This post builds on the research article “Consuming Class: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico,” which was published in the August 2008 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Editorial Footnotes
Cultural Anthropology has published a number of essays on Mexico, which also address issues of political economy: Ana Maria Alonso’s “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje,’ Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism” (2004, Alejandro Lugo’s “Cultural Production and Reproduction in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico” (1990), James H. McDonald’s “Whose History? Whose Voice? Myth and Resistance in the Rise of the New Left in Mexico” (1993), and Laura A. Lewis’ “Of Ships and Saints: History, Memory, and Place in the Making of Moreno Mexican Identity” (2001).
Cultural Anthropology has also published other essays on “the middle class” in a range of national contexts, including Neeraj Vedwan’s “Pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Consumerism, Brand Image, and Public Interest in a Globalizing India” (2007), Susan A. Reed’s “Performing Respectability: The Berav, Middle-Class Nationalism, and the Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka” (2002), and Mark Liechty’s “Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu” (2005).
Editorial Overview
Multilevel marketing – in which salespeople are rewarded both for the products they sell, often door to door, and for enrolling new salespeople – has enjoyed extraordinary success in developing countries in recent years, drawing in millions invested in the values and potential wealth of entrepreneurialism. Peter Cahn explores this phenomenon in an essay in the August 2008 issue of Cultural Anthropology, focusing on the figure of Esperanza, one of the three million distributors of Omnilife nutritional supplements in Mexico. Kahn describes the growth of multilevel marketing within neoliberal restructuring, and how it has provided opportunities for people struggling to maintain middle class incomes and status even as the middle class job sector withers away.
This vital essay introduces an important caveat to literature on global economic restructuring that foregrounds the ways elites have forcefully imposed market based reforms, and non-elites have resisted. Focusing on middle class Mexicans, Cahn draws out another angle, showing how neoliberal capitalism holds out the promise of increased purchasing power to upwardly mobile citizens who dedicate themselves to playing by market rules. “As long as they are motivated by the need to reach their desired level of consumption,” Cahn writes, “neoliberalism needs no violent push to win acceptance”. Far from resisting neoliberal reform, figures like Esperanza invest their hopes in it.