Culture and the Ad

by O'Barr, William M.

• ISBN13: 9780813321974
• ISBN10: 0813321972
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-06-20
• Publisher: Westview Pr

Summary

If, through the years, American advertising has offered a clean and simple approach to getting out the word on new products or services, it has also made a complex, disturbing, and fascinating statement about American ideals and ideologies. This book, accessible to all readers, provides the necessary tools to interpret and understand in historical perspective how the American advertising industry portrays anyone other than the white American mainstreamAfrican Americans, women, Native Americans, tourists of many nationalities, all of whom have come to be known as "the other''in its print media.With more than one hundred carefully selected illustrations, Professor O'Barr takes us on an enlightening excursion from two early American travel manuals (which so subtly and perhaps even unconsciously delineated a hegemonic ideology to the amateur American tourist-photographer), to advertisements in the 1929National Geographicmagazine, to Dennis O'Rourke's disturbing 1987 filmCannibal Tours,to images of blackness across the twentieth century, and on to the representation of the Japanese (and, conversely, their representation of white Americans) in contemporary times.Though the author writes in a witty and readable style for the student and general reader, the argument he develops is one of profound seriousness: that the representation of foreigners and other categories of outsiders who appear in advertisements provides paradigms for relations between members of advertising's intended audience and those defined as outside of it. These paradigms constitute an ideological guide for relationsof hierarchy, dominance, and subordinationbetween self and others, between "us" and "them."

Author Biography

William M. O’Barr is professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Institutional Structures of Feeling	p. iii
Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Analyzing Social Ideology in Advertisements	p. 1
Bibliographic Notes	p. 15
Instructions in Representing Others	p. 17
Bibliographic Notes	p. 44
Representations of Others, Part 1	p. 45
Bibliographic Notes	p. 70
Representations of Others, Part 2	p. 73
Bibliographic Notes	p. 101
Audience Responses: The Photographers of Tourists	p. 103
Bibliographic Notes	p. 106
An Exposition of Twentieth-Century Print Advertisements: Depictions of African Americans	p. 107
Bibliographic Notes	p. 108
Interpretive Notes	p. 109
A Visitor's Guide to African Americans in American Advertising: a Twentieth-Century Restrospective	p. 113
Unexpected Audiences: American and Japanese Representations of One Another	p. 157
Bibliographic Notes	p. 198
The Future	p. 199
Bibliographic Notes	p. 206
References	p. 208
About the Book and Author	p. 209
Index	p. 210
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.