Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid
Jamie Cross and
Alice Street
Jamie Cross is the 2008-09
RAI/Leach Postdoctoral
Fellow at the National
University of Ireland. His
current research explores
the relationships between
large-scale enterprise and
development in the Indian
economy. His email address is
jamie.cross@nuim.ie.
Alice Street is an ESRC
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
at the University of Sussex.
Her current research focuses
on relationships between
health, governance and
development in Papua New
Guinean biomedicine. Her
email address is a.street@
sussex.ac.uk.
Fig. 1. Soap, Hindustan
Unilever Limited, a video
case study produced by
Michigan Business School
Video to accompany C.K
Prahalad’s 2006 book The
fortune at the bottom of the
pyramid.
Fig. 2. The front cover of
Prahalad’s book.
4 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009
Unilever is no stranger to the life-protecting potential that
hand-washing with soap can have on poor communities. Soap
was the product on which Lever Brothers, one of Unilever’s
two founding companies, was built. The widespread avail-
ability of good quality, low-cost, branded soap, did much to
improve levels of hygiene in 19th-century Britain. Today it has
the potential to do the same in other countries. (Unilever 2005)
The bottom line is simple: it is possible to ‘do well by doing
good’. (Prahalad 2006)
Poverty as opportunity
Search the online business and development media and
you will find countless examples of products in the fields
of health, energy, telecommunications and banking that are
designed for and marketed explicitly to people who live on
less than two dollars a day. The well-being of poor people
is proving to be a particularly rich seam for global busi-
ness and is driving innovation in the design and delivery
of products and services. High profile ‘for-profit’ social
initiatives include Phillips’ smokeless
stoves, Ericsson’s rural wireless net-
works, Vesterguard’s water-purification
tools, Fujitsu’s low-power, low-cost
laptops and Danone’s vitamin-enriched
yoghurt.
The US-based management and mar-
keting guru C.K. Prahalad has done
much to champion this phenomenon.
The essential premise of his 2006 book
The fortune at the bottom of the pyr-
amid is that the creation of new markets
around the needs and aspirations of the
poor can be both an efficient technical
solution to problems of poverty and an
engine for corporate profit. Bottom-of-
the-pyramid initiatives are premised
on the role of the market as a delivery
MICHIGAN BUSINESS SCHOOL
mechanism and on the logistical capacities of large enter-
prises. It is a vision that has received accolades from Bill
Gates and Madeleine Albright, and is today championed
by the United Nations and the British government as a
model for private-sector involvement in international
development.
One of the inspirations for Prahalad’s book came from the
Indian subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever.
Since 2000 Hindustan Unilever Limited, India’s largest
fast-moving consumer goods company, has tied strate-
gies for expanding sales of one its oldest brands, Lifebuoy
soap, to educational campaigns focused on reducing
diarrhoeal disease and micro-credit schemes aimed at
improving rural livelihoods. For Prahalad, the signifi-
cance of this move was that it made social and economic
issues integral to business. Selling soap to poor people,
he argued, could be a public health and poverty allevia-
tion project as well as a profitable business venture. Today,
Unilever’s initiatives in India have become the most com-
monly referenced case study of busi-
ness strategy for emerging markets in
the developing world. The company’s
success in increasing revenues while
delivering on key international devel-
opment objectives has provided a new
framework for market expansion that
is reinvigorating capitalist enterprise.
As a result of C.K. Prahalad’s book,
Unilever’s initiatives now circulate
through schools of business and man-
WARTON SCHOOL PUBLISHING
agement, development agencies and
public policy institutes as an exem-
plary case study in how the search
for corporate value and the needs of
the poor can be combined. The global
influence of Prahalad’s work and
Unilever’s initiatives in India make
Fig. 3. ‘Lifebuoy promotes
handwashing with soap to
improve health in India’.
Image from a 2005 report
in Unilever’s ‘Global
Challenges, Local Actions’
series.
UNILVER LTD
Fig. 4. Lifebuoy soap as sold
in India.
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009 5
them particularly relevant for anthropologists interested in
the human face of contemporary capitalism. Against the
backdrop of social justice movements seeking to reform
trade relations and regulatory initiatives concerned with
holding business socially accountable (de Neve et al.
2008), C.K. Prahalad has emerged as a belligerent cham-
pion for the market as a vehicle for moral engagement in
the world. His work represents a shift in the language of
corporate social responsibility that dispenses with any
reference to philanthropy or acts of giving, and makes no
distinction between ethical practice and the self-interested
pursuit of profit. It is a vision that anchors what anthropol-
ogists see as a quintessentially modern desire for a more
social economy (Parry 1986) in entrepreneurship and the
market.
Soap and the social good
In this article we examine three initiatives in South India
that have brought Hindustan Unilever to prominence as a
pioneer of business at the bottom of the pyramid. Using
corporate reports, promotional materials, business case
studies, academic papers and newspaper interviews we
look at a public-private partnership campaign, a school-
based educational campaign and a direct distribution
strategy. Our intention is not to advance opinions about the
empirical effectiveness of soap against the transmission
of disease or human morbidity. Instead we use this article
to reflect on the particular constellation of relationships
between multiple actors that have enabled Lifebuoy soap
to emerge as a ‘social good’, an object that circulates
through international business schools,
NGOs, universities and govern-
ment departments as a con-
vincing composite of both
‘social’ and ‘commercial’
value.
Public health has been a
particularly fruitful site for
bottom-of-the-pyramid innova-
tions. Global companies that sell
sanitary towels, contraceptive
devices, nutritional supplements,
cataract removal services, spec-
tacles and hygiene products have
allied themselves to international
public health goals through educational marketing cam-
paigns and direct distribution franchises. By appending
economic and social development goals to health system
privatization, such interventions are reconfiguring rela-
tionships between business, science, state and consumer/
citizen.
If Lifebuoy soap can be presented convincingly as a
‘social good’ – to the extent that it has come to circulate
globally as a model of successful business practice – it is
because the interests of marketing executives, the brokers
of scientific knowledge and research, state actors, school-
children and women on low incomes have been success-
fully modified, enlisted and momentarily aligned. The
emergence of Lifebuoy soap as a brand-name consumer
good associated with the realization of shareholder value
and the achievement of specific medical and economic
objectives in the fields of public health and micro-enter-
prise represents a moment of stability in the life of soap as
a product (Callon 2002). An anthropology at the bottom of
the pyramid, we argue, can provide valuable insights into
the hidden work and power relations involved in estab-
lishing an everyday commodity – like soap – as a ‘social
good’ that is capable of simultaneously combating disease,
tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.
Hygiene as a large, unmet consumer need
Strategies to sell soap have always been at the cutting
edge of innovations in marketing. The first mass adver-
tising campaigns of the early 20th century were designed
by Lever Brothers to sell their brands of Lux and Sunlight
soap. Their campaigns created new consumer ‘needs’ that
tapped into subconscious fears and desires to construct
connections between cleanliness, hygiene, social mobility
and brands of manufactured soap. Indeed, as Timothy
Burke (1996) has argued, their intimate connection to the
body has given toiletries a unique role in the construction
of modern consumer subjectivities. An early advert for
Lifebuoy soap (Fig. 5) emphasized the dangers of invis-
ible germs on doorknobs, public telephones, banister rails
and other people in public places, and argued that the only
protection against the risk of contagion was the ‘perfect
scientific cleanliness’ offered by Lifebuoy – ‘a true health
soap’.
As European and colonial histories show, wherever
people have embarked on civilizing missions or pro-
grammes of social reform to improve indigenous, native
or lower-class populations, questions of hygiene have
played a major role (Shove 2003). As Timothy Burke
has described, in colonial Rhodesia ideas about cleanli-
ness and the transformation of bodily practices were cen-
tral to both projects of government and Lever Brothers’
commercial expansion (Burke 1996). Little surprise, then,
that in the 21st cen- tury Unilever has emerged at the
forefront of new sales strategies aimed at
the fastest-growing markets
for consumer goods in the
developing world. Today,
Unilever’s ‘bottom-of-the-
pyramid’ innovations in
India have created a new
alignment between the
LTD
commercial value of
VER
washing and cleanliness
UNIL
and the goals of inter-
national public health
policy.
Health in Your Hands
In 2000 Hindustan Unilever was part of
‘Health in Your Hands’, a global public-private partner-
ship campaign to promote hand-washing with soap, as it

LEVER BROTHERS COMPANY / J. WALTER THOMPSON COMPANY COMPETITIVE ADVERTISEMENTS COLLECTION
Figs 5 & 6 (above and below
right). Early advertisements
for Lifebuoy soap, published
by Lever Brothers Company
in the US Saturday Evening
Post.
PPPHW
Fig. 7. Logo of the ‘Health
in Your Hands’ campaign
organized by the global
Public-Private Partnership
for Handwashing (PPPHW),
established in 2001.
6 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009
launched a pilot project in the South Indian state of Kerala.
Based on research which showed that hand-washing could
reduce the risk of diarrhoeal disease by 47 per cent (Curtis
and Cairncross 2003), the partnership harnessed corporate
expertise in order to change hygiene habits, increase the
use of soap and bring about a significant decline in the
transmission of water-borne diseases. With support from
the World Bank, the government of Kerala put up 70 per
cent of the project costs while a consortium of transna-
tional companies covered the costs of marketing.
Popular conceptions of science as an autonomous
realm of knowledge separate from the social and political
domains make it a particularly crucial ally in the pro-
duction of soap as a social good. As Prahalad argues,
‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ projects require science-based
foundations in order to pre-empt criticism or legitimize
commercial goals (Prahalad 2006). This is especially the
case in public health contexts where the ‘social’ creden-
tials of a product depend upon evidence of its medical
effects. Scientists from the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine have been central to the Health in Your
Hands partnership and their research has provided impor-
tant evidence of the project’s commercial and political
neutrality (Health in Your Hands 2003).
Active-B
For Prahalad, alliances like those between Hindustan
Unilever and scientific research institutions are mutually
beneficial partnerships. Yet there is nothing predictable or
preordained about such alignment of interests. The benign
language of partnership obscures the power dynamics
involved as global multinationals like Unilever work to
recruit other actors and establish themselves as nodal
points in emergent market-driven health systems.
At the same time that Hindustan Unilever was par-
ticipating in the ‘Health in Your Hands’ initiative, for
example, the company was modifying the material quali-
ties of Lifebuoy soap by introducing the anti-bacterial
agent ‘Active-B’, or triclosan. In India this new ingre-
dient was used to market the brand’s enhanced health-
protecting qualities and heightened effectiveness over
other soaps. Yet the same business school case studies
that applauded Hindustan Unilever’s involvement in the
global hand-washing initiative also noted that the decision
to incorporate triclosan was taken despite ongoing debate
in scientific and public forums in the US about the health
risks associated with adding anti-bacterial agents to house-
hold hygiene products (Murch and Reader 2003, Prahalad
2006).
Controversy over the risks of triclosan intensified in
the late 1990s when findings published in Nature showed
that under laboratory conditions triclosan induced genetic
changes to bacteria (McMurray et al. 1998). The authors
suggested that the widespread use of everyday household
products containing triclosan could lead to the appearance
of multi-product-resistant super-germs. Subsequent labo-
ratory testing and clinical trials (cf. Aiello 2005) have both
reinforced and contested this research, provoking sensa-
tionalist media headlines.
As the business school case studies report, these
US-based controversies have not impinged on Unilever’s
use of triclosan in household products for markets in India.
Regardless of whether germs in US laboratories are effec-
tively eliminated or dangerously transformed by triclosan,
Hindustan Unilever’s marketing managers determined that
the addition of it to Lifebuoy soap would attract Indian
consumers. In the US public debate over the safety of tri-
closan reflects increased concern about risk, uncertainty
and relationships between science and society in the con-
text of a rapidly developing biotechnology industry. In the
context of India’s rapidly expanding markets for health
care products and services, meanwhile, the marketing
potential of agents such as triclosan reflects the signifi-
cance of biomedical symbols, treatments, instruments and
technologies as ways of legitimizing authority and cultural
distinction (Lambert 1996).
The processes by which such scientific controversies are
settled (or bypassed altogether), and scientific knowledge
LEVER BROTHERS COMPANY / J. WALTER THOMPSON COMPANY COMPETITIVE ADVERTISEMENTS COLLECTION
 Fig. 8. ‘Lifebuoy little stars
meet super star Hrithik
Roshan in Mumbai’ . Image
from Hindustan Unilever Ltd
report, 2007.
Fig. 9. ‘Mothers shown how
to wash their hands with soap
in rural Chattisgharh, India
on Global Handwashing Day
2008’ Image from Health in
Your Hands report.
HEALTH IN YOUR HANDS
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009 7
travels to and is circulated in specific places as universal
fact, are central to the way in which commodities aimed
at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, like Lifebuoy soap, can be
marketed as ‘social goods’. The high-­profile nature of the
triclosan controversy in the US media and its compara-
tive absence in India illustrates the intrinsically contingent
nature of relationships between business and science and
the importance of tracing such alliances as they travel
between the laboratory and the marketing department.
Behaviour change
Valerie Curtis, a behavioural scientist at the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a key founder of
the Health in Your Hands partnership, has become a highly
visible advocate of public-private partnerships in public
health, arguing that large corporations like Unilever are
essential to creating effective, technical solutions to dis-
eases of poverty. For Curtis, marketing strategies focused
on the subconscious desires, motivations and habits of
consumers mean that commercial firms are uniquely posi-
HINDUSTAN UNILEVER LTD
tioned to change everyday hygiene practices in ways that
conventional public health campaigns have failed to do
(Curtis 2003). The experience of large-scale enterprises in
engineering habits and needs, Curtis argues, makes them
effective and necessary partners for international public
health. As Curtis has said:
There are fundamental public health problems like hand-
washing with soap that remain killers only because we can’t
figure out how to change people’s habits. We want to learn
from private industry how to create new behaviours that
happen automatically. (Curtis, quoted in Duhigg 2008)
Yet the reduction of hand-washing to an instrumental
relationship between soap and bacteria belies the multiple
ancillary transformations that occur when public health
interventions include commercial partners. Persuading
poor Indians that their hands are dirty may be vital if they
are to take up a life-saving hand-washing habit. But it is not
only bacteria that are being acted on in such campaigns.
When health and hygiene are sold as commodities, rela-
tionships to the body and understandings of well-being
become increasingly mediated by consumption practices.
A key motivation for Unilever to encourage hand-washing
is that the relationship between hands, soap and cleanli-
ness can be extended to create a ‘total hygienic ideal’. As
market research for the Health in Your Hands partnership
put it, ‘the more evolved the market, the more species
of soap products will be found in a consumer’s house-
hold’ (LSTMH 2005: 10). New hygienic consumers will
not only wash their hands but other ‘dirty’ body parts,
domestic surfaces and appliances that will each require a
unique cleaning product. Just as Unilever’s 19th-century
campaigns in metropole and colony created new hygienic
and consumer subjects, so too their contemporary engage-
ment in international public health initiatives goes well
beyond the creation of new hand-washing habits to shape
new hygienic sensibilities, aspirations and desires.
Saving lives or selling soap?
The portrayal of the Health in Your Hands global partner-
ship as a purely technical public health intervention, and
the involvement of global consumer goods companies as
benign and disinterested, ultimately contributed to the
failure of the pilot project in Kerala. In Kerala the Health
Fig. 10. ‘Project Shakti:
Creating Rural Entrepreneurs
in India’. Image from 2005
report in Unilever’s Global
Challenges, Local Actions
series.
Aiello, A.E.et al. 2005.
Antibacterial cleaning
products and drug
resistance. Emerging
Infectious Diseases
11(10): 1565-1570.
UNILVER LTD
Basheer, M.P. 2002. ‘The
handwashing initiative:
Selling soap or saving
lives?’ Info-Change India;
available at http://tinyurl.
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May 2009).
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consumption, and
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Curtis, V.A. and Cairncross,
S. 2003. Effect of
washing hands with soap
on diarrhoea risk in the
community: A systematic
review. Lancet Infect.
Diseases 3: 275-281.
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accessed 11 May 2009.
8 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009
in Your Hands partnership was construed as an attempt to
conceal profit motives with superficial claims about the
greater common good. Suspicious that the commercial
interests of the business partners were being downplayed,
social and political activists led a media campaign against
the project, arguing that it was entirely driven by the inter-
ests of multinational corporations.
Community leaders argued that it was the lack of access
to safe, affordable drinking water rather than the failure to
wash hands with soap that led to the transmission of dis-
ease (Sridhar 2003). ‘Give us drinking water first, instead
of [brand name] soap’, the president of a village govern-
ance committee in a region with high rates of coliform
bacteria in the water supply told reporters (Basheer 2002).
Business leaders argued that the public-private partner-
ship would destroy Kerala’s indigenous soap manufac-
turers, including those small-scale and environmentally
sustainable cottage industries that had been established by
micro-credit and poverty-alleviation programmes in the
state. ‘This handwashing initiative is a ploy to eat into the
existing market for these swadeshi [made in India] soaps’,
said the General Secretary of the Kerala Small Scale Soap
Manufacturers Association (Basheer 2002).
Social and environmental activist Vandana Shiva criti-
cized the Health in Your Hands partners as neo-­imperialists
whose interventions insulted local health knowledge and
‘furthered the colonizing interests of multi-national cor-
porations’. ‘Quite clearly,’ she wrote, ‘the project is not
about “saving lives” but merely about selling soap’ (Shiva
2003: 3).
In India the Health in Your Hands partnership mis-
judged the publics it hoped to educate. While consumers
might not be put off by debates about the risks of triclosan
use in the US, social activists, political representatives
and local businesspeople proved highly sensitive to the
political economy of globalization. Shiva’s references to
‘local’ knowledge and industries pointed to the failure of
the ‘global partnership’ to position itself as a spokesperson
for local interests. Instead, opposition to the partnership
as an external imposition mobilized powerful distinctions
between ‘local’ versus ‘foreign’ and ‘public’ versus ‘com-
mercial’ interests. Protests by social movements and oppo-
sition parties led to the Government of Kerala pulling out
of the partnership and the World Bank withdrawing sup-
port. As a result the initiative came to a standstill.
Complete disclosure
In the aftermath of their public-private partnership in
Kerala, Hindustan Unilever altered its approach to health
and hygiene in India (Murch and Reader 2003, Prahalad
2006). In relationships with public partners and con-
sumers the company now made a complete disclosure of
its commercial objectives and presented this as evidence
of trustworthiness. The launch of two pilot projects in the
state of Andhra Pradesh exemplified this approach. While
these projects continued to draw on scientific evidence and
research to legitimize their aims, the company had learnt
from the Kerala experience that broader alliances were
crucial if it was to market Lifebuoy soap successfully as a
health commodity without drawing public criticism. These
new initiatives addressed the failure to gain popular sup-
port in Kerala by making its commercial interest explicit
and by incorporating ‘local’ consumers as active partici-
pants in the marketing and distribution process.
The first project, Swasthya Chetna, was an educational
campaign that aimed to prevent the spread of diarrhoeal
disease by teaching schoolchildren about the need to wash
their hands with soap, and in doing so forge new associa-
tions with Lifebuoy soap. The project involved classroom
workshops that created direct associations between hand-
washing, hygiene and their brand. Unilever envisaged
schools as ‘entry points into communities’ and schoolchil-
dren as ‘change initiators’ who would convey the Lifebuoy
message to adult consumers in their homes. As Harpreet-
Singh Tibbs, Lifebuoy’s brand manager put it:
We aren’t shying away from the fact Lifebuoy is going to ben-
efit or we’re trying to get soap consumption up. We’re being
upfront about it. But we’re also telling them we’re doing some-
thing good for the benefit of the community and it’s there for
you to see yourself. (Harpreet Singh-Tibbs quoted in Murch
and Reader 2003: 24)
The second project, Project Shakti, was a direct dis-
tribution scheme that used existing funding for micro-
enterprise to reshape Unilever’s regional distribution
system and expand the company’s sales coverage into
‘media-dark’ regions that they had been unable to reach.
Unilever’s initiative was to provide members of micro-
credit schemes run by the state and community-based
NGOs with business opportunities, by recruiting them as
saleswomen or direct distributors. Project Shakti women
are not Hindustan Lever employees, but the company helps
train them, provides local marketing support, and offers
incentives, bonuses, prizes, ‘Amma of the Month’ award
schemes, and web profiles. As Sharat Dhall, Hindustan
Lever’s director of new ventures and marketing services,
told an interviewer for the Wall Street Journal:
For the women, it provides a livelihood […] For us, it is a great
one-to-one medium for brand communication and consumer
education. (Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2005)
The Shakti Ammalu – or Shakti Mothers – have emerged
as rural India’s equivalent to the Avon Ladies of 1950s
Britain: by 2004 they had covered 50,000 villages across
12 states, selling to some 70 million consumers. Unilever’s
promotional materials describe Project Shakti as empow-
ering women ‘in ways that are much more profound than
the income they earn selling soap and shampoos, it has
brought them self esteem, self empowerment and a place
in society’. As Rajev Shukla, Unilever’s global brand
manager for Lifebuoy soap, has said:
[Project Shakti] isn’t about philanthropy. It’s an outstanding
example of business with a purpose. Our vision is to build
cleaner, more hygienic and ultimately healthier communities,
and the health of our business in the last few years demon-
strates the power of this approach.
Fig. 11. ‘Honours for
Lifebuoy’s Swasthya Chetna
Programme’. Image from
Hindustan Unilever Ltd
report.
Lambert, H. 1996. Popular
therapeutics and medical
preferences in rural north
India. The Lancet 348:
1706-1709.
London School of Tropical
Medicine and Hygiene
2000. ‘The global market
for soaps: A market
research report for the
public-private partnership
on handwashing with
soap’. Available at http://
tinyurl.com/ohs36z;
accessed 11 May 2009.
Foster, R.J. 2007. The work
of the new economy:
Consumers, brands, and
value creation. Cultural
Anthropology 22(4): 707-
731.
McMurray, L., Oethinger,
M. and Levy, S. 1998.
Triclosan targets lipid
synthesis. Nature 394:
531-532
Murch, M. and Reader, K.
2003. Selling health:
Hindustan Lever Limited
and the soap market.
University of Michigan
Business School:
Department of Corporate
Strategy and International
Business Case Study
Series. Available at: http://
tinyurl.com/mvbez6;
accessed 24 June 2009.
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fortune at the bottom of
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Wharton School
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or destroying lives. Village
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Available at http://tinyurl.
com/phe49r; accessed 11
May 2009.
Sridhar, L. 2003. ‘Handwash
or eyewash: Selling soap
in the name of public-
private partnerships.’
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Available at http://tinyurl.
com/qnecrq; accessed 11
May 2009.
Unilever 2005 ‘Lifebuoy
promotes handwashing
with soap to improve
health in India’ Unilever:
Global Challenges, Local
Actions Series. Available
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lmk34o (accessed 5 July
2009).
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 4, AUGUST 2009 9
Consumers and co-production
As corporate players in the Indian soap market have sought
to extend or consolidate their market position among poor,
rural consumers, they have co-operated with government
and international organizations to fund public health mes-
sages, sponsored drama groups and artists to promote
brand awareness, trained nurses and midwives to propa-
gate behaviour change, and supported local conferences
or campaigns organized by local professional associations
in order to establish tacit endorsement for their products
(LSHTM 2000). Hindustan Unilever’s involvement in the
Health in your Hands partnership fits into this broader
pattern.
What made Swasthya Chetna and Project Shakti dif-
ferent, however, was their use of lay consumers rather than
scientific or expert actors and institutions to bring legiti-
macy and credibility to the brand. The active participation
of children and women in Swasthya Chetna and Project
Shakti has been essential to the production of Lifebuoy
soap as a ‘social good’. Each initiative incorporates the
practices and relationships of end users or consumers in
ways that create specifically ‘social’ outcomes. When
schoolchildren who have been taught to wash their hands
with soap in Hindustan Unilever’s classroom-based edu-
cational campaigns return home to their parents, or when
rural women on low incomes use small loans to sell soap
to neighbours, friends and kin, they produce the very rela-
tionships through which Lifebuoy soap acts as a prophy-
lactic against water-borne disease and a driver of social
and economic development.
In the business literature on initiatives at the bottom
of the pyramid, this interaction between the corporation
and the consumer is understood as one of mutual benefit.
C.K. Prahalad, for example, has described it as a ‘locus of
value co-creation’ in which corporation and community
of consumers co-operate to deliver unique and desirable
outcomes for each other. As anthropologist Robert Foster
(2007) reminds us, however, Lifebuoy soap is primarily
a ‘brand’, a corporate asset that remains the legally pro-
tected intellectual property of Unilever. If we are to look
at the social practices and relationships created by the con-
sumer as forms of labour that add a specific value to this
‘brand’ then the interaction between corporation and con-
sumer demands to be understood in different terms.
Anthropologists are familiar with the way that micro-
enterprise interventions like Project Shakti do not just
create the capacity to consume among families but also
shape entrepreneurial subjectivities (Rankin 2004) and
incorporate the social practices of the poor into the market
(Elyachar 2005). As Julia Elyachar has argued, micro-
enterprise initiatives appropriate those relationships,
networks and forms of co-operation with which people
survive without the state and subsume them into projects
of market development. The alliance between micro-­
enterprise and market expansion in Project Shakti takes
this work of appropriation further, by activating relations
of kinship, community and indebtedness in which the
women recruited as salespeople are immersed in order to
create attachments to specific products. When the Shakti
Amma sells soap to village women in rural Andhra Pradesh
her existing network is appropriated by a project of market
development, and the work of building and maintaining
these relationships is the creative labour that Hindustan
Unilever extracts to add value to the Lifebuoy soap brand.
In both initiatives Hindustan Unilever enlists children
and women consumers as producers of value, and it is
their active involvement which enables Unilever to dif-
ferentiate Lifebuoy soap from other brands as simultane-
ously public health commodity, development project and
viable commercial venture.
Enterprise evangelism
India’s postal department has traditionally used stamps
to honour political leaders and commemorative events.
On World Health Day 2006 Lifebuoy soap became the
first commercial product to appear on an Indian postage
stamp, symbolizing the immense political power that
projects combining public service with market expansion
now have. India’s Chief Postmaster General launched the
stamp by congratulating Hindustan Unilever on initiating
a ‘socially beneficial movement’ for good health and
said: ‘I urge all my brothers and sisters to take personal
hygiene habits like washing hands with soap extremely
seriously.’
The international development industry and global
business are tightly interlocked. Development paradigms
and policies are largely premised on the role of the
market as a mechanism for improving access to health
care or reducing poverty and, where existing markets
have been found to be flawed or imperfect, interventions
have sought to strengthen its institutions and actors.
The surge of interest in markets at the ‘bottom of the
pyramid’, however, suggests that relationships between
business and development are now more dynamic than
ever before. While public-private partnerships and cor-
porate social responsibility ventures repeatedly fail
to surmount a moral opposition between ‘market’ and
‘society’, bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies which make
their self-interest explicit and which incorporate scien-
tific knowledge and poor consumers into the marketing,
production and distribution process appear to gain
acceptance as successful composites of both social and
commercial interest.
The assemblage of logistical innovations involved in
the production of a social good sees transnational capital
forging fresh alliances with scientific communities, public
sector bodies and civil society organizations, and building
new relationships with poor people not as passive con-
sumers but as co-producers. Enterprise and the entrepre-
neurial spirit are today asserted as solutions to diseases of
poverty and rural livelihoods with evangelical zeal. The
corporate search for value at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’
is transforming the landscapes in which many anthropolo-
gists work. What will the pyramid look like when anthro-
pologists look up? l