http://mcu.sagepub.com
Journal of Material Culture
1999; 4; 263Journal of Material Culture
Robert Foster
The Commercial Construction of 'New Nations'
http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/3/263
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Journal of Material CultureAdditional services and information for
http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://mcu.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
THE COMMERCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF ‘NEW
NATIONS’
x ROBERT J. FOSTER
Department of Anthropology, University of Rochester, USA
Abstract
This article considers the instrumental role of commodity marketing and
mass consumption in producing nationality as a dimension of personal and
collective identities. It asks: if nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily
refer to political identities, then to what sort of imagined communities,
if any, do they refer? It addresses this question in part through a discussion
of commercial images from Papua New Guinea, one of the ‘new nations’ of
the South Pacific.
Key Words x advertising x mass consumption x material culture
x national culture x Papua New Guinea
INTRODUCTION: FROM CITIZEN TO CONSUMER?
Almost all the questions and issues that I explore in this article were
raised, as is often the case, by a cartoon in The New Yorker magazine. A
man in pajamas lays propped up in bed, a companion sleeping soundly
at his side. He stares ahead with glazed eyes at a television set, one finger
poised on the remote control. The caption reads: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,
our national commercial.’
I read the cartoon two ways, but to the same effect. In the first
reading, the viewer is watching the start of a late night baseball game;
the stadium announcer alerts the crowd not to the singing of the national
anthem, but rather to the playing of the national commercial. In the
second reading, the viewer is watching late late night television; the
station is about to sign off, but with the national commercial instead of
263
Journal of Material Culture
Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol. 4(3): 263–282 [1359-1835(199911)4:3; 263–282;010216]
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 263
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
the national anthem. This alternative reading, however, seems less likely,
or at least less available to all readers. How many young Americans, I
wonder, having grown up in a world where there is no end to the broadcast
day, simply don’t get the reference to the old convention of opening
and closing television transmission with the national anthem?
Both readings nevertheless suggest that a series of aligned shifts has
taken place in contemporary American society. The substitution of
advertisement for anthem implies a move from political ritual to commercial
ritual that, in turn, betokens an eclipse of the state by the market
as the reference point for national belonging. In other words, viewers
who were once appealed to as citizens are now addressed as consumers;
their sense of national belonging derives less from common membership
in a polity and more from common participation in a repertoire of consumption
practices. The New Yorker magazine, again, offers apparent
confirmation. A recent article, about marketing efforts to identify innovative
trends in ‘cool’ sneakers, reports that among youngsters in
Philadelphia, ‘Reebok Classics are so huge they are known simply as
National Anthems, as in “I’ll have a pair of blue Anthems in nine and a
half”’ (Gladwell, 1997: 84).
How should we take the following claim: ‘We are witnessing the swift
debasement of the concept of “citizen” – the person who actively participates
in shaping society’s destiny – to that of “consumer”, whose franchise
has become his or her purchasing decisions’ (Ewen, 1992: 49).
What might such a displacement of agency tell us about the production
of nationality as a dimension of collective and personal identity? If
nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily refer to political identities
– to a state legitimated by a people – then to what sort of imagined
communities, if any, do they refer?
I want to address these questions by considering the instrumental
role of commodity consumption in nation making, that is, in the production
of nationality. In this regard, I follow but one of the many leads
offered by Benedict Anderson’s (1983) discussion of print-capitalism as
a force that enabled, through the activity of reading, the imagination of
an unseen but delimited community of fellow readers; for Anderson’s
discussion is first and foremost a discussion about mass consumption.
Printed books were among the earliest mass-produced commodities, the
purchase and consumption of which provided the vehicle for the formation
of national consciousness. I want to think here in a preliminary
way about how other such commodities, in their marketing and consumption,
might or might not likewise enable the imagination of national
community. I will use for this purpose commercial images from Papua
New Guinea, the most linguistically and culturally diverse Pacific island
nation-state created in the last generation – created, I should add, not by
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
264
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 264
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
anti-colonial revolution but rather by a ragged decolonization process
instigated largely through the United Nations. In Papua New Guinea, as
with a slew of other nation-states from Italy to Indonesia, the independent
state unambiguously preceded the nation to which it was allegedly
coupled.
Accordingly, I also locate my questions about the production of
nationality in the space held by the hyphen in the word ‘nation-state.’ As
Arjun Appadurai (1991) has neatly remarked, this hyphen today seems
to signal disjunction as much as conjunction, to separate nation from
state as much as to connect them. I want to suggest therefore that my
questions about nationality engage the issue of sovereignty – both the
contested sovereignty of the nation-state and the embattled sovereignty
of individual persons in the famous new world order. On the one hand,
effective governmentality now emanates from agencies other than territorial
nation-states – such as the complex agencies of ‘structural adjustment’
that impinge upon the daily lives of ordinary citizens in Papua
New Guinea as elsewhere. At the same time, global diasporas and
translocal solidarities continually challenge the nation-state’s capacity to
mobilize let alone monopolize allegiance and loyalty. On the other hand,
more and more people seem to be promised ever more possibilities for
freedom and autonomy through their consumption choices. Global flows
of media images incite people living in the most remote villages, such as
those of Papua New Guinea, to new and powerful fantasies of self-fashioning
through consumption. The ideal of personal efficacy achieved
through consumption everywhere rivals the ideal of citizens determining
their collective existence.
The meaning and fate of nationality in these conflicted circumstances
are, of course, uncertain. It is hardly the case, however, that nationality
as a collective identity is destined to dissolve in an acid bath of global
consumerism. Indeed, in some obvious instances consumption choices
appear to form the basis for nationality as a collective identity – as when
an American family chooses to vacation at Colonial Williamsburg or some
other outlet of the national heritage industry. Thus, even if the nationstate
is no longer autonomous and self-determining, and even if the
citizen’s autonomy as a political subject is continually compromised,
nationality is still made available to autonomous consumers: one affirms
an identity as a Papua New Guinean or as an American by buying particular
goods and services. Nationality, in this view, is not simply appealed
to as a quality pre-existing on other civic grounds and transferable to commodities;
nationality emerges, if at all, as a commercial construction, a
by-product of public efforts to render commodities and their use
meaningful. This is particularly the case when transnational corporations
conjure up ‘the people’ to whom they attempt to legitimate themselves:
witness the recent television advertisements for Toyota Camrys that
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
265
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 265
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
depict the diverse American
workers who build the cars;
or, as I will discuss
presently, the ads for Coke
and Pepsi in Papua New
Guinea that define a ‘new
nation’ of soft-drink con-
sumers.
COMMERCIAL
TECHNOLOGIES OF
NATION MAKING
What would a ‘national
commercial’ of the sort
evoked by The New Yorker
cartoon look like? Consider
this paradigmatic possibility,
a print advertisement
of the World War II era for
the soft drink Coca-Cola
(Figure 1). Of all the many
things going on in this ad,
semiotically speaking, I
focus only on two: the assertion
that Coke symbolizes
an American way of living (‘a
bit of America’ and ‘the happy symbol of a friendly way of life’) and the
identification of that way of living with modernity, an identification made
self-evident by the contrasting presence of primitive South Pacific
islanders bewildered by the soldiers’ radios. If we concentrate on the
way in which Coke consumption implies participation in a distinctively
American way of living – a way of living characterized by its material
modernity and abundance – then we must admit that this ad exemplifies
a commercial technology of nation making with a long history.
Similar technologies were at work, for instance, in the early part of this
century, effecting the transformation of immigrants into Americans. The
historian Andrew Heinze (1990) emphasizes the way in which Eastern
European Jews, in particular, were able to use consumer goods as tools
for forging an American Jewish identity. Heinze writes:
Acquiring American speech, participating in American institutions, and
making economic advances were important to the search for a new cultural
identity, but vast numbers of people with little sense of the language and
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
266
FIGURE 1 Advertisement for Coca-Cola,
1945. The Coca-Cola Bottler, October 1945
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 266
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
limited exposure to institutions were engaging, virtually from the moment
they entered the streets of the city, in a new cycle of consumption that
defined a uniquely American approach to life. (1990: 10)
For these immigrants, unremarkable consumption practices – drinking
Borden’s condensed milk, cooking with Crisco vegetable shortening,
bathing with Ivory soap – were the most easily accessible elements of
the process of nationalizing themselves.
Commercial technologies of nation making, then, are not that new;
there is something misleading about the suggestion of an historical trajectory
from citizen to consumer, from political rituals to commercial
rituals. Indeed, the familiar political technologies of American nation
making – pledge of allegiance, national anthem, and Memorial Day parade
– are coeval with the late 19th-century commercial rituals of nation
making, such as shopping through nationally distributed mail-order catalogues
for nationally advertised brands of products. Nor is the use of commercial
technologies in identifying the nation with a modern way of life
uniquely American. For instance, virtually the same effect that Heinze
describes of nationalizing immigrants through consumption practices was
consciously promoted by the Australian government during the 1950s and
1960s. The post-World War II influx of European immigrants was enticed
with ‘the suburban ideal of the middle-class family with its house, garden,
whitegoods and television, all fruits of the nation’s industrial expansion’
(MacDonald, 1995: 28). Becoming Australian meant having a bounteous
Christmas Day barbecue on the shores of Sydney Harbor, complete with
two ‘Eskys’ – Australian slang for portable beer coolers (Figure 2).
A quick trip from Sri Lanka to Spain by way of the Cook Islands
suggests some of the
various ways in which
consumption enables if
not enjoins people to
think the nation by, to
use Steven Kemper’s
phrase, ‘blurring the
line between a political
act and a consumption
decision’ (1993: 393).
In the case of ‘new
nations,’ where the
project of the nationstate
is often prominently
identified with
modernity, the adoption
of certain consumption
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
267
FIGURE 2 Image used to promote immigration
to Australia. MacDonald, 1995
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 267
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
practices can especially function as a sign of national progress. Such is
the case, Kemper argues, of the Development Lottery in Sri Lanka. Lotteries
– including the same Lotto game played in the US – began to be
introduced in Sri Lanka in 1977, making the country one of 79 where
$154 million dollars was gambled every day as of 1989. The Development
Lottery, known for its large jackpots, is a government enterprise,
the proceeds of which are used to sponsor development projects that in
principle benefit the Sri Lankan citizenry. Gambling is thus by definition
practical patriotism. In addition, the Development Lottery’s weekly
drawings for large cash prizes are staged for television, such that viewing
the lottery creates the exclusively shared space-time that Benedict
Anderson – citing the daily consumption of newspapers – saw as a prerequisite
for imagining the nation.
Kemper’s argument about the Development Lottery in Sri Lanka capitalizes
on a suggestion that I, following Appadurai, have made elsewhere,
namely, to treat nations as imagined communities of consumption: ‘largescale,
non-intimate collectivities, unified by the ritualized fantasies of collective
expenditure’ (Appadurai, quoted in Foster, 1991: 250). However,
when the development that the state seeks is the development of tourism,
it is not inappropriate to wonder whose fantasies and expenditures are at
issue. Jeffrey Sissons (1997) has recently posed this question in regard to
the Cook Islands, a small Pacific island nation ‘freely associated’ with
New Zealand, where since 1988 state-sponsored ethnic nationalism has
stimulated and been stimulated by the expansion of a tourist economy.
Through the vigorous operation of the Ministry of Cultural Development
in preparing to host the 1992 Festival of Pacific Arts, Cook Islands national
identity became equated with a commercially oriented cultural tradition,
‘an essential resource for tourism-led economic development’ (Sissons,
1997: 184). Sissons writes:
The rhetoric of nationhood, which formerly emphasized the values of
togetherness and progress, increasingly celebrates a more marketable ethnic
pride and cultural heritage. Television advertisements encourage Cook
Islanders to show friendly, smiling faces to their visitors in the national
interest. National dance competitions are sponsored by international
airlines. Local vaka [canoe] carvers are featured in tourist brochures.
Participation in nationhood has come to mean participation in the tourist
industry. As a result, Sissons argues, a new sense of nationhood is emerging
among Cook Islanders: ‘a sense of living in an increasingly commodified
space, of belonging to an imagined community for others’
(1997: 186). An imagined community for others, the Cook Islands is
increasingly being shaped through the consumption practices of tourists
as a desti-nation.
Here again we encounter a contemporary instance of a phenomenon
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
268
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 268
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
with 19th-century antecedents, that is, the phenomenon of offering displays
and definitions of the nation-state for public consumption by foreigners.
The most striking context for such displays and definitions,
judging by the amount of attention received from cultural critics of all
sorts, is the world exhibition or universal exposition, the last official one
of which for this century was Expo‘92 held in 1992 in Seville, Spain.
Penelope Harvey’s (1996) intriguing meditation on the Seville exposition,
Hybrids of Modernity, suggests that the exposition was in many ways produced
and received as a mass presentation of over one hundred national
commercials. That is, nation-states were objectified in a comparative and
competitive environment that recalled the marketing strategies of the
transnational corporations – Panasonic, Fuji, IBM – who made it financially
possible for the Spanish state to host the event in the first place. I
will come back to this point presently, but for now I mention only a
couple of Harvey’s observations of how visitors effectively treated
nations as brand-name commodities.
Harvey points out that all visitors could acquire an Expo passport
which could be stamped upon exit from the different national pavilions.
Some visitors apparently made the accumulation of these stamps an end
itself, entering exhibits with great speed and looking immediately for the
place where they could get their passports stamped. In extreme cases,
visitors collected stamps from pavilions that they had not even visited.
Occasionally, a distraught visitor would inquire of pavilion workers
about a lost passport. One ‘pavilion hostess’ reported to Harvey that a
supply of found passports was kept on hand for such occasions. Thankful
visitors would express great excitement if their replacement passport
already had a significant number of stamps. In addition, the visitor’s
strategy would incorporate the recorded visits of the passport’s previous
owner, there being no point in visiting pavilions for which stamps had
already been obtained. The transformation of citizens into consumers
seems virtually complete: passports – the unique and singular validations
of political identity – become rendered as transferable commodities
between unknown visitors, as consumable signs detached from
material referents.
Harvey also relates a story of how, in the shop at the exit from the
Israeli pavilion, a box of bookmarks stood next to the cash register: ‘As I
was casting an eye over what was on sale I noticed someone walk over
and help themselves to one of these. Others immediately followed until
dozens had been carried away. The shop assistant, who noticed too late
what was happening, was horrified’ (1996: 159). Harvey’s point is that
the visitors were innocently if automatically collecting mementos, accustomed
to how pavilions often provided leaflets and paper mementos (and
passport stamps) which visitors collected as they left. The difference
between the national pavilion and the souvenir shop (much like the
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
269
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 269
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
difference between national museums and their gift shops) is thus erased:
visitors act as and are addressed as consumers in both spaces. Like
tourists in the Cook Islands, at least some visitors to Expo‘92 treated the
imagined communities of others not as nation-states but rather as destinations,
that is, as objects and experiences available for consumption.
This convenience sample – Sri Lanka, the Cook Islands, Expo‘92 and
turn of the century America – allows me to observe three things about
the place of commercial technologies and consumption practices in producing
nations. First, consumption practices have the capacity to operate
as powerful vehicles for materializing nationality, although with ambiguous
or indeterminate consequences. On the one hand, the ordinary or
mundane nature of certain consumption practices attaches nationality to
everyday experience in a way that more extraordinary practices – celebrations
of national holidays, once in a while elections or irregular military
contests – simply do not. On the other hand, the materialization of
nationality in the form of consumable objects and experiences leaves the
nation vulnerable to the market. What if nobody buys? Or what if
national consumer goods – take Vegemite, for example – become the
property of foreign corporations? Or what if mainly non-nationals buy –
and so demand nationality in the forms that they prefer?
It is these questions that Harvey’s discussion of Expo‘92 and Sissons’
discussion of Cook Islands tourism pose. From this perspective, national
affiliation is a matter of individual and private purchase decisions rather
than an irresistible social fact. It is clear, moreover, that when these purchases
are made by non-citizen tourists, the result is hardly affirmative
patriotism for anyone – although, perhaps, alienated nationality for the
local citizens and ironic nationality for the tourists. But even for locally
based citizens, it is clear that the consumption of national brand goods
or participation in national lotteries or even watching national sporting
events need not produce civic consciousness. Consumption, as anthropologists
such as Daniel Miller (1987) have persuasively demonstrated,
is an activity through which people can appropriate and recontextualize
commodities as instruments for creating differentiated, particularized
and sometimes resistant identities. At best, then, common consumption
might engender a diffuse and diluted sense of collective affinity – the
sort of recognition, if any, that someone affords someone else who drinks
the same brand of beer or gambles at the same roulette table.
I will take up this perspective on consumption and nationality in my
conclusion, but not before suggesting what this perspective marginalizes.
Orvar Löfgren (1996), among others (see Linde-Laursen, 1993), has
encouraged us to pay attention to what he calls ‘the microphysics of
learning to belong,’ that is, the ways in which the nationalization of
routines and trivialities – including routine and trivial consumption
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
270
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 270
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
practices – produces feelings of belonging. These feelings often only register
when the routines and trivialities in question are violated or
brought into juxtaposition with alternatives. Heinze (1990), for example,
recounts a story from My Mother and I, the 1916 memoir of Elizabeth
Stern, whose family came to New York City from Poland in 1891. Stern
recalled the embarrassing moment when she first opened her lunch at
school – a mass of fried potatoes and a crushed tomato wrapped in newspaper.
By contrast, ‘the American students had precisely packaged meals
– neat, regular-sized sandwiches, square paper napkins and lunch boxes’
(Heinze, 1990: 168). The fearful symmetry of these lunches, along with
the criticism of her peers, shamed Stern into throwing her lunches away.
Nor is it irrelevant to add that many of these students were probably
using as lunch boxes the distinctive packages of Uneeda Biscuits – lowly
soda crackers heavily and successfully advertised by a chain of bakeries
stretching from Maine to Louisiana and Colorado and incorporated in
1898 as the National Biscuit Company. Thus, the American way of presenting
lunches in public made Elizabeth Stern feel, and feel deeply, that
she did not belong.
Consumption practices have the capacity to link personal and collective
identities in compelling fashion. It is precisely this capacity that
the Sri Lankan state seeks to mobilize in its Development Lottery. As
Kemper points out, the lotteries elicit the agency of the bettors, requiring
bettors ‘to take action, make choices, and keep their eyes fixed on
the prize’ (1993: 393). The effectiveness of the trope of development thus
lies in how it connects the (modern) individual’s imagined self-development
with the development of a collective individual, the nation. Entering
pedestrian consciousness by way of sidewalk loudspeakers and ticket
booths with vivid posters, the Development Lottery makes the nation
thinkable or imaginable. Buying a lottery ticket then becomes the practical
means for engaging the nation with the desires and dreams of individual
consumers.
Of course, like Kemper, I am not suggesting that consuming Development
Lotteries or Uneeda Biscuits instantly, automatically, or permanently
makes Sri Lankans or Americans. But I am suggesting that we
take such consumption practices seriously if we want some purchase on
the way that nations become entangled with lived identities. I suggest
that by doing so we are in a position to address the question about
nations that Anderson raises but ultimately fails to answer in Imagined
Communities: why do (some) people die for such limited imaginings? That
is, how do nations become aspects of everyday embodied being? In this
regard, I refer to the letters that American soldiers – presumably like the
ones depicted in Figure 1 – wrote to their families during World War II.
Selections from these letters appear in Mark Pendergrast’s (1993)
informative history, For God, Country and Coca-Cola. Here are two:
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
271
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 271
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
It’s the little things, not the big, that the individual soldier fights for or wants
so badly when away. It’s the girl friend back home in a drug store over a
Coke, or the juke box and summer weather. (Pendergrast, 1993: 210)
To have this drink is just like having home brought nearer to you; it’s one
of the little things of life that really counts. I can remember being at Ponce
de Leon Park, watching the [Atlanta] Crackers play baseball as I filled up on
Coca-Cola and peanuts. It’s such things as this that all of us are fighting for.
(Pendergrast, 1993: 210)
Commodity fetishism with a national inflection, perhaps. But this sort
of fetishism, it seems, enabled people not only to die for but also to kill
for the nation. Pendergrast (1993: 211) thus notes the delight of the CocaCola
Corporation when ‘Colonel Robert L. Scott, in his best-seller God
is My Co-pilot, explained that his motivation to “shoot down my first Jap”
stemmed from thoughts of “America, Democracy, Coca-Colas.”’
Colonel Scott’s invocation of democracy leads me to a second, more
straightforward observation about consumption and national identities,
namely, that consumption practices offer the promise of realizing the
principle of equivalence given in the idea of nationhood. This point has
been made often enough, if mainly in the process of demonstrating the
promise to be superficial or downright false; I merely stress here that
the point has two dimensions. First, mass consumption offers to individuals
the sort of agency and equality manifestly denied them in the
realm of capital and labor. Certain inexpensive consumer items –
Uneeda Biscuits, Coca-Cola, lottery tickets – imply that the challenge of
self-determination is open to all at the same price (or at the same cold
odds). When such consumer items are nationalized, then their consumption
engenders an ephemeral sort of mass enfranchisement; each
consumer replicates the consumption of his or her anonymous but equal
co-nationals.
Second, mass consumption provides a vocabulary and model for
communicating the equivalence of nations, for just as each bottle of Coke
or package of biscuits replicates every other one, so too are individuals
within the nation latently alike and equal. Similarly, just as Coke and
Pepsi are equivalent but different brands of colas, collective individuals
or nations are equivalent polities that differ only in their constituent elements.
Löfgren (1989) has called attention to this phenomenon by identifying
an internationally recognized grammar in terms of which national
identity is validated and differentiated. In addition to flags, anthems,
museums and so forth, valid nations are now available for presentation
through an array of national brand consumer goods. Where I live in
Rochester, NY, there is a store called Beers of the World. The displays of
beer, and only beer, are arranged by nation-state of origin. One can buy
beers not only from Australia or France, but from their former colonies,
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
272
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 272
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Papua New Guinea and Niger. There is a formal equivalence to these
displays, much like the formal equivalence of nation-states achieved
in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games or the official selfrepresentation
of Expo‘92. Indeed, as Harvey (1996: 54) points out, universal
exhibitions are time-tested technologies for ‘distinguishing
nation-states through representational practices which simultaneously
render them equivalent’. It is not at all surprising, then, that some of the
African pavilions at Expo‘92 displayed their own brands of beers and
soap powders.
My third, final, and briefest observation concerns the way in which
consumption practices enact various relationships between tradition and
modernity, relationships that figure variously in all national narratives.
Elizabeth Stern, for example, yielded to her peers’ classification of the
lunches that her mother made as remnants of an anachronistic tradition
out of place in modern America. Consumption in this case defined the
split between a dead Polish past and a living American present. Almost
a century later, once novel consumption practices constitute American
traditions – such as drinking Classic Coke – the modification of which
would qualify as sacrilege. Consumption in this case allows the past to
live in the present, and thus to qualify the nation as both enduring and
innovative. Such a resolution of past and present is particularly desirable
in those ‘new nations’ opened up to the wholesale import of modern but
unmistakably foreign consumption practices. In such situations, the task
of nationalizing modernity is liable to criticism as selling out local traditions
and heritage. The national narrative must negotiate between the
twin demands of the state to represent itself as progressive and as protective
of the indigenous way of life. Such a resolution, I suggest,
requires the collusion of consumerism with the project of the nation-
state.
THE COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PAPUA NEW
GUINEA
It is with these observations in mind that I now turn to the role of commercial
technologies in making the nation, Papua New Guinea. Papua
New Guinea (PNG) is a place known to most Americans, if at all, through
the work of anthropologists, from Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret
Mead to Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner. In these works, PNG
emerges as the home of the authentic cultural Other or, more precisely,
the home of about 800 different authentic cultural (and linguistic)
Others. Its vast diversity has delighted anthropologists with a cornucopia
of myth, ritual, cosmology, and social organization, all duly made the
objects of an impressive body of ethnographic analysis. What is less
generally well known is the recent political history of the country and
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
273
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 273
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
the enormous transformation of social life in the country’s major cities
brought about by the expansion of wage-labor, commodity consumption
and mass media. Since 1975, when Australia ended its role as Administrator
of the UN Trust Territory, the independent state has deployed all
available technologies for rendering Papua New Guinea a nation-state.
But the PNG state is, unlike its neighbor Indonesia, for instance, a weak
state; and its capacity to impinge upon the consciousness of its constituent
strong societies has been limited; the results of its projects in the
area of political socialization have been both uneven and tenuous. Nevertheless,
certain mass consumption practices have spread throughout the
country or are accessible to anyone visiting any major town. These consumption
practices now provide advertisers with vehicles for imagining
the nation as the market that the advertisers aspire to address.
What, then, might a national commercial in Papua New Guinea look
like? Here is one possibility, a print ad for Pepsi Cola (Figure 3). The text
reads: ‘Pepsi. The favourite drink of the land of the unexpected. Pepsi
brings out the best in Papua New Guinea’s diverse culture. Pepsi. The
choice of a New Generation. The choice of all Papua New Guineans.’
The accompanying image juxtaposes a product consumed by ‘all Papua
New Guineans’ with an instance of PNG’s diverse culture – three young
women dressed similarly in unambiguously traditional garb. Text and
image thus accomplish two things. First, they suggest (to me, I want to
be clear) that the new generation of Papua New Guineans, perhaps like
PNG itself, embodies a conjunction between (local) tradition and (global)
modernity (see Foster, 1997). That is, tradition and modernity are represented
as compatible rather than antagonistic. This compatibility is
more than just posited, for the local bottlers of both Pepsi and Coke in
Papua New Guinea lend material and financial sponsorship support to
the various cultural
festivals organized
around the country to
celebrate PNG’s cultural
diversity (Figure
4). Such sponsorship
is one of the main
ways in which transnational
corporations
deflect criticism from
themselves as foreign
and exploitative (see
Guss, 1996). It is also
one of the ways in
which these corporations
are complicit in
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
274
FIGURE 3 Advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, 1995.
Hiri Moale Festival 1995 Official Programme
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 274
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
the construction of PNG as a multicultural nation in which ‘diversity’
means benign stylistic variation in dance routines and ceremonial
costume.
Second, and by the same token, the Pepsi ad presents ‘the choice of
all Papua New Guineans’ as cutting across the diversity that Pepsi
allegedly ‘brings out’. Perhaps the relative uniformity of the three
women’s dress and the simultaneity of their drinking reinforces this
claim. In any case, I infer that Pepsi is being likened to the nation, and
vice-versa, inasmuch as both encompass and transcend diversity – the
diversity of individual consumers, on the one hand, and the diversity of
unique cultural traditions on the other. This inference is made more
plausible by the following two Coke ads.
The first ad (Figure 5) depicts an individual consumer whose hat
marks him as not generic; for this particular hat is not only his favorite
hat, but an article of clothing associated with a particular region of Papua
New Guinea (though also an item of emergent pan-PNG indigenous
material culture that includes betel nut and string bags – bilums). He is
thus one of the diverse consumers from the diverse cultures all of whom
drink Coke in PNG. Similarly, the second Coke ad (Figure 6) suggests a
diversity of decoration styles and facial phenotypes encompassed within
the singularity of a common commodity/brand: Coca-Cola.
Consumption goods that transcend diversity and perforce constitute
the nation as a totality also have the capacity to link consumer-citizens
and their diverse traditions to a wider world. This is the claim, at least,
made by the following advertisement which, although for the National
Bank of Solomon Islands Limited (the Solomon Islands being PNG’s
closest Melanesian neighbor), could easily run in PNG. The text of the
ad (Figure 7) gives voice to an ‘us’ and a ‘we’ that are none other than
the nation itself:
Money matters are nothing new to us . . . For hundreds of years we Solomon
Islanders have used traditional money like the examples above. But times
do change and although the use of ‘Kastom Mani’ is still a very important
part of our culture, at times we need special services and expertise in our
dealings with a wider world. The National Bank of Solomon Islands can
provide such services and expertise – we know the importance of sound
financial management. After all, we are carrying on a tradition centuries old.
The services of the National Bank thus function as the means to articulate
(not to eradicate) local and ancient traditions with changing times
and expanding horizons, that is, with modernity.
This same identification of consumption practices with modernity can
be achieved with less respect for or recognition of tradition(s). Thus
another ad for Pepsi (Figure 8) suggests that the soft drink does more than
bring out the best in PNG’s diverse cultures; Pepsi also brings out the
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
275
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:13 pm Page 275
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
276
FIGURE 4
Advertisement
for Coca-Cola,
1995. Hiri
Moale Festival
1995, Official
Programme
FIGURE 5
Advertisement
for Coca-Cola,
1995. UBD
Papua New
Guinea Business
and Trade
Directory
FIGURE 6
Advertisement
for Coca-Cola,
1992. Port
Moresby Show
1992, Official
Programme
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 276
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
modern qualities of PNG’s new generation. (Here I add parenthetically
that the models in this ad include a former Miss PNG and two current
television/radio personalities; all are recognizable as members of PNG’s
growing national/cosmopolitan elite. I am uncertain, however, if consumers
would recognize this ad as genetically related to a Pepsi ad of
several years ago that featured the singer Ray Charles.) A less risky way
of identifying the nation with modernity through consumption practices
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
277
FIGURE 7 Advertisement for National Bank of Solomon
Islands Ltd, c. 1995. Solomons (inflight magazine of Solomon
Airlines)
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 277
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
involves linking products
with athletes and, more
particularly, international
sports competition. I say
less risky because this
strategy usually involves,
once again, corporate
sponsorship of national
sports teams. This sort
of sponsorship complements
the sponsorship of
cultural festivals, the
former promoting the
nation-state’s modernity
while the latter affirms
its traditional basis. A
television ad for Shell
gasoline, which I have
analyzed elsewhere
(Foster, 1996/97), serves
as an impressive instance
not only of this strategy,
but also of the semiotic
merging of nation and
corporation through the
fortuitous manipulation
of the colors in PNG’s
flag – red, black and gold – with the colors in Shell’s corporate logo.
The identification of nation and consumer product is achieved in
more homely fashion in a television ad for a brand of tinned beef called
Ox and Palm. This ad was produced by an agency located in PNG and
staffed by PNG nationals, but owned and creatively managed by an Australian
man (see Foster, 1996/97). It is my candidate for the title of
National Commercial of Papua New Guinea inasmuch as it consolidates
many of the general claims that I have made about the commercial construction
of nations. It presents Ox and Palm tinned beef as a product
whose consumption mediates geographic diversity – mountains and
islands – as well as the social diversity represented by town and country.
Ox and Palm is, moreover, a domestic product in both senses of the term
– made in PNG and used in the homes of all Papua New Guineans – or
even brought from home to school for lunch in a routine that conjures
up the ghost of Elizabeth Stern. It is, like Uneeda Biscuits and Pepsi Cola,
democratically inexpensive enough to be available to almost everyone.
And it is, finally, the perfect blend of tradition and modernity, an
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
278
FIGURE 8 Advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, 1995.
UBD Papua New Guinea Business and Trade
Directory
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 278
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
originally foreign product that arrived over 40 years ago in PNG, but has
since become domesticated and familiar enough to qualify as a national
tradition: Corned Beef Classic.
CONCLUSION: NATIONALITY WITHOUT
NATIONALISM?
What does tinned beef have to do with nationalism? My colleague
Nicholas Thomas might say that the question itself testifies to ‘the failure
of a project of modernity in the South Pacific’ (1997: 211). In the introduction
to their recent edited volume, Narratives of Nation in the South
Pacific, Thomas and Otto suggest that in places like Papua New Guinea,
it is not nationalism but rather nationality that develops through consumption
practices: ‘The distinction is that between affirmative patriotism
on one side and a collective imagining on the other . . . People may
perceive themselves as members of a nation, and as essentially similar
to other nationals, without necessarily possessing a loyal or civic consciousness
. . .’ (1997: 1). Drinking beer or eating corned beef that bears
a national signature engenders collective affinity, perhaps, but surely an
affinity too politically dilute to call nationalism.
Thomas develops this claim in part by alluding to the way in which
many consumption practices relate ‘to non-national identities or identities
that positively subvert nationality’ (1997: 217). Consumption practices
enable people to participate in both sub-national identities and
international identities at the same time, thus making national identity
enacted through consumption a contingent choice rather than an irresistible
social fact. Furthermore, one might wonder if the attempt to
identify consumer products with the nation doesn’t have the whiff of the
attic about it. The tag line ‘It’s Pepsi in PNG’ reflected a moment when
transnational corporations thought it in their best interest to collude with
the fledgling state’s attempts to imagine a nation. That moment has
passed, and Pepsi can now forget the nation and address the consumer
directly, indeed, directly identify the consumer with the product, as in
its most recent ads. This ad (Figure 9), for example, is one of the first in
Pepsi’s coordinated worldwide campaign, the centerpiece of which is the
redesign of the can to emphasize the color blue. ‘Break Free’ has replaced
‘It’s Pepsi in PNG’ as the slogan – a realization of Stewart Ewen’s nightmare
of consumer democracy in which freedom and autonomy refer to
purchase decisions.
I am led to the conclusion that as nations are uncoupled from territorial
states, nationality will live on as an idiom for some weak form of
collective identity, one identity among others available in the global
marketplace. If current events contradict this conclusion, it is only
because, as Appadurai suggests, no other idiom ‘has yet emerged to
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
279
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 279
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
capture the collective interest of
many groups in translocal solidarities,
cross-border mobilizations,
and postnational
identities’ (1993: 418). And this
conclusion is tempting, moreover,
because I could then invert
the old evolutionary conceit of
seeing a European past in the
Melanesian present and argue
that PNG anticipates Europe’s
future. I could suggest, with
Thomas (1997: 219), that while
Europe struggles ‘to obliterate
the memories that stand in the
way of a posthistorical, postnational,
postmodern market and
superstate, Pacific societies
apparently possess no national
identities that need to be for-
gotten’.
But I prefer not to conclude
so for now. In March of 1997, a
series of remarkable events
unfolded in PNG, events that
from this distance certainly look like the collective action of people in
the name of a nation hitherto regarded as only weakly imagined. The
revolt was triggered by the public disclosure of a deal made by high
ranking government officials, including the prime minister, to hire an
outfit of South African-based mercenaries. The mercenaries were to
intervene in a long-standing civil war in Bougainville, one of PNG’s
island provinces. The refusal of the military to cooperate with the mercenaries,
in conjunction with several days of mass protests in the capital
city, led to the expulsion of the mercenaries, the stepping aside of the
prime minister, and the institution of an inquiry into the multi-million
dollar deal. The PNG state was effectively charged with betraying the
nation whose will it ideally expresses.
Here is one reaction to the events, a letter written to a PNG daily
newspaper, The National, from a citizen studying in Australia:
It’s great to be Papua New Guinean.
After 10 days of anxiety and distress during the Government-Defence
stand-off, the final outcome makes me proud to be a Papua New Guinean.
I will never compromise my nationality or pretend to be someone else which
I am not.
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
280
FIGURE 9 Advertisement for PepsiCola,
1997. Papua New Guinea Post
Courier
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 280
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Here in Australia, the newspapers, TV programs and people enjoyed the
sensationalised reports about the events in PNG. The Australian media,
particularly television, were getting into each other’s way in their quest for
higher ratings.
And inevitably the result is every other Australian I met felt that PNG
was going down the tube and we were doomed for hell.
I never lost faith and I told those Australians we could solve our problems.
I submit that these words are not a postmodern instance of what
Appadurai (1993) calls ‘Trojan nationalisms’ – nationalisms that contain
transnational links and non-national aspirations – but rather a familiar
modern instance of nationalism incubated abroad. What is perhaps
postmodern about the letter is the fact that it was emailed from Canberra
to the newspaper’s office in Port Moresby and made available to
me through the World Wide Web on the newspaper’s home page (http:
//www.wr.com.au:80/national/). But my point is that the author’s
nationalism was elicited and communicated by the same mass-mediated
means through which nationality has been and continues to be disseminated
in Papua New Guinea. Many of these mass mediations are commercial
– advertisements for gasoline and corned beef – and many of the
consumption practices that they seek to nationalize are mundane to the
point of being banal. Nevertheless, I submit that these images and their
effects in creating personal and collective identities warrant close
scrutiny before we deem the prospects of ‘new nations’ to be closed.
Acknowledgements
This article was first delivered as the keynote address at the Duke University
Conference on Nationalism and Identity, 26–27 April 1997; I have retained its
colloquial style. I wish to thank the organizers of the conference, especially
Anders Linde-Laursen, for making my participation possible. The research on
which this article is based has been supported by funds from The Spencer Foundation,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of
Rochester. I thank the National Research Institute of PNG for permission to
conduct this research and Mark Busse and Claudia Gross for their kind assistance
and multiple contributions. The data presented, the statements made, and
the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
References
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, A. (1991) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy’, Public Culture 2: 1–24.
Appadurai, A. (1993) ‘Patriotism and its Futures’, Public Culture 5: 411–29.
Ewen, S. (1992) ‘Pragmatism’s Postmodern Poltergeist’, New Perspectives
Quarterly 9(2): 46–51.
Foster: T H E C O M M E R C I A L C O N S T R U C T I O N O F ‘ N E W N AT I O N S ’
281
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 281
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Foster, R. (1991) ‘Making National Cultures in the Global Ecumene’, Annual
Review of Anthropology 20: 235–60.
Foster, R. (1996/97) ‘Commercial Mass Media in Papua New Guinea: Notes on
Agency, Bodies, and Commodity Consumption’, Visual Anthropology Review
12(2): 1–17.
Foster, R. (1997) ‘Our Money, Your Money, the Government’s Money: Finance
and Fetishism in Melanesia’, in P. Spyer (ed.) Border Fetishisms, pp. 60–90.
New York: Routledge.
Gladwell, M. (1997) ‘The Coolhunt’, The New Yorker, 17 March: 78–88.
Guss, D. (1996) ‘“Full Speed Ahead with Venezuela”: The Tobacco Industry,
Nationalism, and the Business of Popular Culture’, Public Culture 9: 33–54.
Harvey, P. (1996) Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the
Universal Exhibition. New York: Routledge.
Heinze, A. (1990) Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption
and the Search for American Identity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kemper, S. (1993) ‘The Nation Consumed: Buying and Believing in Sri Lanka’,
Public Culture 5: 377–93.
Linde-Laursen, A. (1993) ‘The Nationalization of Trivialities: How Cleaning
Becomes an Identity Marker in the Encounter of Swedes and Danes’, Ethnos
58: 275–93.
Löfgren, O. (1989) ‘The Nationalization of Culture’, Ethnologia Europaea 19(1):
5–24.
Löfgren, O. (1996) ‘The Nation as Home or Motel? On the Ethnography of
Belonging’, Anthropological Newsletter October: 33–4.
MacDonald, R. (1995) ‘Selling a dream’, The Australian Magazine November
(4–5): 25–28.
Miller, D. (1987) Mass Consumption and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Otto, T. and Thomas, N. (1997) ‘Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific’, in
T. Otto and N. Thomas (eds) Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific,
pp. 1–13. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Pendergrast, M. (1993) For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History
of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It. New York:
MacMillan.
Sissons, J. (1997) ‘Nation or Desti-nation? Cook Islands Nationalism since 1965’,
in T. Otto and N. Thomas (eds) Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific,
pp. 163–88. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Thomas, N. (1997) ‘Nations’ Endings: from Citizenship to Shopping?’ in
T. Otto and N. Thomas (eds) Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific,
pp. 211–19. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
x ROBERT J. FOSTER teaches anthropology at the University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY. He is the author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia
(Cambridge, 1995) and editor of Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial
Melanesia (Michigan, 1995). His current research interests include globalization,
mass consumption, and comparative modernities. Address: Department of
Anthropology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0161 USA. [email:
rftr@mail.rochester.edu]
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 4 ( 3 )
282
02 Foster (to/d) 28/9/99 1:14 pm Page 282
© 1999 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Miklos Voros on November 30, 2007http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from