Selling with Prejudice: Social Enterprise and Caste at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India

ABSTRACT

How do you sell a solar powered lamp to India's un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty. In the highlands of Orissa, India, a US company sells solar powered lights through a network of young male sales agents. The company and its products express empathy and proximity, attachment and connection to India's indigenous and low caste communities. Yet the company’s salesmen are often more concerned with maintaining forms of structural advantage and their sales practices articulate social differences based on caste, class and gender. Rather than see prejudice as a peripheral effect of expansion and growth in emerging markets this paper proposes that we see it as a constitutive feature of markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• caste
• social enterprise
• solar energy
• bottom of the pyramid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.⁠

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Leverhulme Trust.