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Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. By WILLIAM MAZZARELLA. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. xi, 364 pp. $22.95 (paper).
This wry and beautifully crafted account of advertising in Mumbai packs a subtle and heavy theoretical punch. Striving to "inhabit" rather than present an overview of this life world, William Mazzarella draws the reader down a complex set of pathways in which several campaigns are described in great detail.
Mazzarella focuses on production, on the makers of advertisements. Released from the need to celebrate the appropriative creativity of consumers, Mazzarella is able to develop a welcome argument for a critical anthropology of the "culture industries." Instead of ritual denunciations of Theodor W. Adorno (of the kind which anthropologists who have never read Adorno usually feel obliged to make), Mazzarella investigates the manner in which capitalism creates particularities (such as the local) which are often in its interests (rather than the interests of "local" consumers). But eager to avoid the totality implicit in some versions of such an argument, Mazzarella stresses an ineradicable "concrete excess" (a kind of material "supplement") which always interrupts such a system. Mazzarella cites Brian Massumi's notion of "affect" here, but Jean François Lyotard's "figure" does the same kind of theoretical...