At the 2003 American Ethnological Society meetings, one of the panels was an open discussion considering the question “What is the ethnographic project?” In the course of this discussion, an audience member suggested that the reason that such a question is challenging and interesting to anthropologists is that ethnography, like “the culture concept” before it, is slipping away from us. This is not to say that anthropologists no longer think through “culture” or do ethnography, but that many others – from academicians to marketers to MTV film crews – have recently found value in research forms and methods that were once more strongly associated with anthropology. Thus, the audience member suggested, anthropologists now are concerned with defining their own ethnographic project, particularly in light of the crass and incomplete mimicries.
Although such a characterization is problematic – did anthropologists ever hold even an academic monopoly on either culture or ethnography? – I find it a useful framework through which to illuminate some aspects of my project on global marketing. I am interested in how ideas of culture and ethnography are being employed and deployed by marketers who, I think, are a particularly interesting site for anthropological research. Like the creative minds behind advertising, marketers are self-conscious cultural producers. They make and remake meanings. However, in the last twenty years, most marketers’ duties have expanded to include the ‘global,’ a concept that appears to have rocked marketing as much as it affected anthropology. Transnational or international trade companies first tried to go global by selling identical products in various locations, following the Fordist model. But the most successful brands have made culturally specific distinctions – McDonalds and Disney are good examples – selling slightly different products to different audiences without eroding the brand.
Because of these distinctions, marketers are often used to translate a product or its advertising for a particular culture; and the Japanese market is typically described as the most impenetrable. Marketing books abound with titles like “Unlocking Japan’s Markets” (1991), “Cracking the Japanese Market” (1991), and “Relentless: The Japanese Way of Marketing” (1996). Thus, to marketers (at least in their published work), Japanese consumer behavior is partially and variously shaped by Japanese culture – the trick for them is to figure out when and how culture plays a role. When do Japanese consumers behave like an “average consumer” (a standard set probably set by an American model) and when are they uniquely Japanese?
To obviate these inconsistencies, most transnational companies hire marketing consultants to help them understand and sell in the Japanese market. These professionals can be either Japanese firms or internal divisions of international firms, but either are the first line of professional cultural translators. It is their job to take products and ideas from either the unspecific global context or from other countries and figure out how to make them meaningful in Japan. Marketers are thus cultural producers and reproducers and wear these titles with a professional air that is unusual in other anthropological works on globalization. Indeed, few of the canonical works on globalization get into the nitty gritty details of intentional and professional localization – Karen Hansen’s Salaula provides a good example. In her research into the market for used clothes in Zambia, Hansen investigates many different levels of the chain of production and consumption. At different times in her fieldwork, she observed clothes being donated in the US and Europe, followed their progress to Zambia via container ship, worked with Zambian clothing sellers, and bought clothes with Zambian friends – and was thereby able to acknowledge how meanings of the clothes were made and re-made in each different context. Despite all the detail in her examples, the process seems remarkably organic – most participants are not aware of the larger ramifications of what they’re doing or how meanings change. The global flows occur without any actor consciously working to make it happen.
Although this might be an accurate way to describe how meaning is made about used clothing, I suggest that the process is much more intended, explicit and commodified when professional marketers are involved. Because it is a marketer’s job to translate products into a local cultural context, they self-consciously localize – making the global into a locally intelligible commodity. Although globalization has been considered from various angles and with many intents, I suggest that this location on the continuum of global and local – the professionals who hires themselves out to successfully localize global products –provides a new vantage point through which to describe how globalization gets done, how cultural differences are made and remade.