2024/11/19 by Edward F. Fischer · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/sea2.12337
openalex publication_date 2024/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
As a business model, social media strives for “stickiness,” making it hard for users to stop scrolling or swiping or watching endless reels of videos. While these products have helped expand our view of addiction, the ultimate sticky products are physically addictive drugs such as opium or tobacco. In Kretek Capitalism, the title of which echoes Peter Benson (2012)'s study of Tobacco Capitalism in North Carolina, Marina Welker provides a thorough and multidimensional analysis of the clove cigarette (kretek) industry in Indonesia. She shows how cultural traditions, nationalism, gender politics, and savvy marketing come together to fuel demand in the face of health concerns. She also illustrates how the kretek industry feeds into national and global political (and cultural) economies, looking at the influence of Philip Morris' acquisitions while taking us from rural farmers and tobacco traders to the rolling rooms of the factory floor to small stores and the gifting relations that undergird a sense of community. Welker has a clear through-line, presenting an analysis of labor extraction and predatory capitalism in which exploitation extends from factory labor to consumers and contract farmers, from artists and influencers to politicians and activists. This is convincingly argued with examples of exploitation both brute and subtle, and the conclusion will be unsurprising for students of global capitalism. What I found most compelling were the rich and nuanced ethnographic descriptions that show the many shades of gray underlying this high-level conclusion. Both tobacco and cloves have bloody colonial histories behind them. The Portuguese pioneered the European trade in the coveted spice starting in the 1550s. But it was the seventeenth century Dutch working through the Dutch East India Company (VOC) that came to violently dominate the trade in the Spice Islands in the Banda Sea (now part of Indonesia). The Dutch strategy, pioneered with nutmeg, was to eradicate all trees except those controlled by the VOC. They declared that cloves could only be grown on the island of Ambon. Tobacco was a nineteenth century introduction, and here again the Dutch used brutal tactics to shape agricultural production toward European exports. The combination of smoking tobacco and cloves goes back to the late nineteenth century. The blend became commercialized in the early twentieth century, but kretek's current rise to ubiquity only started in the 1960s. Kretek are made today using cloves and clove oil, combined with tobacco and a range of other flavorings and additives. They began as hand-rolled products, but as they entered the mainstream market, they moved toward machine rolled versions that emulated “white cigarettes” (tobacco cigarettes that came in white rolling paper as opposed to the dark rolling papers of early kretek). For the farmers who grow it, tobacco is seen as risky and fraught, especially compared to subsistence production. But the Indonesian agricultural economy has been shaped by tobacco interests in ways that make alternatives harder to come by. Kretek production relies mostly on contract farmers, but independent farmers also sell into the market—child labor is not uncommon. Contracts are handled by specialty trading firms, acting as agents of the kretek manufacturers. With price fluctuations, fickle plants, and intense quality control, farmers complain that they are victims of the market, even as they are used in romantic and nationalist portrayals of tobacco (and clove) farmers as independent heroes. They point out that the power in this formation is not in owning the means of production, but rests with buyers, who are able to call all the shots about price, quality, volume. In the contemporary kretek market, the dominant player is Sampoerna, once a family-owned company grown from local roots and now a Philip Morris subsidiary. Welker focuses on Sampoerna because of its market position but also because of the remarkable access she had to the company, even spending time working in various roles in a Sampoerna factory. This factory produced hand-rolled kretek, which are associated with traditional masculine sociality in their consumption. Yet the hand-rollers are women, who, as workers, are doubly marginalized. This is not unskilled labor, as it might first appear, but requires the development of embodied skills. Welker describes developing a feel for rolling, trying to keep up with expected volume and quality control. Working at Sampoerna is largely seen as a plum job, as it comes with various benefits, such as scholarships for children, factory health clinics, libraries, and short-term loans—all things that are virtually unheard of in the Indonesian context. The company, like others of its kind, also goes to great lengths to make work “seem meaningful and fulfilling to those who perform it, even when its utility and purpose is to increase company profits” (p. 199). The company runs Radio Sampoerna, an in-house music, news, and information broadcast played in the factory. Radio Sampoerna serves to motivate workers, foster loyalty, and transmit moral, social, and health messages (although not about smoking). DJs announce quality winners for the week and remind workers about quality control measures in addition to playing music. Sampoerna's employee engagement strategies also include the gamification of production. The company offers prizes and kudos for exceeding goals on the in-house radio broadcasts. While this apparently increases efficiency, it also acts to heighten individualism and dampen the collective, team spirit many workers find meaningful. Gamification, Welker argues, focuses attention on short-term goals rather than long-term consequences of the smoking industry. At the same time, Sampoerna manages a sophisticated and multipronged marketing effort. In addition to billboards and media ads, they actively work with local organizations to reinforce the cultural heritage and national pride aspects of kretek. They actively engage the influencer economy (around the A-Mild brand), and have developed a college ambassador program. The most important distribution channel remains “traditional retail,” meaning small shops. Welker describes the salespeople serving these venues as doing a kind of “care work”—offering advice, being friendly, building relationships. In this, she writes, “sellers are both agents of exploitation and exploited subjects” (p. 156). As Welker shows, the desires of consumers are shaped by marketing and manipulation. Still, they are also meaningfully tied to identities and traditions. Smoking kretek together is an important venue for male socialization. Kretek also play an important role in local gifting economies. One might give a single kretek cigarette to a crossing guard who has been especially nice, or a pack to a friend to recognize a favor or just solidify the bond. In such ways, kretek are enmeshed in the social relations of people that might even reject the predatory capitalism fueling kretek production. All of this poses a challenge for anti-tobacco advocates. As Welker writes, “a significant share of the industry is controlled by foreign firms, kretek are mostly machine-rolled, the poorest smoke the most, and tobacco control activists struggle for influence in a context where policy decisions are shaped by patriarchal sympathy with male smokers and friendly relations between industry and government” (p. 201). As we have seen with vaccine hesitancy in recent years, simply providing scientific data on health impacts is insufficient, and changing Indonesian's veracious smoking habits will require structural and social change and not just biomedical education. Kretek Capitalism will be of interest to students of Indonesia as well as to anthropologists concerned with the complicated ways global capitalism affects and reflects local cultural, social, and political landscapes. Reading this book, I learned as much about Indonesian politics, economic conditions, and ethnic and gender relations as I did about clove cigarettes—a testament to Welker's ability to highlight the multifaceted web in which kretek production and consumption are embedded.