CONSUMING CLASS: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico
Since the 1980s, Mexican leaders have followed other Latin American countries in pursuing neoliberal economic policies designed to stimulate foreign investment, reduce public spending, and promote free trade. Recent studies of indigenous movements and popular protests challenge the idea that these market-based economic reforms enjoy a broad consensus and suggest that elites impose them by force. By turning the focus to middle-class Mexicans, I argue that some nonelite sectors of society avidly welcome the reign of the free market. Although they do not profit directly from unregulated capitalism, the middle class looks to neoliberalism to ensure access to the material markers of class status. The rising popularity of multilevel marketing companies in Mexico, which glorify consumption and celebrate the possibilities of entrepreneurship, demonstrates the appeal of neoliberalism to citizens fearful of diminished purchasing power. By tying consumption to globalized free markets, neoliberalism does not need coercion to win acceptance.
Networking health: multi-level marketing of health products in Ghana
ABSTRACT Multi-level marketing (MLM0), a business model in which product distributors are compensated for enrolling further distributors as well as for selling products, has experienced dramatic growth in recent decades, especially in the so-called global South. This paper argues that the global success of MLM is due to its involvement in local health markets. While MLM has been subject to a number of critiques, few have analyzed the explicit health claims of MLM distributors. The majority of the products distributed through MLM are health products, which are presented as offering transformative health benefits. Based on interviews with MLM distributors in Ghana, but focusing on the experiences of one woman, this paper shows that MLM companies become intimately entwined with Ghanaian quests for health by providing their distributors with the materials to become informal health experts, allowing their distributors to present their products as medicines, and presenting MLM as an avenue to middle class cosmopolitanism. Ghanaian distributors promote MLM products as medically powerful, and the distribution of these products as an avenue to status and profit. As a result, individuals seeking health become a part of ethically questionable forms of medical provision based on the exploitation of personal relationships. The success of MLM therefore suggests that the health industry is at the forefront of transnational corporations’ extraction of value from informal economies, drawing on features of health markets to monetize personal relationships.
Modernism's Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand
funny thing happened on the way to the STET (the Stock Exchange of Thailand). In November 1997, I returned to Thailand amid a financial catastrophe that has since been labeled the Asian economic plague, to begin an ethnography of capitalist crisis. I imagined that it would be a project on the politics of transparency—that ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state where once it was the function of the state to regulate the market. I was, and am, interested in how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization, and how money’s total and totalizing mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being. I wanted to pursue the ways in which the rhetorics of transparency and visibility have been conceived in aesthetic domains where calls for the end of mimetic representation mirror and reiterate calls for disclosure and objectivity in the economic domain. Before I got to the STET, however, a nationally renowned spirit medium named Chuchad appeared on a cable network talk show, hosted by a former academic, and confessed to twenty-six years of fakery. In a narcissistic act of teletechnic encompassment that the doubt-ridden Quesalid could probably never have imagined, Chuchad not only theatricalized his newfound skepticism but also invited all mediums to join him in renouncing their dissimulating practice.1 Ulti-