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The architecture of cigarette circulation: marketing work on Indonesia's retail infrastructure
Author(s) -
Welker Marina
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12911
Subject(s) - circulation (fluid dynamics) , expansive , competition (biology) , business , architecture , work (physics) , power (physics) , marketing , advertising , engineering , geography , mechanical engineering , ecology , materials science , compressive strength , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , composite material , biology , aerospace engineering
The cigarette industry mobilizes independent retail as the scaffolding for ubiquitous cigarette advertising and sales in Indonesia, forming an expansive semiotic and material architecture of cigarette circulation in a country with limited tobacco regulations. As impending regulations threaten to curb cigarette advertising, and independent retailers face stiff competition from mushrooming chain convenience stores, Philip Morris International's Indonesian subsidiary has developed a retail community programme to recruit and ‘modernize’ select retailers. The programme has intensified the quotidian labour of marketers who use knowledge, persons, and things to inhabit and renovate independent retail. I show how fashioning cigarette markets entails fashioning retail infrastructure, and is embedded in intimate relations of power, care, and violence.