Orientalism on Cigarette Packs

by Beyazit Akman

By:

Posted: 12/1/08

Orientalism
on
Cigarette Packs

beyazit akman

when I first landed in the United States coming from Turkey, one of the parents of my host family told me on the way home, where I would stay for a couple of days, that she liked the Pyramids in my country very much, adding the question
whether my hometown was close to that great attraction site. She was of course trying to be nice, showing how much she knew about my home country, thus at the same time aiming to make me comfortable. However, I must admit, I felt quite uncomfortable
by this college graduate's ignorance of the almost common sense knowledge that the Pyramids are not in Turkey, but in Egypt, and Turks had nothing to do with it; I myself having never seen them. (As far as pyramids go, actually, Americans should be more familiar with it than Turks as every one dollar banknote has an image of it.) Although quite disappointed by the fact that Turkey didn't have any pyramids, she still didn't look satisfied with the answer. There were not only pyramids in Turkey, according
to her, but also lots of deserts, tents, palm trees, and even places of oasis. That was the reason why she chose an "Oriental" student to host; to learn more about "our culture", including the persistent question of why "we" Arabs [she was assuming that Arabs and Turks were all the same] marry lots of women at the same time, and whether it was difficult or not to travel on a camel, pointing out to the comfort of the Chevy she was driving… Quite simply, I was utterly shocked. Were these the same Americans who read the New York Times? Were these the people who ruled the world in this so much-touted-global era? Yet, how came this ignorance?
What was the source of it? Fortunately, my confusion did not last long. The answer to all of these questions was not lying in any secret book or sociological analysis, but on the table -most literally- when we got to my host family's home: the Camel cigarette pack; the oasis, the palm trees, the Pyramids, and a camel; a series of images in front of which wrote gravely: A Unique Blend of Turkish and Domestic Tobacco.
When Edward Said explained it is in the cultural sphere that the hegemonic discourse used to propagate the aims of imperialism can be recognized (Orientalism, 12), or when Raymond Williams introduced the notion of "structures of feeling", the idea that a particular culture at a particular time possess a particular sense of life, conception, feeling, a patterned regularity of firm but intangible values and perceptions
(Turner, 57-8), they had hardly in mind cigarette packs as one of the manifestations
of Orientalism, and of the hegemonic order structuring values and perceptions. However, as I will argue in this paper, the design of the cigarette packs is neither arbitrary
nor random-although sometimes hastily sketched, but never lacking conscious intent-and it has functioned for a century and a half as one of the cultural products representing, but more importantly, effectively creating structures of feeling, patterns of values, a consistent set of beliefs for the society thus aiming at conditioning peoples' minds at an unprecedented level about the "other", who is this case a monolithic Middle
Eastern society. Orientalism is the most prominent discourse of all packs among many others such as masculinity, patriarchy, anti-feminism, and war propaganda. In this study, I will analyze more than fifty examples of cigarette packs, including the bestseller
brands of all time not only in the cigarette industry but also in the overall of all products available to mankind-Camel, Chesterfield, and Marlboro-and demonstrate the consistent pattern of Orientalism prevalent in these images and designs on packs, as well as demonstrating the origins of such depictions, and ultimately the underlying message and intent beneath these designs. Given the amazing number of packs of this sort, it is quite surprising that this study will be the first of its kind, an instance showing how products of popular culture are underestimated regarding their sociological and political references, which thus makes them all the more powerful.
fatima: the first case
Orientalism on cigarette packs is as old as the history of cigarettes, or we should say, cigarette packaging as we know it. A young man named James Bonsack from Virginia, the biggest tobacco state in USA, started it all after inventing in 1878 a fast cigarette-rolling machine (Thibodeau and Martin 9), thus paving the way for mass production. Although the habit of cigarette smoking goes all the way back to the dawn of man (as
far as 6000 B.C.) looking at evidence coming from a vast area including pre-Columbian and Mayan cultures, Indian Americas, and the Middle East, it was the popularity of cigars
and pipes in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe that led the way to tobacco plantations and Bonsack's invention eventually, thus creating the cigarette industry as such in the late 19th century. One of the nascent companies making use of the Bonsack machine was Liggett & Myers, which produced the first bestselling cigarette in history: Fatima. Created in the last decade of the century, the brand was the number one ciga-
-rette by about the second decade of the 20th century (32). Fatima
sets the standards for the brands to follow its success; the images on the pack can be conceived as the prototypical design of its much more sophisticated successors: a woman behind the veil looking invitingly if not seductively, only her eyes being seen, a crescent and a star, and finally on the opposite site, some sort of cross. The name "Fatima" covers the main upper side of the packet whereas "Turkish" does the lower part in almost equal font size. The advertisements are less subtle; the veil is transparent, the woman is smiling and much more calling, the
embroidery on her clothes and jewelry is explicitly "oriental".
The common sense tempts one to argue that as the tobacco used in Fatima cigarettes is partly Turkish, there is nothing abnormal
to find Turkish images as descriptive features on the pack. There are yet two main problems with this quite plausible argument. The first one is that neither in package designing nor in advertisements, and not only in cigarette industry but also in the overall market of commodities, the design of the pack or the images used to define the product have hardly anything to do with the product itself.
Especially in today's commercials the situation is much more obvious; the actual
product advertised covers almost a fraction of the commercial, demonstrating the number one rule of a capitalist system: the use value-what a product is for- should be demolished to create the highest possible exchange value for that specific product. Otherwise, all shoes, let it be Nike, Adidas or a brand you have never heard of, are to be the same price as they are only good for protecting feet. As long as you break the link between the product and the use value, you can price it as much as you want, thus creating an arbitrarily chosen surplus. The case is no different for cigarette industry; "the brands are not descriptive of the product itself" (Thibodeau and Martin 6). For example, the Fatima brand is only partly consisted of Turkish Tobacco, and most probably
the majority of the blend comes from Virginian plantations. Then, the grave que-
-stion is, why does package not include any descriptive image about Virginia? Or we should ask, is there something which is exclusively Virginian so as to be put on a cigarette
pack? Do we have a set of conceptions about the Virginians which we can use to depict this tobacco? If there is such a thing, then why are we supposed to associate the Virginian tobacco with the Virginian people-if there is anything in the world such as a "Virginian persona"?
Thus we come to the heart of the issue; the second and the most important problem
with the argument that a brand including Turkish tobacco should be descriptive of the "Turkish"ness. Bearing in mind that it is hardly possible to come up with something Virginian, only one of the fifty states of the United States, how are we supposed to come up with something which is exclusively Turkish, and something which is to be associated
with the tobacco of the Fatima? Is a woman behind a veil something Turkish? Why not a man instead of a woman? Or let us ask, do all women-or any woman-in Turkey wear veils, and if so, does it make what one calls "Turkish"ness? As for the crescent and the star, which are actually the two images constituting the Turkish flag, although quite unlike the positions on the Fatima pack, even if we accept that this is something relatively Turkish, what are we supposed to do with that cross on the left hand? While discussing other misrepresentative products, O'Barr explains, "These ads do not tell about China, India or Africa from the point of the view of the people who live there but of those who romanticize, exploit, and conquer them" (93). As we will see in the rest of this article, in more obvious examples, the designing of cigarette packs do not work on na've assumptions such as the package defines the product but with quite hideous and colonialist agenda intended sometimes consciously other times subconsciously. Before trying to give some answers to the above questions it is better to go on with more sophisticated
and more famous brands of smoking.
mur
ad: marlboro of the time
It didn't take even a couple of decades for the almost perfection of cigarette design-and thus of Orientalism on packs. In 1905, S. Anargyros, later to become the tobacco giant P. Lorillard, launched Murad, the bestselling cigarette by 30s (Thibodeau and Martin 30). The elaboration is so charming that it is clear why Raymond Williams calls advertisement as the "official art of capitalist society" (qtd. in O'Barr 2). The blankly gazing woman of the Fatima is replaced by a pensive woman, part Cleopatra, part Harem
girl, lying on a cat-shaped throne, comforted by a giant ottoman cushion. There is an anubis-the jackal-headed Egyptian God-on each side of the throne and two "Egyptian" columns on each side of the pack. In the far background, there is a many-
rayed Sun with several buildings resembling a mixture of pyramids and chimneys. Camels, regular pyramids, tents, palm trees, a huge green valley and oasis on the grass (!) are other elements completing the picture. The elements making the representation a total illogical mass are innumerable: even within the logic of "Turkishness" of cigarette
packs, there is nothing "Turkish" in this "Turkish Cigarette" except the woman, who can represent any origin in addition to "Turkish". The anubis, the cat, the obelisks are all part of the Egyptian history and culture-but never constituting what may be called "Egyptian"ness, on the other hand.
This fusion of everything "Egyptian", "Turkish", "Arabic", and "Middle Eastern" with stereotypical images is the epitome and apotheosis of Orientalism. The reduction of a vast number nations and cultures to one single definition as the term "Orient" is what gives the colonial powers the opportunity to totalize, demonize, and create a counter-Other to define themselves against as well as a logic to manipulate and exert power on them. The way the West knows the Orient has been a way of using authority on them, demonstrates Said (6). A monolithic perception of totally different cultures and nations
on semi-mythical constructions helps the Western nations define themselves in a much easier and superior way. Therefore, the Orientalist discourse states that the
West is both the cradle and the pinnacle of civilization, creating and embracing all things logical, rational, an mathematical, whereas the Orient is all things illogical, mystical,
exotic, intuitional, deprived of historical development and change and always living in a world of oasis, camels, deserts, tents, pyramids, concubines dominated by barbarism. Stam and Shohat explain this situation as:
Eurocentric discourse is diffusionist; it assumes
that democracy, science, progress, and prosperity all emanate outward from a western source. . . . [It] sanitizes western history while patronizing and even demonizing the nonwest; it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements but of the nonwest in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined (482).
This is the double process of self-idealization and other demonization.
What follows this black and white differentiation is the need of the West to invade, dominate and change the Orient towards
civilization. Then, the question what the cigarette smoker has got to do with all these can be raised quite plausibly, one whose answer we will focus on in the following analyses.
something egyptian
As much as fusing the "Turkish" cigarettes with "Egyptian" elements, tobacco companies mixed "Egyptian" cigarettes with almost anything else, quite meaningless as these designs were. "Draw me something Egyptian" was the magical order given to the chromo-lithographic artist. But why Egyptian?
There are three exclusive reasons for this in addition to the ones we have covered up to now. Although the blend in these brands is in most cases a blend of Turkish tobacco rather than Egyptian, the nascent Turkish Republic at the time was no match for the depiction of mystique and ancient
empires of the East according to the corporate decision
makers. Turkey was now based on a parliament syst-
em rather than a monarchy, and the glimmering days of the empire were already replaced
by the poverty caused by the wars against colonialist powers. Thus when one uttered the word Turkish, it did not arouse the associations of wealth, power, and civilization
as it did in the medieval and pre-modern era, but of a mediocre country trying to stand on its own feet in a post-war era. Thus, it was more than okay for the compa-
-nies to use the "Egyptian" images for Turkish blends as the former still had the aura of the Pharaohs, the time of the Pyramids, and the sphinxes. This is why Alba, Café-Noir, Egyptian Straights and Oasis have all these images in the foreground. Yet, the best example
of this sort is Memnon pack on which lies the statue of Amenhotep III at Thebes (Mullen 81) above which writes prominently, "Carefully Selected Turkish Leaf".
the origins of orientalist depictions
A complete analysis about the origins of Orientalism would be an impossible task within the limits of this paper, and many other influential works led by Said's Orientalism have already fulfilled that task. However, we can have a brief overview of Orientalist depictions, the historical background which led to the designs on cigarette packs…
When on 1 July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte's flag ship, the Orient, with a giant armada full of painters, writers, orientalists, scholars, missioners, and theologians as well as huge troops, appeared at the coast of Egypt, nobody had the slightest idea that this would almost officially launch the mythical construction of the East as subservient to the West, the latter always superior and always ahead of the former (Stevens, 24). Napoleon
was claiming he was there for the Egyptians with whom he had no problems
but with their barbarous rulers. He gave the order to his attendants to analyze the society and show them eventually the superior West, and utilized as much as he could all the available knowledge of Koran and Islamic culture that could be learned by the French scholars, thus demonstrating the tactical power of knowing (Orientalism 82). Fed by the stereotypes and preconceptions created in the Crusades and Medieval Era, those who came to Egypt did not try to see the actual world, however, but to find what they already knew, thus blocking their conceptions to the real world but validating their mythical constructions of an East to be converted. Otherwise, they would have to turn back!
Their texts based on other mis-representative texts created the very reality they purported to describe. Yet, more important was to show both home and abroad in Egypt to the people of both nations that the East was a divert, a subversion to be dominated
and to be civilized. Napoleon knew no sword could do it but pen. And that is when cultural imperialism starts so as to keep the actual colonialism intact. Gramsci
explains that it is this cultural hegemony that give imperialism its durability and strength (qtd. in Orientalism 6). This is also the trick how the British were able to keep many of its colonies under order for centuries with a bunchful of troops, and quite astonishingly with the nations' own people. Thus Egypt became a focal point for Europeans,
particularly the French, the dominant colonialist power of the era for a century or two leading master painters to "depict" an Orient based on this newly-gained territory.
Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapolus (pg. 10), Lecomte Du Nouy's The White Slave, Gerome's Slave Market, Regnault's Summary Judgment, Seldon's Pyramids of Gizeh, and Lecomte du Nouy's Rhamses's Dans Son Harem are but a few examples of a constructed world where girls wait to be seduced, and barbarians suck blood, and a world devoid of civilization. Therefore, the Orientalist formulas about Egypt are much more colorful and accessible, if not older, in the European mind than other Middle Eastern countries, which makes them much more stable and their roots firmly fixed. Turkey, on the other hand, never underwent such a colonialist discourse. "Something Egyptian" thus rouses in mind not only all the Oriental stereotypes in minds, but also gives the smoker the chance to inhale all the promises of this Oriental world; the exotic, the mysterious, and the seductive.
However, although the rule of thumb was to depict that "Egyptian thing", the designer knew hardly anything about Egypt but all the clichés mentioned above. Sometimes,
however, getting bored of all these fixed fictions, the artists take some liberties in their conceptions, but still within the conditioning boundaries of Orientalism. The mixture of Arabic letters with Hieroglyphs is one of the most prominent examples. The process cannot be a difficult one: "What do the Egyptians speak? Arabic. But didn't
they have the hieroglyphs? Sure they did. Then let's do it!" What can be more "Egyptian"
than the mixed Arabic-looking and hieroglyph-looking -though not even authentic
-characters on Lotus and Mavrides Cigarettes:
Most designers are not even this "plausible". Egyptian Mysteries looks like the job of a designer who wanted to incorporate all sorts of signs and symbols s/he knew into the package: "[The design] exploits a bizarre blend of religious ceremony and flagellation," explains Mullen, "not in itself unusual, but here plainly ridiculous" (81).
It is the brand Crocodile, however, championing the most unlikely and absurd blend: a crocodile on the bank of a river next to the Pyramids.
the pyramids: a ubiquitous oriental component
Although the case of the Pyramid on Crocodile is most absurd, there have been other brands which have made more logical usage of this wonder of the world. The Pyramids are used on cigarette packs since the very beginning of the latter to this very day not only with its image but its very name being that of the brand as in the case of the Pyramid. There is no need to m-
ention the already discussed fact that the Pyramids
are not used to define the Egyptian tobacco inside the package as it is rarely so, a case which can be demonstrated rather easily by looking at the Rhodesian Turkish Blend Cigarettes which are dominated by two Pyramids and an oasis in the foreground. The monolithic and ahistorical conceptualization
of the East is still at work, and it is
still the desert and the palm trees defining the Oriental as it was a century ago as the packets of both yesterday and today suggest. The depiction of the Pyramids is always a useful construct that enable people to declare their convictions and affirm their values
as they easily create a fur-flung and totally different society than one's own. "Thus the Orient was both a tool for self-scrutiny, and a foil for social change" (Edwards 16).
Under this section, thus, I would like to point focus on the question of what is so appealing about the Pyramids which makes them almost an inseparable part of cigarette packaging,
and to what extent this question is related with Orientalism.
Cigarette pack designs aim to allure the (potential) smoker with several ways and the most prominent of these are the exotic charm, the sexual appeal, a sense of grandeur,
and chauvinism, all of which are in most cases filtered through, represented via, and made use of through Oriental-
-ism. In the rest of the paper, I will demonstrate examples of how each one of these categories are achieved one by one, the first of which is the exotic appeal primarily achieved by the Pyramids. We should note, however, that these are not clear-cut distinctions
but they are all bound up with one another; in most instances sexual appeal is tied up together with chauvinism as well as the sense of grandeur is with the exotic. Neither are they the only paths by which the cigarette finds its consumer; but only the most conspicuous and primary ones, from which many others such as snob appeal, and matters of fashion spring forth.
The Pyramids are the easiest and perhaps the securest way of giving the aura of the mystique, the exotic, and the sense of being far-away from the smoker's immediate
environment. Hardly anybody is quite satisfied with one's own life and the idea of a distant, imaginary, and an illusional location is quite comforting. The smoker is thus given the opportunity for a momentary escape; to get rid of his/her (although in most cases his) life at least hundred times a day when one inhales a deep breath out of that tobacco in a rounded-up paper no matter how imaginary the feeling is. Yet, isn't it the point of all this fuss? The more imaginary, the better.
However, while achieving this appeal, the design functions through the lenses of Orientalism as it defines the distant place, that's to say, the "Other" as the Orient. It is very well swept under the carpet that a modern day Turkey or Egypt is quite unlike these imaginations; and rather similar to the hectic, smothering, disturbing, and busy lifestyle of the smoker. Masses of concrete buildings, skyscrapers, congested traffic, and quite simply difficulty of life are as ubiquitous in the East as they are in the West. Moreover, we should also ask the question why the cigarette companies don't apply images
of the country, one of their own, valleys and meadows alike, or sea sides, beaches or coastal areas of one's own territory. Aren't they as soothing? Of course they are, but the soothing quality is only one part of the story; sexual appeal, the fantasy of occupying
a virgin territory which is not one's own are the other essential elements in the creation of the 'exotic' as well as in the definition of one's own identity.
the har
em
Sensual and sexual fantasy is one of the strongest tools of cigarette marketing. Not surprisingly, so is the case for Orientalism. P. Lorillard's 1912 Belle of Turkey is one of the first leading brands (led by Fatima) to use a woman figure as the dominant
image in the overall design. The color choice and the design in general has an almost artistic quality with an attractive royal red, an unexaggerated
dressing style of the woman figure, and a quite precise depiction of the mosques and palaces in the background. The woman is also not gazing through the packet to the onlooker
seductively, but rather having a posture of self-confidence and self-assurance.
The brands which followed, however, were not this 'reserved' in the depiction of the
"Oriental woman". Harem epitomizes the same old Orientalist discourse; a world where civilized manners do not count; instead young girls are picked up according to most bestial and lascivious desires whereas Salome exhibits the Oriental dancer in a less subtle way, waiting ready for the Western gazes.
In this way, exoticism and romance of the Middle East is transferred to the cigarette.
This is how the Orient is "reduced to colony, concubine, and indolent heathen, betraying the complex attitudes of entangled imperialist" (Edwards 11). The Turkish Blend girls are also living a happy and indolent life looking forward to satisfying their masters' desires in the best possible way. El Ahram fuses the exotic allure of pyramids and obelisks with harem girls whereas O.B.'s advertisement brings together a half-naked Harem girl, some sort of 'dervish' and on the same 'precision' level, a traditional "African", thus creating a most bizarre composition completed by the imperial monogram
of the Ottoman Empire in the middle. "Since little was understood about harems at the turn of the century," explain Thibodeau and Martin, "artists often conceived of them as brothels, fussed up with Oriental touches -veiled and beheaded houses of sin" (32). The women in the harem-are we to speak of the actual ones in the Ottoman era-were only but servants working in multiple areas ranging from bakery to tailoring in the huge palace; most of them having their own husbands and the rest to be married;
they were not sex slaves of the Sultans, at all, who had their own wives who were quite powerful and esteemed figures to such an extent as to interfere in state affairs and lead the nation. However, such a fact does not serve any purpose for the colonialist
discourse, one which is based on the fiction that (1) Eastern men abuse women and thus the Western man should save them (a cliché Hollywood theme led by the Indiana Jones series), and (2) the Oriental women would be pleased to serve the Western man
two fictional grounds on which the so called need to convert and teach the infidel and the barbarous or (regarding the second reason) to give them what they deserve emerges. When John Stuart Mill declared, "India needs us," he meant nothing more. Therefore, it is no wonder that the territorial occupation of the exotic land and claiming the Oriental
woman are both phallic, chauvinistic, and delusional but quite effective weapons.
sultans
Being rich and powerful, important and authoritative, having dignity and glory, and ruling in splendor and magnificence are another set of characteristics with which cigarettes allure the smoker, and the image of sultans is the first and foremost way of getting this message across (although the lives of most sultans hardly ever resemble these fantasies, but who cares). P. Lorillard's Nebo (1911) can be counted as the brand which initiated the emperor era with the image of a sultan-like figure looking up to the sky, which is the limit of what he can achieve, or at least a man with dignity and grandeur. He is neither European nor Asian but exclusively "Egyptian", as the style of the facial hair and clothing condition us to believe so. The rest of the brands in this category are less subtle in their picturing of the rulers, as bizarre mixtures they are. S. Anargyros's Mogul fuses "Egyptian"ness with the Moguls, whereas one of the bestselling
brands of all time, Omar applies the picture of a Greek-like soldier for its Turkish blend cigarettes. Mogul's emperor poses with character and cachet, holding a cigaret-
-te and standing in front of a great palace, most probably his own. His dressing and turban
are depicted without exaggeration by the use of soft and light colors, and the upper corners of the brand are also given an Oriental embellishment. An advertisement of the same brand applies more strong colors and the figure is this time almost caricatured.
As for Omar, the most famous brand of the time, its ads are much more 'authentic' within the borders of the cigarette pack design than the real pack. This 1914 poster of Omar is like a scene sprung forth from the Arabian Nights. The image
is also captioned with a quote from Omar: "Yon rising Moon that looks for us again-/How oft hereafter
will she wax and wane." We can deduce from this instance that the more elaborate and sophisticated
the Orientalism is applied on
ads, the better the brands sell. Selim II, on the other hand, is perhaps the most modest
example of this fashion, depicting an Ottoman Sultan in its purity with an almost perfect-like precision. The designer must have made a copy cat from a reliable source.
the fez
The fez has always been conceived by the West as the number one defining dress element of the East, particularly of the Turks. However, this conception has not been without bias or other negative connotations
specially attributed to the people of the Middle East. Within this respect, the fez is not a simple symbol
of dress representing the Turks or any other totalized
perception of Middle Eastern people, but a tool for degrading, pejorative, and debasing remarks. The earliest and the most conspicuous proof comes from the 'Go Bang' Cigarettes, which depicts an almost monkey-like human being crawled on an 'ottoman'
cushion, wearing a fez, and smoking a cigarette:
Bonnel Blend advertisements associate images of poverty and penury with an Istanbul-like skyline consisting of mosques and palaces in the background.
The child in the fez behind his donkey purport to be the common folk of this imaginary Istanbul: What is interesting in these depictions is that these images do not give the messages of power,
dignity, or magnificence to the smoker; on the contrary, those of destitution. Then the question is how these images achieve to allure the smoker. There are several answers. The most plausible one is that the manufacturer may try to cater to the smoker's sense of self, and how that self is different
from the "Other". One's immediate idenity is
made clearer by the application of a foil identity and environment, which are subservient
and inferior to the former; thus creating the sense of satisfaction in the smoker. "European culture," explains Said, "gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self" (Orientalism 3). Exclusion of others, thus, is essential in the formation of identity.
The second option is that cigarette companies also aim at those smokers-mostly
teenagers-, who have broken loose with the society, or who have an identity crisis, which is at least temporarily solved by being an outcast of rather than a participant of one's own world. Therefore, the smoker easily associates his/her eccentricity with that of the images on the pack; the eccentricity of the East helps the potential smoker find his/her own. In any case, and at any rate, one thing is for sure that these illustrations of bareness do not belong to the smoker's world but to that of the East, someplace far away where some sort of weird people wear fezzes. There is still third option to explain the case of the fez, which is quite simply xenophobia.
Butler & Butler's Fez is fortunately much more sober in its depiction; a middle aged man smoking quite self-confidently, a quality created by the self-assured movement
of the smoking hand. All in all, the image invites the onlookers to a little bit of self-indulgence, which is good for anybody.
The 1905 Turkey Red, however, brings about all the clichés about the Orient once more. Thibodeau and Martin define the image as, "Behold every man's version of Oriental exotica . . . . a European beauty in 'Turkish' garb: part harem girl, part prostitute"
(32). Bathed in red light, the package she displays in her hand reads: "Come to
stay," by which sexual fantasy reaches perhaps at its zenith. "[T]he cigarette manufacturers were also trying to shed the association that cigarettes had with femininity and were creating packages that would play to male fantasy. To add to the sense of exotic, two fezzes, emblazoned
with Turkish symbols and glowing
as if they had light bulbs inside, float like lanterns on either side of the beauty's
head" (32).
the camel story: the pinnacle of orientalism
When in 1913, the world famous Barnum & Bailey Circus was touring near Winston
(Mullen, 52), one of the tobacco empire states, the Circus managers didn't have the slightest idea that their dromedary called 'Old Joe' would not only name one of the bestselling products in history, but also be the world's most famous camel. Not long ago, bothered by the cigarette giant Duke's success, R. J. Reynolds, the man, had decided to come up with a brand which would dominate the earth's cigarette industry, exclaiming, "Now, watch me give him hell!" referring to Duke. RC Haberkern, a R.J.R. employee, having heard about the circus, persuades its managers to allow their dromedary
Old Joe to be photographed for use on pack design. However, Old Joe does not keep still for the photo and his trainer whacks him on the nose with a stick. Enraged and agitated, Old Joe pulls back his ears, raises his tail, and adopts a posture between offended dignity and aggression. Almost a hundred years later, that posture is still on billions of packs around the world. Reproduced exactly from this photo, the camel im-
-age (actually a dromedary) takes its place prominently on the design.
The second half of the story starts when at the same year, TV audiences are puzzled
by ads exclaiming "Camels are coming!" for months before any product is shown. Reynolds pulls back company's numerous brands out of the market to draw all the attention
and focus on only one brand to dominate and replace all others, and initiates a huge marketing campaign including teaser commercials. When the product is released finally, it becomes an instant champion.
The Camel design is the embodiment of all things "Oriental." Designers at R.J. Reynolds
took their jobs really seriously this time. Mullen states that artists of the company
analyzed earlier bestselling products such as the Murad pack (52), and it is not hard to guess that what they have discovered is that the number one cigarettes were always those with Oriental design. They knew that they had to combine all the previous
elements-oasis, palm trees, deserts, mosques and palaces, the Pyramids, and the crescent-in one single design. Yet, above all, they had to come up with something quite fresh and original; a brand element as yet still representing the Orient.
The prominent camel image on the middle of the pack was their solution. Organization
of all other elements surrounding the camel was based on mathematical precision, symmetry and ratio. The big pyramid on the right hand is matched by a more far away smaller one plus an oasis, including palm trees and a small lake. The back of the pack hosts palaces and minarets with crescents enveloped by the endless desert, all in all dominated by the sand color between yellow and light brown. Whereas front captioning emphasizes the "Turkish blend" prominently, the notice on the back adopts a snob appeal, creating an aura of dignity of its own. In the overall, the composition is eye-catchingly clear without the least bit of exaggeration.
Camel thus not only becomes the champion of the market but also of Orientalism
on cigarette packs. Reducing the Orient to its most cliché and stereotypical features,
thus prisoning it into an ahistorical, and never-changing web of impasse and deadlock, into a fate which is to be behind the West for ever and ever. Moreover, the desire to represent the "Turkish" tobacco with all things non-Turkish-Turkey doesn't have any deserts nor any camels as the latter are to be found in the former, nor any "Oriental" architecture like Tac Mahal, which is in India-represents the desire to stick to imaginary geographies, the ambition to totalize all Middle Eastern communities, and the eagerness to turn the region into a foil with a contrast to that of the "West", the latter no more factual than its counterpart. We should note that all these processes do not occur on the conscious level as much as they do subconsciously. All the same, the mind seeing the word "Turkish" a million times fused with images like desert scene, the Pyramids, and camels begins to combine and associate them with one another, leadi-
-ng to the common belief in Europe and United States that Turkey does have camels and deserts.
the invincible mosques
Camel' s immediate success leads to one of the fiercest competitions in corporate business,
what is called as the 'Cigarette Wars'. In response to R.J. Reynolds, Ligget & Myers, instead of introducing a new brand, focused on its Chesterfield brand as the locomotive product of the company. Its original design reshaped, the new pack incorporates
a heraldic crest and a calligraphic style as the predominant elements of the design. However, a bestselling brand without an Oriental aura in cigarette industry is of course unthinkable, and Chesterfield's trick is the image of an harbor, a piece of skyline dominated by mosques and minarets as faded and faint they are, in the background.
Yet, the latest Chesterfields which can be found at stores today highlight the Oriental images less subtly with the touch of the green color and a greater contrast. Before
talking about the significance of the heraldic crest, it is better to look at the case of Marlboro, which will open up for us quite unexpected and surprising paths of analysis in relation to Orientalism.
a c
ase in reverse: occidentalism
Would it be fair to write a paper about cigarettes but not to mention Philip Morris's Marlboro, the par excellence of today's tobacco industry? Regarding our topic, however,
there are no camels, pyramids, nor any harem girls on this very well known design,
one which is actually so famous that it is said to be the second most known image around the globe after the stop sign (Thibodeau and Martin, 46). Therefore, no matter how long you look at the design, you won't see a conscious or a subconscious Orientalist
message. Or is it really so?
Prior to answering this question let's see what the design is about. Philip Morris & Co. introduced Marlboro as we know it in the 1950s, the name of the brand coming from the Marlborough Street in London, where the company's factory was located. Originally and ironically planned as a women's cigarette in 1924, the brand was turned into a boldly masculine product several decades later with the help of the ubiquitous cowboy ads. Some interpret the drawing as a phallic design, whereas some others claim it represents muscular strength, both of which are intimately related. "The pack," explains
Mullen, "reinforces [the Marlboro Country] image with its sharp angularity of red chevron on the front and back, repeated along the bottom of the pack for easier identification when stacked in a tobacconist's shop. The lettering also has a no-frills vertical thrust, particularly to the 'l' and 'b' which tend to add to the illusion that the pack is bigger than it is" (56).
So far so good; quite simple and an effective design about masculinity… Yet, if one looks close enough, it stands just out there, in the middle, clear as a day: the coat of arms crowned by the Cross, and captioned by the Latin sentence "veni vidi vici", that is hardcore Orientalism.
When the Great Roman Emperor Caesar, in 47BC, conquered Pontus-the modern day Turkey, Egypt and Syria-he sent out the message to Rome and senate: "I came, I saw, I conquered." Two millennia later, that declaration stands gravely on every Marlboro pack from Asia to Antarctica. There are mainly two ways to approach and analyze this most subtle case. Firstly, by incorporating the motto which emerged after the occupation
of the Middle East, the colonialist attitude of the West is not only kept intact but also reinforced and carried to the modern century although this is done with utmost
dexterity and tenacity, drawing none's attention, as yet inscribing itself into many minds as well as many pockets. Within this respect, the masculinist, chauvinist, and all other phallic themes already existent on the design are fused quite successfully with occupational
desires for the East. We also should not underestimate the presence of the Cross which defines a common Western identity against a totalized "anti-Christmas
This last point brings us to the second and more important approach, which shows us the other side of the coin. As well as the Western nations applied Orientalism as a way of degrading and debasing the Middle East countries, they've used what we may perhaps call Occidentalism; the habit of accepting, taking for granted, and perpetuating
the superiority of the Occident, the Orient's all-time counterpart. (It would also be proper to call it, if you will, delusions of grandeur.) We have already seen on many instances how the East is depicted as the mysterious, intuitional, ahistorical, imaginary, exotic, and the primitive. On the other hand, the West is all things positive: the mathematical, the improving and changing for the better, and the civilized. Defining
these set of characteristics as "supreme fictions" Said explains, "[N]either the term Orient nor the concept of the West has ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other" (Orientalism, xvii).
Thus, the Western discourse, in an attempt to fulfill all these positive words, claims the ancient civilizations, which they think as "Western", although the issue of "west vs. east" is quite a recent invention compared to the long history of our kind. Claiming the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome is the foremost proof of this phenomenon.
Stam and Shohat also point out to this anachronistical allusion: "One symptom
of Eurocentricism is the tendency to trace the origins of all academic disciplines to ancient Greece" (482) while there is vast amount of evidence showing the rest of the world was not just lost in oblivion for thousands of years. What is even more noteworthy
is the case of the United States. After the dissolution of old colonial powers such as the British and the French, the New World took on the imperial "mission". Said writes, "France and Britain no longer occupy center stage in world politics; the American imperium
has displaced them. A vast web of interests now links all parts of the former colonial world to the United States" (285). Thus, it is not surprising to see the United States conceives itself as the new heir to the Roman Empire.
To give some examples from most famous brands, Pall Mall incorporates a more innocent Latin expression along with the heraldic crest, whereas Belted Earl enlivens the spirit of the Crusades. The British brand Island Queen represents an empire where the Sun never set, and most interestingly, Will's Fearless demonstrates how the civilized British troops come over the "primitive" Africans. Finally, I would like to point to the British American Tobacco (BAT) poster, as it embodies all the issues of Occidentalism and the transfer of imperialism to the New World. Unlike all the other Oriental figures we have seen up to now-the monkey-like man, the poor kid
wearing the fez, the insatiable Sultans, or the indolent harem girls-the BAT man is one of a kind: spiffy, charismatic, quite handsome, in a stylish suit, and above all, 'civilized' should we say.
smoking is harmful
While discussing the notion of hegemony, Edward Said notes, "Its tendency has always been to move downward from the height of power and privilege in order to diffuse,
disseminate, and expand itself in the widest possible range" (The World 9). Our analysis shows, remembering the art of Delacroix, Gerome, and others we could name within the limits of this paper, Orientalist depictions, fed by the politics of possession and colonialism have moved within a couple of centuries from the million-dollar paintings
of high art to the billion-pack cigarette industry which functions at the heart of everyday popular culture.
In addition,lows on a the duration of imperialism
is not without evolution; it not only moves from top to bottom, but also folcontinuum of more and more subtlety. The early conspicuous
illustrations of the so called bloodthirstiness of the Oriental man is replaced by dignified Sultans,
the naked harem slaves were turned into indolent
girls, the severe swords in the hands of the barbarous were taken over by sweet cigarettes between the two fingers. However, the encoding of Otherness, the theme of superiority, and the desire to dominate have stayed intact, thus more rooted and even more effective. It is more effective
because nobody dares to think for a second about some sort of images on a work of 'worthl-
-less' popular culture such as the design on a cigarette pack. "The very ordinariness of the cigarette pack," states Mullen, "-produced in its hundreds of millions every year, bought, used and then thrown away - has led to it being overlooked" (7). However,
there is no doubt that incomparably more people have seen and carried the cigarette Snake Charmer than its Gerome version (pg. 32).
Neither disturbed by curious and doubtful looks, nor questioned seriously by any person, let alone mentioning a scholar, the products of popular culture such as the cigarette pack defy all the obstacles in their path of constructing "structures of feeling.""Orientalist advertisements," indicates Edwards including those of the cigarette industry, "[. . .] utilized a vocabulary of stereotype and fantasy that was not confined to those who had the wherewithal to purchase fine art" (206). Moreover, the persistence of the same set of images again and again on cigarette packs shows how rooted, organized and effective the hegemonic discourse is, regarding Orientalism. The depictions are not randomly sketched (although hastily are they), neither are they scribbled accidentally; on the contrary, as we have seen on more than fifty packs, there is a strict pattern governing each and every "Turkish", "Egyptian", or any other "Middle Eastern" pack design.
"The starting point of critical elaboration is," sums up Gramsci, "the consciousness
of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore, it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory" (Orientalism
25). This paper was the attempt to collect and compile quite a small as yet vital field of that inventory. After all, as Williams points out, this may be the only way to "unlearn the inherent dominative mode". Otherwise, the Pyramids may never leave Turkey.