Journal
ETHNOS
Volume 84, Issue 3, Pages 458-479Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2018.1561487
Keywords
Youth; caste; social enterprise; solar energy; bottom of the pyramid
Categories
Funding
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Leverhulme Trust
- ESRC [ES/L003147/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
How do you sell a solar powered lamp to India's un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty. In the highlands of Orissa, India, a US company sells solar powered lights through a network of young male sales agents. The company and its products express empathy and proximity, attachment and connection to India's indigenous and low caste communities. Yet the company's salesmen are often more concerned with maintaining forms of structural advantage and their sales practices articulate social differences based on caste, class and gender. Rather than see prejudice as a peripheral effect of expansion and growth in emerging markets this paper proposes that we see it as a constitutive feature of markets at the 'bottom of the pyramid'.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available