Ethical food packaging and designed encounters with distant and exotic others
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David Machin
Abstract
There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labor. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction: The Making of Them and Us – Cultural encounters conveyed also through pictorial means
- Research Articles
- Translation as culture: The example of pictorial-verbal transposition in Sahagún’s primeros memoriales and codex florentino
- Germaine de Staël’s Réflexions sur le procès de la reine: An act of compassion?
- Mao’s Homeworld(s) – A comment on the use of propaganda posters in post-war China
- Construing Scandinavia: A semiotic account of intercultural exchange in theme park design
- The cultural semiotics of African encounters: Eighteenth-Century images of the Other
- Intercultural parallax: Comparative modeling, ethnic taxonomy, and the dynamic object
- Early body ornamentation as Ego-culture: Tracing the co-evolution of aesthetic ideals and cultural identity
- Intercultural competition over resources via contests for symbolic capitals
- Ethical food packaging and designed encounters with distant and exotic others
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction: The Making of Them and Us – Cultural encounters conveyed also through pictorial means
- Research Articles
- Translation as culture: The example of pictorial-verbal transposition in Sahagún’s primeros memoriales and codex florentino
- Germaine de Staël’s Réflexions sur le procès de la reine: An act of compassion?
- Mao’s Homeworld(s) – A comment on the use of propaganda posters in post-war China
- Construing Scandinavia: A semiotic account of intercultural exchange in theme park design
- The cultural semiotics of African encounters: Eighteenth-Century images of the Other
- Intercultural parallax: Comparative modeling, ethnic taxonomy, and the dynamic object
- Early body ornamentation as Ego-culture: Tracing the co-evolution of aesthetic ideals and cultural identity
- Intercultural competition over resources via contests for symbolic capitals
- Ethical food packaging and designed encounters with distant and exotic others
