This is the start of a new regular feature here at AnthroWorks, Must read, which will highlight the most interesting books we’re reading right now.
by Barbara Miller
Media commentary was flying fast and thick in September 2009 about soft drinks and their relationship to high rates of obesity in the United States, and whether or not raising taxes on soft drinks would help reduce consumption, improve health and reduce health care costs. Welcome to a debate as fraught with economic interests as that of tobacco or hard drink. Like tobacco and hard drink, soft drinks (notably American products such as Coca-cola and Pepsi-cola) have been pushing hard for several decades to create and sustain markets around the world, from the Asian giants of China and India to smaller but still promising targets such as Papua New Guinea.
Cultural anthropologists, since the groundbreaking book by Sidney Mintz on sugar, have been researching and writing about particular commodities within a political economy framework. They ask questions such as: whose interests are served? who wins? who loses? The genius of cultural anthropology in providing a rich context for a seemingly small, single commodity is revealed in many recent studies which have examined cars, coffee, chocolate, and more.
Robert Foster takes on soft drinks in his latest book, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. This is a great book. It is definitely worth incorporating in your teaching if you are a professor, and in your thinking if you are a human being who cares about people and our environment. Foster pulls together many strands of cultural anthropology to create a compelling story about how soft drink corporations are attempting to take over the world not just in terms of sales but also in terms of government and citizenship.
Foster argues for the importance of the twin notions of corporate governmentality and consumer citizenship. Concerning corporate governmentality, he provides compelling examples showing how corporations such as Coca-cola co-opt the powers of the state in South Korea and India to assume the role of guaranteeing that citizens have access to clean water for drinking and water supply for irrigating their crops. He argues that international corporations like Coca Cola, along with many NGOs and other international agencies, serve as a new mode of “deterritorialized” governmentality. So, when it appears that countries in Africa, for example, have weak governments in the traditional sense, Foster says: look further and you will see the power of governmentality as exerted through commodity networks. A strong government force is in play: but it’s profit-oriented and global rather than service-oriented and local.
Consumer citizenship is the flip side of corporate citizenship. In it, consumers lobby corporations rather than governments. This new mode of political consumerism makes sense since corporations are increasingly taking the role of providing goods and services.
In his closing chapters, Foster brings the discussion back to the US. He discusses “pouring rights,” specifically how Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottlers in the early 1990s acquired exclusive rights to vend in public schools. School principles in poor districts especially welcomed the revenue. As if this all weren’t bad enough in terms of ugly economic interests, Foster weaves the reader back to Mintz’ landmark commodity: sugar. So much seems to come back to sugar. Sugar is oil’s sweet sister in terms of commodities that rule our lives.
Foster doesn’t explicitly pitch his book as “critical anthropology” or “activist anthropology” but it is both, and it is a powerful example of both. He reveals the underlying power structures in soft drink promotion and sales locally and globally. In his last sections he discusses “the morality of products” and points to the power of consumer politics as being able to speak against exploitative corporations and their products that slowly kill consumers while making corporate owners rich.
My thanks to Robert Foster for his convincing connections between global corporate interests and social justice through the lens of a Coke bottle.
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