II. Anthropological features in advertising

2.1 The anthropological study of Sri Lanka

If every human being is a folk ethnographer by default, anthropologists and advertising executives are ethnographers in the strict sense of the word. In different ways both are trained as such, and both get paid for making claims about how the natives think. In the case of advertising, agencies compete with one another by claiming better knowledge of how that thinking will affect a particular product or service.

Addressing a prospective client, an executive musters the equivalent of ethnographic authority, that hard-to-define sense that the person speaking knows. Logical similarities aside, the two professions are becoming interdependent in everyday practice. Anthropologists have encountered a crisis of confidence over the last two decades or so, questioning whether the idea of meaning, much less the concept of culture, can allow anthropologists to make claims about other kinds of people. At roughly the same time, the culture idea has drifted into popular discourse, and advertising executives nowadays speak of culture as a way to talk about consumption as a social phenomenon, as opposed to a purely psychological one.

Business constraints steer advertising executives away from the worst excesses implied by the idea. To make a plausible pitch, executives need to stay current in a way most ethnographers, who eventually have to leave their fieldwork sites, cannot. Concentrating on demographic complexities provides a second advantage. Having to attend to markets within markets militates against the temptation to understand a society as a single entity. Advertising executives might in principle have knowledge of the natives that is not only sophisticated but also less prone to the essentialism and a historicism – ‘these people have an essence; they are irremediably and always one way and not another’ – of which ethnographic accounts have been accused [1, p.74].

Anthropologists interested in Sri Lanka have understood it as a society shaped by local religious, kinship, caste, and land tenure systems. More recently, they have emphasized new expressions of Buddhism, ethnic violence, and the historical memory. These interests have created a picture of Sri Lanka that is admirable but incomplete. Advertising people are interested in the same society pictured in different terms. For them, Sri Lanka is a society of consumers. It fans out from Colombo and divides neatly into two groups – the middle class, typically English-speaking and living in Colombo, and those who live in provincial cities and villages [1, p.173].

Much has been made of ethnographic work as a task that produces texts. Instead of assuming that the intellectually-central parts of the endeavor are participant observation, interviewing, and their default value, ‘being there, anthropological theorists two decades ago began to focus on the way ethnography gets written. They insisted that the way anthropological knowledge is reduced to journal, lecture, and book form is a constitutive act and deserving of scrutiny. By this recent standard, ethnographers have another characteristic in common with account managers, copywriters, and other creative people in the advertising business. Nonetheless, while anthropologists produce ethnographic texts, the texts which advertising people produce – a thirty-second commercial qualifies as a text just as much as a book – create another kind of knowledge.

The ethnographic study of Sri Lanka begins with Seligmann’s early twentieth century account of the island’s only aboriginal people, the Väddas, and that focus on the primitive, the traditional, and the unspoilt set the course. By the 1950s and 60s – when Leach, Tambiah, and Obeyesekere began their work – ethnographic interest had settled on village life [2, p.47]. Only recently, and then haltingly, has it looked to urban settings, modernity, and transnational processes in the island. In other words, anthropological research on Sri Lanka started out in a way that could be criticized as exoticizing or orientalizing. Advertising could be criticized for contrary sins. Its focus fell first on a small, Westernized elite living mainly in Colombo.

Advertisements, framed in English, and often featuring line drawings of European faces and places, treated those consumers as ‘brown Englishmen’ given to the tastes and values – even through the 1960s and 70s – of Victorian England. Moreover, advertising executives create new and often startling images of the people who read advertisements and watch commercials [3, p.181]. They are hardly the only source of images of Sri Lankan society people encounter, and those images are reinterpreted as they are read. But whatever individuals make of them, advertising representations of Sri Lankan society have become a way in which people acquire a sense of place or locality, and thus of themselves. If figures of the modern show Sri Lankans how to be less like themselves, figures of the local show them how to be more Sri Lankan. Given the social distance that separates the people who make advertisements from the people who consume them, figures of the local can be as alien as figures of the modern. Whether advertising deterritorializes the imagination or domesticates it, it follows the same trajectory. Exhorting, advising, and sometimes merely picturing, advertising has no reason to exist if it cannot move people towards something new.