Richard Wilk

Bottled Water The pure commodity in the age of branding

Bottled water has become a pervasive global business, and bottled water consumption continues to increase rapidly, particularly in countries where clean potable tap water is available at very low or no cost. This article discusses the ways the rich cultural meanings of water are used in marketing and branding, and the forms of consumer resistance that oppose bottled water as a commodity. The contrast between tap water and bottled water can be seen as a reflection of a contest for authority and public trust between governments and corporations, in a context of heightened anxieties about risk and health. The article concludes that bottled water is a case where sound cultural logic leads to environmentally destructive behavior.

Typological Schemes and Agricultural Change: Beyond Boserup in Precolonial South India [and Comments and Reply]

A diffusible-dye releasing type dye consisting of a radical which reacts with an oxidation product of a color developing principal agent in a color development process to yield a substantially colorless compound and a dye residue carrying water-soluble radicals. Its photographic uses are also disclosed.

“It's destroying a whole generation”: Television and moral discourse in Belize

An anthropological approach to television must transcend the limitations of traditional media scholarship by paying closer attention to the cultural and political context of the medium in different times and places. This paper explores the ways television has affected the small Caribbean country of Belize during the last ten years. It focuses attention on the way people talk about television in public and private, on the place of television in moral discourse. It suggests that by providing an objectified “other,” foreign television may promote new forms of nationalism.

The Impossibility and Necessity of Re-Inquiry: Finding Middle Ground in Social Science

On the face of it, the idea of formal re-inquiry has clear roots in positivism, in the idea that social science is a progressive enterprise of rejecting falsehood and building truth. Either qualitative or quantitative methodology can be part of the positivist project. Taking a position of pluralism in the militant middle, I argue that both positivism and humanism have a great deal to offer consumer research and that re-inquiries have a central place within both philosophical positions.

Consumption embedded in culture and language: implications for finding sustainability.

Abstract In this article I ask how deeply consumer culture has become embedded in contemporary American society. I suggest that we need to begin with greater conceptual clarity, particularly on terms that are part of the very phenomenon we are trying to study—consumption and freedom, for example. Metaphor theory helps to distinguish between folk concepts and analytical categories as a basis for understanding why consumption is so central, so deeply embedded in fundamental concepts of family, gender, individualism, ethnicity, and nationality. It also helps reveal inconsistencies in environmentalists’ ideas about freedom, individual action, and the role of the state in regulating consumption. The article concludes with the deliberately provocative argument that “sustainable consumption” is not the best way to phrase or frame the goals of reducing the amount of energy and materials used and wasted in the United States.

An ethnography of neoliberalism: Understanding competition in artisan economies. Commentaries. Author's reply

Both a method and a goal of neoliberal policy, competitiveness structures ever more economic practices while consolidating cultural and community commitments. Current anthropological models treat competition narrowly as a reflection of economic inputscapital, innovation, and talent. In contrast, I show that, first, competing successfully is predicated less and less on economic factors and increasingly on expressiveness and communication. Second, competition entails not so much individualism as positioning and thus is best understood as a structural relationship among competitors. Third, the essential cultural work of competition is not to sweep away inefficient conventions but rather to reconcile the painful inequalities emergent within a community with its professed shared values. To support these claims, I analyze artisan economies, a sector of the global economy that has been surprisingly, if not always happily, revitalized by neoliberal policies. Concentrating on indigenous artisans in Ecuador, I examine how people use words, art, crafted objects, and consumer goods to construct competition as an economic and moral field and place themselves within it.Both a method and a goal of neoliberal policy, competitiveness structures ever more economic practices while consolidating cultural and community commitments. Current anthropological models treat competition narrowly as a reflection of economic inputscapital, innovation, and talent. In contrast, I show that, first, competing successfully is predicated less and less on economic factors and increasingly on expressiveness and communication. Second, competition entails not so much individualism as positioning and thus is best understood as a structural relationship among competitors. Third, the essential cultural work of competition is not to sweep away inefficient conventions but rather to reconcile the painful inequalities emergent within a community with its professed shared values. To support these claims, I analyze artisan economies, a sector of the global economy that has been surprisingly, if not always happily, revitalized by neoliberal policies. Concentrating on indigenous artisans in Ecuador, I exam...

The local and the global in the political economy of beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss World

Abstract Beauty pageants are an exemplar of global cultural flow, and the tensions between local and supranational production and reception of media events. This paper discusses the local history and political context of beauty pageantry in the Caribbean country of Belize. The pageants are portrayed as sites where Belizean identity is recast in a universalized language of difference and distinction. The political economy of beauty allows local production and interpretation only within a narrow semantic frame provided by the metropole.

The household in anthropology: Panacea or problem?

Maclachlan, Morgan D. Editor. Household Economies and Their Transformations. Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 3. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1987. 227 pp. including references.

Serving or Helping Yourself at the Table

25.00 cloth,

The Future of Food Studies

12.75 paper. Imamura, Anne E. Urban Japanese Housewives: At Home and in the Community. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1987. x + 191 pp. including appendix, references, and index.