Minton Anthropology Lecture

Minton Anthropology Lecture with guest speaker Professor Marina Welker

Factory life, traditional labor, and corporate responsibility:  The curious case of Philip Morris International and the decline of slow smoking in Indonesia. 

Defenders of Indonesia's cigarette industry often cite the employment and benefits it brings to hundreds of thousands of workers in factories where clove cigarettes or kretek are still hand-rolled, trimmed, and packed. This talk provides an ethnographic lens into the organization and experience of this labor in factories producing ketek for Indonesia's largest cigarette company, Sampoerna. Sampoerna, which is owned by Philip Morris International, operates five factories and contracts thirty-eight small "third party operators" to manufacture its hand-rolled brands, employing over 50,000 workers and creating a sizable cadre of business and labor lobbyists and supporters. Professor Welker focuses on the tactics through which Sampoerna is both shrinking and sustaining this labor-intensive means of production, which is increasingly figured as iconic and endangered in an era when slow smoking is rapidly declining, eclipsed by sales of machine-made cigarettes. 

Marina Welker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell.  Professor Welker's research centers on the ethical relationship between business and society. Welker is the author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-authoritarian Indonesia. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2015-16, Welker conducted research on the making, distribution, and consumption of clove cigarettes in Indonesia.

6:00-6:30pm reception; 6:30pm lecture, gratis.  Members and guests are invited to dine at The Club following the lecture. The cost is $40 per person, inclusive of tax, gratuity and one glass of wine with dinner. Dinner reservations are required 48 hours prior to the program. Same-day cancellations and no shows will be charged.