known in anthropological and environmentalist circles for resisting both national and corporate domination by utilizing sophisticated media, are depicted as simple ‘story tellers’ who convey an ‘essential wisdom’. (Kaplan, 1995: 435–6)
As Kaplan points out, the discourse gives a simple, polarized view of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world people, and a vision of
vanishing natives who require managed altruism from a concerned source of capital development . . . the benevolent capitalism of The Body Shop . . . What is particularly chilling to me is The Body Shop’s representation of a corporate
replacement of the nation-state. It appears to be The Body Shop that funds and
manages development projects, just as it appears to be The Body Shop that addresses health care, financing, and environmental concerns in its global reach . . . Both the written text and the images in these ads glamorize and seek to legitimate unequal transnational economic relations . . . The myth of a ‘world without boundaries’ leaves our material differences intact and even exacerbates the asymmetries of power that stratify our lived experiences. (Kaplan 1995: 437–9)
Although Kaplan uses the ‘ethical’ Body Shop as an example, her major point is not to have a go at this particular company: her aim is rather to show how repre- sentations create imaginary communities and ‘mask’ the real economic workings of business and commerce and the inequalities that are created and maintained by global capitalism. There is an underlying issue – a vital one for human societies – about the weakening of democratic processes as the functions and services of elected governments are taken over by multinational corporations accountable only to their shareholders.1
Global business is concerned, fundamentally, with the use and distribution of resources. This is particularly evident in resource-based industries, such as mining, oil exploration and – as noted earlier – materials such as timber, and food produc- tion. Because global economies are reaching further and further into what were until recently remote areas, many anthropologists who work with indigenous communities and peasant societies are now considering how these deal with the incursion of enthusiastic developers and greater involvement in expanding global markets.
This expansion has major social and environmental implications, as demon- strated, for example, by Stuart Kirsch’s (2001) research with communities in Papua New Guinea, where mining has become a major part of the country’s economy. Kirsch’s work, which I mentioned in Chapter 1, points to the massive ecological
damage caused by mining in the headwaters of the Ok Tedi river, and its economic and social effects on the communities in the area. Observing the dominance of transnational corporations in the equation, he points to the local communities’ relative powerlessness and inability to demand environmental protection, in an area vital to their social and economic well-being (Kirsch 2003).