Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India

This is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of mass consumerism in India’s globalized marketplace. Since the opening of the Indian consumer market in the 1990s, the advertising industry has become a centre of mediation between the global and the local. William Mazzarella analyses these and develops an interpretation of the cultural politics of consumerism. Shoveling Smoke is a critical and innovative intervention into current debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and visual culture. Mazzarella traces the rise of mass consumption in India during the 1980s. He shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship between the local and the global and ironically turned advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity. This book is also an account of how national consumer goods advertising is produced in metropolitan India, and the anxieties, commitments, and contradictions that animate that practice. It thus also inquires into some of the broader transformations in Indian public culture with which the rise of mass consumerism came to be identified. This book will be of immense interest to the advertising fraternity, the media, economists, policy-makers as well as students and scholars of culture, sociology, and anthropology.