Abstract
Keywords
The book Consumerist Encounter is a daring project. Its audacity to ‘open’ the traditions of social anthropology and especially the Indian version to the social realities beyond a ‘class’ project (pun intended) where the line between mass and class are diffused simply because as the author maintains, it is about time academic discourses render such arrogant classifications not just dated but useless. Through a dissection of the semiotics and the semantics of culture, the rise of the middle class, the shifting temperament of the neoliberal economy and the agency of the public as both producers and consumers of images and imaginations, Bhattacharya attempts to locate India at the crossroads of a symbolic interaction and visual anthropology that are both compelling and necessary. It appears to be a conscious effort by the author, to position consumerism in mainstream sociological and anthropological discussion in India, granting it the attention it deserves. It almost appears that Bhattacharya introduces ‘consumerist encounter’ as a metaphor to understand every other social reality in India in contemporary times. And while doing this, in his words, the author releases the contours of Indian sociology and social anthropology from ‘rural house arrest’ because the agrarian fixation deserves a systematic dismantling.
Reading Sreedeep Bhattacharya’s book ‘The Consumerist Encounter’ is like riding a see-saw – every time you swing to the other end, you have an alien encounter. By alien I do not refer to a James Camron metaphor (although the author perhaps would not mind that). What I suggest instead is a lexicon of kaleidoscope each pregnant with contrasting yet complimentary meaning. In a word, reading this book is a joyride, not a playful one of that of a child, but like the first hike of a young adult – gasping for breath while scaling the next height – both at the same time. There is another reason why the playfulness, at least for me as a reader does not synchronize with the simplicity of a child. Bhattacharya’s playfulness with his words, the tones, the selection of coupling and decoupling of them are no child’s play – the flirting is epic while the delivery remains profound. Although he insists that his book does not carry a message as such, the subtext remains conspicuous throughout – what you do not find, finds you; that consumerism as a practice is exceptional because it is quotidian.
The book has nine chapters – each of them with an autonomous structure and persona. The introduction ‘Introducing the Intersections: Commodities and their Images in the Consumerist Landscape’ tickles anthropological anecdotes with capitalist accumulation realities – bringing de beers and the kula ring together in a sentence. This is only the beginning as the author instrumentalizes shock as a positive reinforcement throughout the book. The contrasting imagery of de beers and kula ring are prelude to such forthcoming actions. These visual juxtapositions are also captured in the 10 anti-commandments that could both be considered as humble submissions or vehement disclaimers.
Next in line is the first formal chapter titled ‘If Your Jeans Are Original, How Come Everyone Else Has One?’: Representation of Exclusionary Attitudes in Advertisements. The chapter title is partially telling, pointing to the emergence of the middle class in a postcolonial nation-building period that evolves from frugality, elicit temptation to unapologetic immersion into consumption. The chapter also draws our attention to the dilemma of consumer-sentimentality and the illusion of niche consumption of the assembly line production. Bhattacharya here notes that while consumers demand exclusivity, such desires are increasingly more primal than socially driven. The next chapter Discovering Lineage amidst Urban Anonymity: Role-Playing through Images of Things adds further in the discussion by reestablishing the focus on economic and cultural globalization and the L-P-G in India that dramatically changed the perspective on consumption – from utility to materiality. The hallmark continues to remain in the detailing – from Provogue to Allen Solly, Bhattacharya offers ‘stretchability’ as a precondition for experiencing urbanity.
This infatuation of the consumer is uncovered in the third chapter Peer-reviewed Images: Image-Consuming Selves as Visual Commodities through the intervention of the obvious object of investigation – the body. Although an expected entrant in the conversation, one must clarify that Bhattacharya locates the body as a subjective landscape lending it agency. Consequently, the body here transforms into a personhood through social construction and materiality. In addition, Bhattacharya in this chapter argues that body as a site of desire and care, deprivation and corporeality, domination and dismissal, and sexuality and assertion – are based on the imagination of a perfection borrowed from the West but reorganized locally. Such practices debunk beauty standards on one hand and creates new ways of acceptance of all body shapes on the other hand. One is still reminded of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, although Bhattacharya does not draw on Friedan and nor does he want us to be mystified by the girl on the magazine. The highlight of this chapter, however, remains the attention to the male body as the debate-centrum.
In Till It Lasts the Wash: Attached Messages, Detached Consumers, and the Trajectory of the T-Shirt, Bhattacharya has found the modern day universal covering all body types – the proverbial T Shirt. The T-shirt is androgynous, it is highly disposable yet painstakingly necessary for regular consumption. While it carries a resemblance of sorts with the Jeans, the T-Shirt does not need to be fetishized as a tailor-made product because it already is. Despite its mass production, T-Shirts are impactful because of the textual and visual messages they carry. That way, T-Shirts are one of the most underrated media of communication, statement, and consumption. The T-Shirt as a medium emerges as the message, in a McLuhanian fashion. Through the T-Shirt, Bhattacharya also brings back the significance of class position in a discussion on consumerism, pointing us to the ubiquitous of the quotidian. The next chapter Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost: Accounts of as Aspiring Consumer documents the material conditions and broader economic activities and experiences that transforms educated youth to consumers. This chapter is autoethnographic in parts, as Bhattacharya turns his own cultural experience of working in a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) into a narrative, pointing us to the observation that the call center culture as a byproduct of both economic and cultural globalization offered the college goers an opportunity of immersion to consumption – a class of consumers that would be conspicuous by absence without the mushrooming of the ‘outsourcing’ business.Drawing on ethnographic works of Biao Xiang, Carol Upadhyay, to name a few, Bhattacharya argues that India’s exposure to the global and the consequent disconnection from the local have together contributed to the rise of a youth-dominated consumer class.
The next four chapters time-travel to the ‘now’ – the era of the digital and the post-digital. We witness the outcomes of digital consumption practices in a networked society where immediacy is fleeting. Under such situations, mobile phones are body-extensions, almost like prosthetics whereas the communication devices like WhatsApp are the crucial sites of production and consumption of intimacy. Such body-doubles, as Bhattacharya maintains, are the primary agents that turn tourism into consumption. In Visual Access and Excess: New Ways of Seeing and Sharing, Bhattacharya captures tourism as a consumerist practice. The humanization of technology and digital media provokes us to imagine the afterlife of things as a direct binary to the usual suspect of afterlife of beings. The binary lies in the observation that the precondition of an afterlife of things is often based on a dismissal of consumerist obligations. This is elaborated in the autoethnographic narrative of visiting Ladakh and witnessing tourism as a height of consumerist massacre. In the next chapter The Afterlife of Things: Inorganic Transplants in the Liminal Debris of Consumer Culture, Bhattacharya shifts the physical location to the junkyard near Mayapuri in Delhi where the commodities like mobile phones come to die. The imagery of the junkyard and that of a post-tourism Ladakh are comparable insofar as they both embody consumerist afterlives turning post-consumption realities into garbage. A similar decay is observed in the next chapter on jute mills titled The Visuality of Materials and the Materiality of Visuals: Loss of Material Sovereignty in an Abandoned Industrial Site. Here, Bhattacharya disenfranchises the abandoned site as an architectural and societal passé due to its gradual decay and desertion. The chapter is coupled with several impressionistic images captured by Bhattacharya himself as he meandered through, in his own words, the imagined past.
The concluding chapter Obsessive Compulsive (Dis)Order: The Promiscuity of Choice and the Ephemeral begins with the declaration that there is no common conclusion for consumerist encounter, for choices are aplenty and the contours of the ‘new’ is intricately linked to the ‘now’ – thereby defying both time and place. Bhattacharya adds that consumerism, as a result, is dismissive of memory and ‘encourages us’ (p. 260) to forget. The most striking feature of this chapter in specific and Bhattacharya’s debut monograph on consumerism at large is that he discusses fetishism without referring to Karl Marx until at the end of the book and only to dismiss the claim that commodities are outside us. This also links the book back to the promise it began with – to free social anthropology in India from its classical traditions and to establish visual anthropology as the center of discussion.