I really like the image at right, of Monica Bursztyn and some Bolivian model, in Simple, an art gallery where I spent three lovely days giving a workshop in ethnography and design.At last, I do have a more directly relevant image. But this photo is about sex (and lets be honest, a kind of gay sexuality is certainly what that photo is about). What I learned about Yodora deodorant includes something about sex, so this image is relevant enough. Moni and I were in Bolivia before I flew off in TACA for Colombia, where the next image was taken. So its a good introductory image, here. Now, on with the story.
There are several things to say about Yodora, here. I'll pick one: its about what people in the trades (both anthropological and business) call consumer products, and how people use them and what this might say about our notion of "consumption."
I was invited to dinner by a fellow researcher, an economist and business guy who runs a small research shop in Colombia. I ended up cooking. This happens, sometimes when people feel comfortable, informal, and perhaps a bit insecure in their own culinary skills (at least that was one of the more interesting reasons given for the immediate acceptance of my half-kidding offer to cook dinner the afternoon before). So I cooked. Pasta; with a sauce of pleasant Mendoza Savignon Blanc and tomato and garlic and this and that of whatever seemed fresh.
In this Bogotá condominium, I was especially aware that what we were doing was far beyond the reach of most Colombians, most people in China, indeed, most people on the planet. But we did not enjoy the meal any less for this awareness. One tends not to feel too guilty about eating well when a good Savingnon Blanc is involved in more than the pasta sauce. That accounts for some of the levity in the kitchen and at the dining table. The rest I leave to the altitude of Bogotá.
After dinner, the conversation turned to consumer products, especially consumer products as they come to be understood and used by people who are not consumer product makers and who don't live in fancy condominiums. Poor people (I mean money, fiscal capital, nothing else; I don't mean cultural capital because my host put odd consumer product stuff in unexpected places, too, as you'll see) or maybe people at the edges of whatever the mainstream is.
We agreed, my host and hostess and I, that people who make consumer products are usually not very much aware of how these things are used. This is especially the case when consumers are poor people: Campesiños. Jente del campo. 农民 (nóngmín, peasants or farmers). This is because middle class people, managers, and corporate leaders don't often spend time hanging around in poor people's homes. Perhaps a few of them do, and certainly some of the people who make consumer products understand what life in that sort of home used to be like because they come from that sort of home.
(Which, by the way, suggests a rather interesting line of inquiry: how is it that some companies seem to know what is going on with the people who buy their stuff and may even care a great deal about such goings-on, while other's don't seem to give a shit. How many corporate executives come from a lower-class background, and what difference might that make?)
After dinner came coffee, panelitas de arequipa y coco (yummy), and the following exchange.
"Look here," my host said. "There was a time, maybe twenty years ago, when the borders were closed in Colombia and you couldn't import any perfumes at all. I worked with a guy who created imitations of famous American perfumes. That's another story. But this deodorant was used in those days by poor people and other people too."
He pulled his foot into his lap, removed his shoe, and to my delight and the mild revulsion of his lovely wife, off came his shoe and sock, and he rested his foot on the table.
"People would put the stuff on their feet. Other people would use it as a deodorant. See: it smells fresh. There wasn't much else in the market. But farmers used it for their feet. Let me show you."
My host (we shall call him Leonardo) got up from the table, and exclaimed, "Paga muy bien attención porque voy a enseñarle algo importante." Pay attention; I"m going to teach you something important.
He came back with this little tube of toothpaste, and started dabbing it on his feet. "Like this, they used it!" he said.
His wife covered her face with her hands. "Diós. Por favor, Leo. . . " she said (but she was laughing as hard as I was, by this time).
"Okay okay, then wait," Leo said and he got up and found this old jar of Yodora.
"So they'd use this." (The foot was on the table again) and not only for feet. Gay guys, they'd use it on their behinds. You know. When they wanted to screw."
I asked, "What? They did what?"
This conversation was moving in a delightfully silly and unabashedly frank direction. I'm thinking, 'These Colombians are not uptight like Angelinos, or Chileans. . . maybe this is that Latin openness to sexuality or something.' Maybe it was the Savignon Blanc.
"They used it for lubricant. What else?" he said.
By now we were all cracking up. So the questions might be, how is Yodora used now? How is it that products come to be used as they are intended by their manufacturers (as they almost never are). Is there no universally available and inexpensive lubricant, condom safe, that one can buy to use when having sex in rural Colombia? Is there? What? Or is it simply the case that people got along fine without such stuff for years but now that condoms are in the sex-picture, things are different?
Below: the researcher, economist, entrepreneur, and table-manners violator who brought this all to our collective gustatory attention—Juan Felipe R.
A ton of human sexuality questions, not to mention table-manners questions, come to the surface, here.
Table manners aside, it strikes me that there hasn't been much anthropological attention paid to the commercial stuff, the artifacts you have to buy, that go along with sex. That might be an interesting, and even an important, field of inquiry. Too often, people who care about HIV or human sexuality in general don't ask specific enough questions about what people actually do, and I don't know of much research relating human sexual behavior to the products people use when they are having sex. It would be interesting work, right? The book would sell, at least. And that would be a great topic for another post (which really belongs as an extended article for American Ethnography, which likes such racy things.
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