Building
Down and Dreaming Up: Finding Faith in a Mexican Multilevel Marketer
American Ethnologist 33(1):126-142.
February 2006
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Abstract
Scholars and journalists have
heralded the spread of direct sellers like Avon and Amway in the
developing world as a training ground for capitalist entrepreneurs. By
examining ethnographic evidence from Omnilife, a Mexican producer of
nutritional supplements, I argue that person-to-person marketing is not
a rationalist response to neoliberal economic reforms, but rather a
spiritual one. Such quasi-religious organizations promise workers a
renewed self-image that restores the balance between individual
interests with obligations to others disrupted by neoliberal economic
reforms. In pursuing this total transformation, workers accept
mechanisms of control that mask the company’s overriding profit motive.
[multilevel marketing, Mexico, neoliberalism, emotional labor,
quasi-religious organizations]
Introduction:
Selling Avon in the Amazon
Since the 1990s, mainstream
media have reported on the legions of Avon ladies and Mary Kay beauty
consultants fanning out across the developing world. They describe
these bold door-to-door sellers with a wink to the incongruity of
selling lipstick in the Amazon (Brooke 1995; Economist 1994; Ellison
1993; Epstein 1993; R. Harris 1994; Teicholz 1999), Brazilian slums
(Jordan 2003), tightly controlled China (Chang 2003; do Rosario 1995;
Forney and Fang 1998; Kristof 1992; Parker-Pope and Bannon 1997),
communist Vietnam (M. Cohen 2004; Kazmin 2004), or in the shadow of the
Kremlin (Stanley 1996; Tavernise 2002). Part of the curiosity is the
unexpected presence of entrepreneurial activity in a place often seen
as hostile to capitalist ventures. The seemingly ephemeral nature of
the product peddled—women’s cosmetics—adds to the novelty of the
hard-driving business style. Such articles suggest that the
enthusiastic welcome direct selling receives in places far from its
roots in the United States betokens the inevitable spread of free
markets around the globe.
According to an industry trade group, direct selling “is the sale of a
consumer product or service, person-to-person, away from a fixed
location” (Direct Selling Association 2002). Although it is a form of
marketing most closely associated with a middle class lifestyle that
accompanied the expansion of North American suburbs after World War II,
direct selling has recruited millions of distributors from the
developing world. While Avon’s sales flattened in the United States,
for instance, sales in developing countries accounted for 38 percent of
Avon’s $4.5 billion in sales and 49 percent of its pre-tax profit in
1995 (Economist 1996:57). Similarly, Tupperware relies on its 100
foreign markets for four-fifths of its revenue and all of its growth
(Hilsenrath 1996). Rather than seeing the brand and the home party plan
as old-fashioned, consumers in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America
embrace the opportunity to become distributors.
Where academic writers have tackled the topic of the worldwide surge in
direct selling, they advance the argument that direct selling prepares
citizens of the developing world for full integration into global
capitalist markets. They point to the resonance between direct
selling’s reliance on individual effort and the commodification of
personal relationships with the tenets of neoliberal economics that
have come to characterize modern capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff
2000; Harvey 1989). In this sense, participation in direct selling
serves as an instruction manual for laborers making sense of a
market-driven economy in which guarantees of state support no longer
hold. However, these explanations leave out the overt religiosity of
direct selling that the participants describe so vividly.
Rather than understanding the explosive growth of direct selling around
the world as training grounds for new economic subjects, I argue that
it is through selling and consuming that distributors rebuild and
fortify the foundations of their faith. All capitalist firms seek to
exercise control over their employees, but direct selling companies
infuse this rationalization of work, which could be interpreted as
alienating, with spiritual significance. As participants in a
quasi-religious organization, direct sellers seek to harmonize the
conditions of their working lives with the tenets of their religious
lives. For the company founders, direct selling may be a route to
financial prosperity in a climate of untrammeled free enterprise, but
for the millions of low-level distributors, the business represents an
opportunity to replace systematized and anonymous labor with work that
is transformative and fulfilling, characteristics that compensate for
the uncertainty of material rewards.
Invoking
Spirituality from Fuller Brush to Omnilife
With a global reach, direct
selling is an $84 billion a year industry that relies on the efforts of
over forty million independent distributors (Rungfapaisarn 2002). In
Mexico, direct selling generates sales of $3.5 billion a year through
the work of one million self-employed entrepreneurs (InfoLatina 2001).
Such marketing has its roots in colonial-era peddlers in the United
States who served as distribution channels for goods in the absence of
a reliable rail system. As retail stores grew more prominent, some
companies still promoted door-to-door sales as a way to reach consumers
in their homes or to demonstrate innovative products. By 1920, at least
two hundred thousand people sold door-to-door in the United States, a
mostly male sales force epitomized by the Fuller Brush man (Biggart
1989:26).
Under the charismatic Alfred “Dad” Fuller, Fuller Brush Company applied
both scientific and spiritual principles to selling, giving its
representatives sample scripts and precise timetables as well as
motivational stories inspired by the founder’s Christian Science faith
(Friedman 2004:206). A Fuller Vice President, Frank Stanley Beveridge,
left in 1937 to start his own direct selling firm, Stanley Home
Products. His innovation, a year later, was to adopt the home party as
the vehicle for sales. By 1954, Stanley Home Products conducted more
than three million living room demonstrations, selling $100 million
worth of Amazo Mops and Degreaser cleansers (Brown 1955). The shift
from door-to-door selling to in-home parties heralded a shift in the
industry to a female-dominated workforce. With the expansion of
suburbia and the boom in home ownership after World War II, the home
party form of direct selling grew in popularity and acquired its image
of catering to otherwise economically inactive housewives (L. Cohen
2003:287).
Three women, all veterans of Stanley Home Products, became the public
faces of direct selling in the 1950s, imbuing their companies with an
evangelical fervor that influenced the entire industry. Earl Tupper
named Brownie Wise vice president of Tupperware Home Parties, making
her the primary motivator of the company’s sales force. Following the
lessons of Stanley, Wise instituted annual pilgrimages to the
Tupperware headquarters, where distributors could be baptized in Tupper
Magic at an artificial lake (Clarke 1999:137). Mary Kay Ash, founder of
the eponymous cosmetics company, and Mary Crowley, her sister-in-law
and founder of Home Interiors and Gifts, unabashedly called God a
business partner (Ash 1981; Crowley 1976). The conspicuous examples of
these women established direct selling as a place where Protestant
Christian beliefs in salvation through individual born-again
experiences mingled with the demands of profit making.
Another change that accompanied the shift of direct selling from
itinerant salesman to parties of housewives was the adoption of
multilevel marketing. Multilevel marketing (also known as network
marketing or MLM) is a type of compensation plan that “allows
independent sales representatives to recruit other sales
representatives and to draw commissions from the sales of those
recruits” (Poe 1995:8). In the 1940s, Carl Rehnborg, a California
entrepreneur and early proponent of vitamin supplements, pioneered the
multilevel approach. Two distributors from Rehnborg’s company split to
form their own firm, named Amway, which adopted both the multilevel
marketing scheme and an explicit evangelical Christian bent (D. Harris
1992; Michaud 1994). With the global success of Amway, MLM has become
the dominant form of direct selling. The proportion of multilevel firms
in the membership of the U.S. Direct Selling Association rose from 25
percent in 1990 to 78 percent in 2000 (Brodie et al. 2002). The pursuit
of recruits, or “downline” members, lends itself to the intense
Protestant-style proselytizing that characterizes contemporary direct
selling.
Framing the work of direct selling in spiritual terms has the advantage
of allowing corporate leaders to exert control over a disparate,
independent workforce. Women who market Avon cosmetics or Amway
cleansers function as resellers, buying the products at a discount,
then collecting a profit from the suggested retail price. As resellers,
they may charge any amount to the public and may even allow customers
to choose among competing brands. Since a lack of loyalty plagues all
direct selling firms—even a sympathetic book written by an industry
insider reports an average annual replacement of 100 percent (Berry
1997:90)—companies have infused their missions with promises of
personal and collective uplift. Mary Kay, for instance, calls its
distributors “beauty consultants,” emphasizing their professionalism
and expertise. For them, the successful application of cosmetics
contributes to healthy confidence and upward mobility (Banks and
Zimmerman 1987). Workers who internalize the ethos of self-improvement
are more likely to submit themselves to the instructions of the company
handbook (Chan 2001; Lan 2001; Pratt 1994).
Company rhetoric touting the flexibility and independence of multilevel
marketing belies the grip of what Hochschild calls “emotional labor.”
Employees must “suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward
countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (1983:7).
Just as factory workers give up control of their bodies to the factory
owners, so do emotional laborers cede their personalities to the
dictates of the larger organization. With multilevel marketing, this
form of control may be even more insidious since it makes no
distinction between home and work lives, offering the emotional laborer
no rest from managing her feelings.1 Despite these mechanisms of
control, most sales representatives do not experience alienation.
Leidner (1993) finds that some service workers welcome the
routinization of human interaction that comes with a quasi-religious
work environment. The philosophy of positive thinking gives them the
tools both to meet sales quotas and to handle noncompliant prospects.
From early on, the direct selling industry in the United States
recognized that by cultivating foreign markets, the pool of available
recruits would expand dramatically. Sales of U.S.-based direct selling
companies abroad, while still a fraction of overall revenue, soared
from $3 million in 1954 to $20 million in 1959 (Wall Street Journal
1959). Despite concerns about the translatability of home parties to
countries where houses are smaller and socializing more reserved,
Tupperware recruited 16,500 distributors during its first two years in
Japan (Business Week 1965). Going overseas also allowed direct selling
companies to elude increased legal scrutiny of their practices at home.
As early as 1933, the town of Green River, Wyoming, prohibited selling
in homes without prior consent (Buzzell et al. 1972:239). Starting in
the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission proposed tightening the
restrictions on door-to-door selling to counter charges of
high-pressure sales tactics (Burck 1972:72) and accusations of illegal
pyramid schemes (Barkacs 1997; Vander Nat and Keep 2002).
Mexico’s proximity to the United States and ready pool of labor make it
an attractive target for the growth of multilevel marketers. Avon
arrived in Mexico in 1957, quickly becoming the company’s third-largest
market after the United States and Japan (Ramírez Tamayo 1995).
Fernández-Kelly reports that webs of reciprocity built around
Avon products “have become an almost legendary feature of proletarian
colonies” on the U.S.-Mexico border (1983:159). Amway began operations
in Mexico in 1990 in the wake of President Salinas’s liberalizing
economic reforms (Xardel 1993:107). The success of direct selling in
Mexico has attracted firms with headquarters outside the United States,
like Japan’s Nikken, which markets magnetized pain relief devices
(Gutiérrez Zuñiga 2001). However, the largest multilevel
marketer in Mexico is Omnilife, which ranks 107th in size among all
Mexican-based companies (Expansión 2004). Since its founding in
1991, Omnilife has expanded operations to 16 countries, generating a
reported $1 billion in sales and recruiting two million distributors,
the same sized workforce as Wal-Mart (Aguilar Garcia 2003; Delaunay
2002).
As with most multilevel marketing companies, the corporate image of
Omnilife is closely tied to the persona of its charismatic founder,
Jorge Vergara.
Vergara, born in 1955 in Guadalajara, went to work for Grupo Alfa, one
of Mexico's biggest industrial conglomerates. In 1984, in the midst of
a national financial crisis, Alfa dismissed 13,000 employees, Vergara
among them. During the seven years between losing his job and founding
Omnilife, Vergara tried a number of business ventures including a meat
wholesaler and an Italian restaurant without success. His health
suffered as well. A friend introduced him to the nutritional
supplements of Herbalife, a Los Angeles-based multilevel marketer. He
began to feel better and to achieve financial gains, eventually working
for Herbalife in the United States, France, and Spain (McCosh 2001;
Rico 2001).
Vergara spoke to a Mexican journalist in 2003 about the genesis for
Omnilife (Mora Tavares 2003).2 After complaining to the founder of
Herbalife that the Los Angeles-based company exploited Mexico without
giving anything back, Vergara had the idea to turn the line of vitamin
tablets into powders, a format more familiar to Mexicans. When Mark
Hughes, the founder of Herbalife, told him that he was “crazy,” Vergara
started Omnitrition. Vergara recalls that he knew he would parlay his
$10,000 investment into a thriving business because he had turned from
a typical multilevel compensation plan to a more holistic
“multidevelopment” one. In Herbalife,
They were only looking to earn
money and sell a dream….Multilevel talks only about making chains to
earn money and offering you a chance to win a Mercedes Benz or buy a
house, when the Mexican asks himself: “What do I want a Mercedes Benz
for? What I need is to eat tomorrow.” The gringos didn’t understand the
difference, the change in mentality. [Mora Tavares 2003:37]
The new company eventually
acquired units for film production, music recording, fresh flowers,
magazines, an experimental school, events promotion, and professional
sports teams, changing its name to the more inclusive Omnilife.
Converting
to the Power of Positive Thinking
Cordless microphone in one
hand and a yellow-tinged bottle of water in the other, Selene recounts
to the 500-person audience her introduction to Omnilife. “Thanks to
these blessed products, I’ve changed my life. I was fat. I was
depressed. Since I was depressed, I ate more and got fatter. Who’s been
there?” I scan the packed hotel ballroom. As the predominantly female
crowd listens to Selene’s story, many take sips from Omnilife bottles
in a range of shades from green to fluorescent orange. Unlike the
imperturbable woman on stage in an elegantly tailored pantsuit, members
of the audience shush squirming children and fumble for notebooks to
copy down the diagrams from PowerPoint slides. But her testimony
resonates with them. When she joined Omnilife not only did she suffer
from physical illness, but also she was under financial stress:
I made gold jewelry. I had money
and a house, but then there was an economic crisis in Mexico. I
couldn’t pay back my loans to the bank, so I went to private lenders,
who charged 20 percent interest. I couldn’t pay them back, so the bank
and the lenders fought over my house, and I was out on the street with
two kids.
For five years, Selene lived
with relatives while she searched for a way to support her children.
Her female cousins, who sold Avon cosmetics, Tupperware containers, and
Stanhome household cleaners, invited her to join them. “I began leaving
catalogs with clients,” she continues, “and soon we won a prize from
Tupperware. But I wasn’t interested in plastic. I wanted money. I
wanted what I used to have. I don’t want to have to look at the price
before I order from the menu.” She appealed to God. “I said to God,
‘Find me a job where I can support my children.’ God listened to me. He
put me in Omnilife. How great He is!” God’s response came in the form
of a newspaper ad promoting an Omnilife orientation session. When
Selene learned about the products and began to consume them, she lost
weight and gained the confidence to recommend them to others. “We have
the security that this company will never fail, and, when I die, my
children will keep receiving my paycheck.” She pauses to acknowledge
the applause from the audience.
Selene’s appearance that Monday afternoon in Morelia, Mexico, targets
both newcomers to Omnilife and veteran distributors. Before she segues
into more technical advice on how to maximize earnings from the
company’s multilevel compensation plan, she slows her speech to make a
final plea to the non-distributors:
God brought you here for a reason.
Trust in God. I want you to close your eyes. Uncross your legs. Relax
your arms. You enter a room and see people gathered around a coffin. As
you get closer, you realize it’s you they are mourning. You see your
spouse crying, “Why did you leave us with so many debts?” Then you see
your children. They are crying, “Why did you never give us the things
you promised us?” Suddenly, you see the figure of a man. You can’t see
his face because the light is so bright. It’s God. You turn to him and
ask, “Please let me live again.”
Selene puts down her
microphone as the chords of a ballad in Spanish called “Dreams” fill
the room. When the song fades, she instructs us, “Don’t open your eyes
until you know why you are living again, what motivates you. God gives
us everything. We deserve abundance. I earn $40,000 a month.”
Two women and one man walk up
on stage, declaring themselves ready to accept the opportunity to
enroll in Omnilife as the audience welcomes them with sustained
applause.
Although Selene’s
presentation borrows heavily from religious rhetoric of
self-transformation and worship staples like call and response, her
appeals to God lack any specific denominational reference. Only at the
end of her four-hour talk do I perceive the overwhelming Roman Catholic
affiliation of the audience. To illustrate her claim that success is
“20 percent work and 80 percent attitude,” she screens a short video
clip profiling Tony Meléndez. A thalidomide baby born without
arms, Meléndez nonetheless learned to play the guitar with his
feet. The climax of the biography shows Meléndez performing for
Pope John Paul II. When the camera shows the pope’s smiling reaction to
the concert, the crowd in the hotel bursts into applause.
During six months of fieldwork in Morelia during 2003 and 2004, I
conducted open-ended interviews with approximately 50 current and
former Omnilife distributors and took extensive life histories from 15.
Everyone in my sample self-identifies as Roman Catholic, though not all
are observant. Their religious uniformity may stem from the way
recruitment in multilevel marketing follows personal networks. Omnilife
has been active in Morelia for almost as long as the company has been
in existence, reaching the city through a first cousin of Jorge
Vergara. She and her husband became involved in a series of marriage
workshops sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church. Their early recruits
included two couples they met at the retreats. Two of the three
husband-wife teams have reached diamond-level status, the top echelon
of the Omnilife hierarchy that ascends from distributor to bronze,
silver, and gold before reaching diamond. All three pairs operate
independent support centers where they hold training sessions and offer
advice to their networks, which can extend to several thousand people.
Nearly all active distributors in Morelia pass through one of these
three centers, located near the wholesale store, making fieldwork more
feasible than in the far-flung neighborhoods of Guadalajara, the site
of Omnilife’s headquarters.
While in Morelia, I lived in the middle-class neighborhood that houses
the city’s Omnilife wholesale store and the support centers (see Figure
1). Over 600,000 people reside in Morelia, the capital of the
central-western state of Michoacán. Its uniform colonial
architecture won the city center recognition as a UNESCO world heritage
site and draws both national and international tourists. Always a
regional commercial center, in recent years, Morelia has received
foreign investment to diversify its consumer options. During my stay in
2004, the governor of the state cut the ribbon to a new Sam’s Club to
compete with the existing Costco. Within walking distance of the
Omnilife wholesale store is a Burger King, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried
Chicken, Holiday Inn, and Blockbuster Video. Still, Morelia is not an
industrial center and supports a widening fringe of shantytowns and
houses left vacant by families who have migrated to the United States.
Figure 1
The Omnilife wholesale center
in Morelia is located on a busy commercial street in a middle class
neighborhood. Registered distributors may purchase from a list of
nearly one hundred products at a discount. Photo by Peter S. Cahn.
As part of my
ethnographic research, I signed on as an Omnilife distributor, paying
the approximately $20 enrollment fee in exchange for a promotional
video, a magazine, a carrying case, and the right to purchase products
at an initial 20 percent discount. Though I consumed the nutritional
supplements as regularly as I found practical, I neither attempted to
sell nor to recruit any additional distributors. This situation, I
later found, describes the majority of the Omnilife workforce. A select
few build downlines and open training centers while the majority buy
for personal consumption and never earn a royalty check from the
company.
My attendance at support center meetings, however, matched the devotion
of only the most diligent distributors. Official company literature
recommends that support center leaders hold orientation sessions about
the health products on Tuesdays and Saturdays and business training for
already enrolled distributors on Thursdays. The support centers in
Morelia conform to this schedule, holding separate meetings each week,
which last about two hours and draw from four to eighty people. By
attending a total of 45 meetings at all the support centers, I came to
know the three highest-ranked Omnilife couples in Morelia. Once a
month, they jointly sponsor an outside speaker, usually a successful
distributor from another state, like Selene. Two or three times a year,
they charter buses to ferry members of their organizations to
company-wide events in adjacent states. Between 2003 and 2004, I
attended 14 of these gatherings in Morelia and elsewhere, including a
self-presentation workshop in Puerto Vallarta and “rallies” with Jorge
Vergara in Guadalajara and San Antonio, Texas.
From a wide-angled view of the company, I could document how the
rhetoric of spiritual uplift remained standardized from corporate
publications to guest speakers to individual commentaries. To obtain a
more fine-grained perspective, I focused my interviewing and
observations on the organization headed by my sponsor, Luisa
González. Some distributors join Omnilife after responding to a
flyer or newspaper ad. More commonly, the first direct contact a
prospective distributor has with the company is through an invitation
from a friend or relative already involved in Omnilife. A branch of the
Guadalajara headquarters produces glossy magazines, videos, and
pamphlets that distributors can use as recruiting tools.
Lacking a personal connection to the company, I visit the Omnilife
wholesale store in Morelia and ask for information. When the employee
behind the counter cannot answer all my questions, he refers me to a
support center located across the busy boulevard. A discrete Omnilife
logo stenciled on the glass front identifies the office, which
otherwise looks like a doctor’s waiting room. A glass-topped desk
surrounded by filing cabinets, a fax, and small refrigerator dominates
the front of the room. An accordion door separates the lobby from a
larger meeting space with black plastic chairs arranged in rows facing
a display of Omnilife products and a microphone stand (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Orientation sessions for
potential Omnilife recruits and business meetings for veteran
distributors take place in this support center three times a week.
Photo by Peter S. Cahn.
Luisa, sitting behind
the desk, greets me politely and gestures for me to sit. She is in her
early thirties and dressed in a summery pink and white outfit with
white sandals accented with silver jewelry. She seems unfazed by my
explanation that I am an anthropologist interested in learning more
about Omnilife and invites me to try a cup of the company’s Thermogen
coffee. At first, she talks exclusively about the catalog of
nutritional products, which come in a bewildering range of flavors with
English names like Fiber ‘n Plus and Dual C Mix. The coffee I’m
drinking, she boasts, burns fat and helps prevent diabetes. “A man who
suffered a heart attack drank the coffee and he felt better instantly.
When you drink it it’s like you’ve been injected. It contains only
vitamins, nutrients, and minerals—what your body needs daily. It goes
directly to where your body needs it most and works in about ten
minutes.” She asks me searchingly how I feel after I finish drinking
the coffee. The only difference I detect is a slight warmth, whether
from the hot water, the burning of fat, or the sunny weather I cannot
tell, but I answer her that I feel fine.
Over time, I learn more about Luisa’s trajectory in Omnilife. Her
parents, who ran their own business selling homemade facial creams,
joined the company after participating in the marriage workshop with
Jorge Vergara’s cousin. Her mother suffered from osteoporosis so severe
that she sometimes resorted to a wheelchair. The calcium-rich Omnilife
products restored her to health and persuaded Luisa to try them.
Drinking a liquid called OmniPlus dissolved in water cured her of
lifelong asthma that doctors could not treat and convinced her that the
technology works. She continued to take OmniPlus during her pregnancy,
and her daughter was born extraordinarily healthy, she boasts. Curious
about these miraculous products’ origin, I ask her who formulated them.
She replies without elaboration that NASA scientists designed them
originally as food for astronauts, the same researchers who patented
the laser ray.3 Some people complain about their high cost, but Luisa
reminds me that many patients willingly spend hundreds of dollars on
medicines without any guarantee of recovery. “Your body was designed
for nutrition, not medicine, am I right?” she asks me, leaving no room
for disagreement. Since she joined Omnilife in 1991, she has not let a
day pass without consuming the company’s products in prodigious
quantities.
The transformation she has experienced in Omnilife goes beyond the
improvement in her physical health. She tells me that she studied to be
a kindergarten teacher. If she wanted relatively well-remunerated work
in a government school, she would first have to accept a year of
service in a remote rural community. She opted to stay in Morelia and
took a job in a private school that paid less than $200 a month. With
that salary, she knew she would never realize her dream of buying a
car. She supplemented her income by selling cosmetics via catalog. When
Amway came to Mexico, she signed up hoping to achieve the same
affluence as the leaders she saw at the presentations. Instead, she
found that “it was all about appearances” and soon dropped out. They
pressured her to buy an evening gown to appear prosperous although she
could not afford one. Omnilife, on the other hand, “is about covering
my needs” through regular profits from retail sales. It has the added
benefit of promising health cures, something Amway’s pricey soaps could
not claim. In her first month and a half as an Omnilife distributor,
Luisa’s Omnilife sales generated what it took her four months to earn
as a teacher.
After she had devoted herself to Omnilife full-time for a few years,
Luisa got married. In retrospect, she believes her desire to be a
mother motivated her and made her overlook the warning signs. The
marriage produced a daughter, but by then she had divorced her husband,
who suffered from drug addiction and alcoholism. She moved in with her
parents and her brother, all of whom worked full-time in Omnilife, and
enrolled in Omnilife’s “basic school.” In the name of
“multidevelopment,” Jorge Vergara implemented a series of self-help
workshops for distributors called “schools.” Engaging in what one
participant I spoke with called “interior work,” trained counselors
lead groups segregated by sex through exercises designed to relieve
grudges and to resolve family problems. Omnilife divides the schools
into a “basic” sequence and an “advanced,” which take place over four
weekends and can be repeated. Luisa attended the schools three times
hoping to deal with the failure of her marriage. By the third time she
knew the session devoted to forgiveness was coming. She went outside
and cried for a long time before she could join the group and forgive
her ex-husband.
The schools scarcely mention the products or the business plan, but
Luisa considers them the key to her success. After graduating from the
third school, she moved out of her parents’ house and rented an
apartment. “I live for my daughter. I want her to know that the two of
us are a family.” Following Selene’s advice, she has a vision that
moves her: a house. Sometimes she and her daughter will imagine what
their house will look like—two stories with a swimming pool and a
garden. To save enough money for her house, Luisa keeps a harried pace.
In the morning, after dropping her daughter off at school, she holds
office hours at the support center, makes phone calls, files paperwork,
and answers questions from distributors who drop in. During the
afternoon, she makes the rounds to visit her clients, checking on their
health and replenishing their supply of vitamin powders. Even with
several chugs from a bottle of Omnilife’s energy drink, Luisa tires
from the constant demands. Usually it is not until the evening that she
can spend time with her daughter, but she knows she “must pay the
price” to achieve her dream. Boosting her twice-monthly check is simply
a matter of thinking positively and consuming the products
consistently.
Vergara’s “multidevelopment” plan, though not identified with any
particular church, duplicates and enhances the spiritual message of
rebirth through self-empowerment promoted by U.S.-based multilevel
marketers. In his public addresses, Jorge Vergara reduces the entire
business plan to “using and chatting,” claiming that the products
practically sell themselves. Once a distributor takes the products
consistently, the effects will be so salubrious that people will notice
the difference and ask for an explanation. In this way, selling
Omnilife does not require either training in nutrition or knowledge of
marketing. The sole requirement is a personal testimony of
self-transformation that compels listeners to want to try the products
themselves. In Luisa’s well-rehearsed narrative, before Omnilife she
was physically, financially, and emotionally ill. With the arrival of
the products and company philosophy into her life, she recuperated her
health and recalibrated her self-image into that of a successful,
competent businesswoman who can surmount any obstacle.
The emphasis on transformation mirrors the conversion that evangelical
Christians undergo. In her study of Jerry Falwell and his followers,
Harding (2000) configures the process of being born-again as the
adoption of a new self-narrative. Preacherly language implicates
unsaved listeners in a spiritual crisis, one that can be resolved only
through belief in Jesus Christ. The moment of salvation comes when the
listener becomes a speaker, recasting her life in the terms of the
Bible. In the same way, Omnilife maintains that potential recruits
exist in financial and physical ruin until they rescue themselves by
taking the supplements and “chatting” in the way that Vergara
prescribes. No structural reform is necessary to ameliorate their
situation, merely faith in the precepts and powders of Omnilife.
According to Luisa, instead of a profit motive, this business follows a
charitable mission embodied in its slogan, “People helping people.“ In
Omnilife she detects a divine origin. “Jorge Vergara is an angel on
Earth,” sent to her when she needed to change her life most.
Training
Capitalist Subjects?
Anthropologists, noticing the
rapid growth of multilevel marketing in the developing world, have
explained its success in terms of a different kind of transformation.
They argue that participation in direct selling trains distributors in
countries undergoing transitions to capitalism to accommodate new
economic imperatives and connects them to transnational standards of
self-presentation.
Wilson documents the popularity of Avon and Amway in Thailand during
the Asian economic crisis of 1997. Selling there, she writes, “can
provide a learnable system for working independently…and compelling
templates with which to narrate one’s possibilities in a shifting
social order” (Wilson 2004:174). In contrast to the informal economic
activities traditionally available to Thai women, direct selling
teaches distributors how to organize their time and to set goals.
Though female distributors do not always follow corporate guidelines
with total obedience, they appreciate the companies’ association with
the modern free market.
Other ethnographic accounts of direct selling in Asia have reached
similar conclusions about the role of direct selling in incorporating
participants in a transnational capitalist network. Teenage girls in
rural Thailand, Fadzillah (2005) contends, use Amway and Avon cosmetics
as a vehicle for their ambitions not to replicate the lives of their
peasant mothers. Direct selling gives them geographic mobility,
financial independence, and access to Western notions of cosmopolitan
beauty. In the same way, direct selling in China assures nervous
members of the working class a smooth incorporation into global
capitalism even though the products themselves are manufactured
locally. Jeffery describes “potential trainings” in which participants
work to leave behind their socialist selves and to learn “new logics of
accumulation and of the enterprising, economically self-regulating
individual” (2001:20). As the Chinese state loosens control over
economic activities, direct selling provides the scripts and
subjectivities suitable for surviving neoliberal market reforms.
Moutsatsos extends the argument about the role of direct selling in
creating the conditions for new self-conceptions to Greek women who
sell cosmetics for the Swedish company, Oriflame. “Oriflame became a
social space that enabled them to reframe their subjectivity. No longer
'merely' 'traditional,' they now became 'modern,' 'professional' women
who stood closer to the ideals of the concept of modern Europeanness”
(2001:152). These accounts acknowledge only fleetingly the
improbability of direct sellers considering a decades’-old business
model rooted in outdated notions of a gendered division of labor as an
avatar of the modern. Though the ethnographers are attentive to the
persistence of local meanings in interpreting transnational selling
practices, they describe a unilinear integration of actors on the
economic periphery into the market mainstream. The assumption that
low-income distributors in Thailand, China, and Greece need specialized
training to ease them into free trade risks ignoring Wolf’s (1982)
admonition to envision cultures as mutually interdependent.
Focusing on the ways direct selling fashions rational economic actors
in a modern marketplace obscures the explicit spiritual overtones that
the participants themselves foreground. Anthropologists have
demonstrated how traditional beliefs in the superhuman are central to
the way people conceive of new economic arrangements (Comaroff 1985;
Ong 1987; Taussig 1980). Verdery emphasizes how Caritas, a phenomenally
popular pyramid scheme in post-socialist Romania, provided training for
participants in an emerging capitalist economy, but not of the sort
that made them more modern and rational. “The process of learning forms
of economic or market rationality—a process to which Caritas was
central—has been occurring in part through the irrational means of
faith and hope, God and the devil. This suggests that Caritas was
teaching people not market rationality but its mystification”
(1995:656).4 Religious interpretations of the new economic order help
Romanians understand how money reproduces itself under free enterprise.
Instead of reading participation in direct selling as a rehearsal for
more complete integration into a global, neoliberal economy, these
studies reveal how it can be preparation for framing distributors’
spirituality. Faith is an overriding concern in companies like
Omnilife. So engrained is faith in the efficacy of the products and the
generosity of the business plan that the lapsed distributors I met
continued to consume the products and blamed themselves for failing to
achieve success in the company. The constant schedule of weekly
meetings, monthly guest speakers, and semi-annual celebrations along
with quarterly magazines, newsletters, and videos barrage distributors
with smiling testimonials of imperiled families rescued by loyalty to
the corporate philosophy. These events and publications reinforce the
audience’s commitment not through the careful presentation of evidence,
but through the techniques of spiritual worship and quasi-religious
values (Green and D’Aiuto 1977; Peven 1968). By “quasi-religious,” I
follow Greil and Rudy’s subjective definition: “entities whose status
is anomalous given contemporary folk definitions of religion”
(1996:221). Quasi-religious institutions do not encourage devotion to a
specific supreme being, yet still induce radical transformations in
their participants’ worldviews. Multilevel marketers fit squarely in
this category (Bromley 1995).
The proliferation of quasi-religious organizations like Omnilife
exemplifies larger shifts in contemporary religious expression. Wolfe’s
survey of religion in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first
century captures well the contours of this amorphous, anodyne faith.
"Talk of hell, damnation, and even sin has been replaced by a
nonjudgmental language of understanding and empathy. Gone are the
arguments over doctrine and theology" (2003:3). In congregations from
affluent suburbs to gritty inner cities, sermons resemble self-help
tracts more concerned with individual therapeutic outcomes than with
eternal salvation. In this environment of a personalized God, all
religions come to resemble each other.5 A study conducted by
researchers at Notre Dame found that Roman Catholics were more than
twice as likely to agree with statements of Protestant theology than
with pronouncements by Cardinal (now Pope) Ratzinger (Wolfe 2003:89).
Other observers confirm that many people of faith in the United States
consider themselves broadly spiritual rather than narrowly religious
(Roof 1999, Wuthnow 1998).
The only explanation these analysts offer for the decline of
denominationalism in contemporary religion is that in their restless
searching, narcissistic Baby Boomers in the United States demand the
same immediate satisfaction from churches that they do from all
consumer goods. However, as studies in Latin America illustrate (Cahn
2003; Fortuny Loret de Mola 1999; Goldin and Metz 1991), religious
convergence occurs outside the consumer culture of the First World. My
research with direct sellers in Morelia suggests that reactions to the
adoption of neoliberal economic policies provide a more plausible
explanation for the blurring of ecclesiastical boundaries.
The pursuit of foreign investment, free trade, and privatization of
state industries in Latin America has forced an intensification in work
patterns for everyone from Mexican agriculturalists (Gledhill 1995) to
Peruvian market women (Babb 1989) to Brazilian white collar employees
(O’Dougherty 2002). In each case, integration into a global economy has
meant the erosion of state-supported services and an increasing
disparity in wealth between the elite and the masses. While some
Mexicans have met these changes with violent confrontation, most have
responded by adopting the logic of success through individual hard work
(Rothstein 1996). In this context of scarce resources, the motivational
rhetoric of direct selling, though developed among evangelical
Protestants in the United States, resonates strongly even with Roman
Catholic Mexicans (Frye 1996:33).
Luisa considers herself a practicing Roman Catholic, attending Mass
every Sunday, taking communion, and raising her daughter in the
sacraments. Yet, in place of praying to saints and reciting the rosary
in the morning, she repeats mantras to the “Infinite Intelligence”
copied from a spiritual self-help book. To her, God is empathetic, not
punishing. He gives His abundance to all humans equally. By addressing
the Infinite Intelligence and instructing it to deliver the wealth that
is destined for her, she aims to maximize the riches that God provides.
This conception of a generous God to whom she can speak directly
diverges sharply from the image inculcated by her religious education.
Her life changed 13 years ago when she joined Omnilife, she declares.
Attending Omnilife training sessions and reading the company
literature, Luisa enrolled in an updated, more relevant catechism
class. The new spiritual principles emphasize faith in the individual
rather than institutions and strip away mediation between the divine
and humans, allowing God’s healing power to work directly on a person
in crisis. That these tenets more closely resemble evangelical
Protestantism than Roman Catholicism does not bother Luisa. “In
Omnilife, we have people of all faiths, but the common denominator is
that we all believe in the products and know where we want to go.” With
her goal clearly envisioned, she feels confident she can reach it if
she maintains her faith in herself.
Direct selling does not prepare her to be a more rational economic
actor in a liberalized free market. Instead, Omnilife reorients and
strengthens her spirituality so that emotional and material success
depends on the manipulation of conditions under individual control.
Just as Romanians in transition to capitalism construe the duplication
of capital as superhuman work, so do Omnilife distributors apply
religious understandings to the duplication of downlines. The rhetoric
of companies like Omnilife redefines obstacles to upward mobility from
unequal structural conditions to paralyzing internal fears.
Overcoming
Internal Barriers
In the division of labor at
Luisa’s support center, her father, Javier, conducts the business
meeting on Thursdays for enrolled distributors. When I arrive at 5 p.m.
one evening in June 2004, Javier is dressed casually in a white,
short-sleeved polo shirt and navy slacks. He puts an Omnilife video in
the VCR and sits in the audience to watch with his wife, Catalina.
During the 20-minute presentation, distributors gradually fill up the
rows of chairs. Many come straight to the meeting from the wholesale
store across the street, toting plastic bags sagging with product.
The video, titled “A Change for Your Entire Life,” features the story
of Alejandro Pineda, a distributor in Mexico City. He recalls that he
was a street cleaner and thought that he would be forever stuck in a
demeaning job. The screen flashes to a desolate Mexico City street at
night. Once he learned about Omnilife, he started taking the products.
Next, the video cuts to Pineda walking through the construction site
for a spacious, two-story house. In the final scene, he tells the
camera, “My family is more united now, and I recovered faith in
myself.” A graphic appears announcing the amount of his twice-monthly
check from Omnilife: $13,000.
After he shuts off the television, Javier takes the microphone and
perches on a stool in the front of the room while Catalina stays seated
in the audience. He calls on several distributors to share what struck
them most about the video. A few people demur, saying that they arrived
late, but those who answer focus on the street cleaner’s turnaround. A
woman comments, “He conquered everything to get ahead.” A man adds:
“Sometimes I feel distressed that I’m falling behind, but I have faith
that good things are coming to carry me to something larger.” Suddenly,
Catalina, on the verge of tears, volunteers her reaction: “What moved
me was when he asked, ‘Will my whole life be like this?’ I felt the
same. ‘Don’t I have the right to live better?’ I asked myself many
times. Like Pineda, we have this hunger to grow. I sometimes feel lost,
but Omnilife is a light. This is what I wanted. We have to make a moral
commitment.”
Her husband follows up with an anecdote about meeting Pineda at an
event for Omnilife leaders. Javier asked him how his house turned out,
and Pineda replied that he had already sold it and was building a
bigger one. “We all have to dream. It all depends on me,” Javier
concludes. He asks a male distributor to come forward and read a
passage from a self-help book about a man who was locked in a meat
freezer. Wracked with fear, he imagined that no one would rescue him
and he would freeze to death. When he died, the people who found him
were puzzled because the freezer was not turned on. “His imagination
killed him,” the man reads. So powerful is the mind that our thoughts
can either destroy us or mend us. The story ends with a quote from Walt
Disney: “If you can dream it, you can make it happen.” Javier takes the
importance of dreaming as the theme for his motivational talk. Any goal
is attainable if we visualize it first and want it ardently enough.
Javier continues, “When we forget to dream, we fall into the complex of
‘I can’t.’ Dreaming is the most divine thing that can exist. When we
stop dreaming, we lose that excitement. We all can, but we don’t all
want to.” Turning to a middle-aged woman in the audience whose primary
job is selling clothing at the municipal market, Javier asks, “What is
your dream?”
“To work hard. I do it to help people. I feel good, so they also feel
good.”
Javier, unsatisfied, repeats, “What’s your dream?”
She rephrases, “To get ahead, to earn a royalty check from Omnilife so
I can leave the clothing stand.”
Javier asks a man seated next to her, “Do you have a burning desire?”
When the man is slow to respond, Javier counts aloud, “One second, two
seconds. You, Silvia?”
Silvia, who enrolled only a month before, answers quickly, “To have
enough product to nourish my children well.”
Javier replies, “A burning desire is not about immediate needs.” He
points to a man in the audience, “You, sir, do you have a burning
desire?”
“To have a lot of money.”
“You need the exact quantity and the exact time by which you will earn
it. Be very specific. It has to be something that doesn’t allow us to
sleep.” He continues:
If I don't have a concrete idea of
what I want in life, I won't go anywhere. In any business I need that
motivation, that desire that moves me, that makes me agitated. It's
like the light of a lens. It won't reach the paper if you hold the lens
far away. But bring the lens closer, the light concentrates, and it
burns the paper. This is the burning desire. We have to make it
concrete.
We have to decide for
ourselves to change our lives. Maybe you'll say I'm crazy. Each of us
has to decide—it's a lot of work. It's not easy; it's not overnight.
But it hurts more to be the person without the desire to change. What
do I have to do? Look for my faults, identify what's held me back. What
am I doing that doesn't allow me to advance? Then change my habits.
We’ll see results when we conquer our fears.
We all have fears. We see the
butcher or the storekeeper and debate whether we should tell him about
the products, but fear paralyzes us and the moment passes. As the
saying goes, “He who doesn’t talk, God doesn’t hear.” What do we have
to lose? Nothing. They’ll either ask us to explain the products or say,
“No, thanks.” It’s so simple; you don’t need a professional degree.
Just say, “I invite you to have a cup of coffee.” Fear will make us
conformist. We’ll say, “Why risk it? I’m suffering, but I can manage.”
That’s a sterile life. Who hasn’t had problems? Do you know the only
place there are no problems? The cemetery. To carry your problems
around and not solve them is sad. We fall into a vicious circle, a
carousel. We need to jump off.
His stern but heartfelt
chiding prompts a young woman to stand and give a spontaneous
testimonial:
I was working hard and on my way
to winning a car and a cruise with Omni, then I left it all to go to
the United States with my family. I lost the car, I lost the cruise,
and I lost all the people I had enrolled under me. When I came back,
Señora Catalina told me, “You knew you would lose your people,
so now get to work.” She apologized for her strong words, but I knew
either I had to accept my errors or I could turn away and be stupid.
For me
this business is like a boyfriend. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or
thundering; you still want to see each other. The next step is to get
married. As Señor Javier said, you have to conquer your fears.
Then you form a family. If it really interests you, you’ll do it. My
goal is to open my own support center. Yes, you can do it.
Javier waits for the applause
to fade before he concludes his presentation:
Look at the people with university
degrees. Thousands, thousands of them are out in the streets looking
for work. After ten years of study, they still don’t have a job. They
see Omnilife and ask, “How am I going to sell these little powders?” We
didn’t go to university, and some of us can’t read or write. But we
decided we want something in life. Change is the only thing that will
bring us to where we want to be. Cut the fear in half. We could spend
three months just talking about fears and pretexts. Fear is natural,
but it needs to be the impulse to achieve something.
Who feels
unsatisfied when someone thanks you? Don’t count the amount of money
you’ve earned; count the number of people you’ve helped. There is a big
difference between selling the product and sharing it. We’ve received
so many blessings. It’s beautiful to know I’m the carrier of something
that helps people. The grace is His who created us.
Javier controls the two-hour
session deftly, never referring to notes or stifling audience
participation. When it ends, he thanks us for our attention, and the 20
distributors socialize for a few minutes before dispersing to wait for
their respective buses home.
This Thursday evening meeting typifies the spiritual message of
Omnilife and illustrates its appeal to working class Mexicans
confronting the challenges of neoliberal economic policies, which
Mexico has pursued with vigor since the 1990s. Javier never studied
beyond high school, and his wife dropped out of elementary school to
help support her family. Although their children pursued higher
education, neither found professional employment that satisfied them
emotionally or monetarily. Their experiences mirror the life histories
of the men and women who frequent the support center. The majority of
distributors in my sample engage in petty commerce, selling food in
their homes or from street carts. The few employed in the formal
economy work as sales representatives and earn a salary in the form of
commissions. A smaller number have been teachers or engineers, but are
retired and looking to supplement their limited pensions. Climbing the
Omnilife hierarchy does not require specialized knowledge or even
literacy, merely a testimonial of personal transformation. In Pineda’s
rise from street cleaner to homeowner and in Javier’s late model BMW
parked conspicuously in front of the support center, they see examples
of success attainable through “using and chatting.”
As Javier emphasizes, fears, not structural impediments, prevent people
from achieving their dreams. Distributors who have not duplicated the
testimonials of changed lives featured in meetings, magazines, and
videos should not fault the quality of the nutritional supplements or
the soundness of the marketing plan. When the young woman returned from
the United States, Catalina would brook no excuses for why her
organization had folded. Rededicating herself to consuming the products
and sharing them with others is her only recourse. No benefits will
come to her until she offers her emotional labor willingly to the
company. She does not interpret this requirement as the arrogance of a
demanding boss, but rather as the affection of a caring lover. Unlike
traditional employers who keep their eyes on the bottom line, Omnilife,
she maintains, selflessly devotes itself to the overall wellbeing of
its distributors. In turn, she must commit herself to returning the
company’s concern. Her lapse convinces her that failure in the company
results solely from internal barriers. For that reason, when
distributors find themselves stagnating, Javier advises them to
identify their mental flaws and to modify their attitudes.
His recommendation forms part of a tightly organized campaign in the
company to remake distributors’ self-image and worldview. The makeover
starts with the nutritional supplements like the cup of coffee Luisa
offered me. When she first consumed the products, a chronic asthma that
medicines had failed to treat disappeared. Defying doctors’ predictions
appears frequently in accounts of recoveries with Omnilife products,
both as a way to reiterate the futility of professional training and to
suggest the non-medical origin of most illnesses. What gives the
powders their healing advantage over prescription drugs is that
Omnilife interprets maladies as manifestations of mental disarray, not
physical affliction. Luisa never bothers with explaining how the
products work on a biological level other than to say that they go
“where your body needs them most.” The efficacy of the supplements
needs no laboratory confirmation since they target the underlying,
unseen causes of illness.
Once the company treats distributors’ physical pain, it turns to
correcting the attitudes that erode self-confidence and foster
interpersonal conflict. As Selene suggests and Luisa confirms, family
relationships generate the largest share of distress in the lives of
Omnilife distributors. A man who left his job as a sales representative
for a juice company to devote himself full-time to Omnilife, recalls
that he used to be a typical macho, quick-tempered and a steady
drinker. He quarreled with his wife and antagonized his clients. Worst
of all, he could not fulfill his role as provider: “It hurts when my
daughters ask for money, and I have nothing to give them.” When his
sister told him about Omnilife, he took it as an opportunity to
transform his life, reading corporate publications and attending
lectures where company representatives portray machismo as cowardice,
not manliness. To repair both his family relationships and his
financial health, he must conquer the fears that limit his productive
behavior. At the 2003 rally, a mass ritual that draws some twenty
thousand distributors to Guadalajara, he heard Jorge Vergara address
the theme of how to eliminate fear (see Figure 3). Though when we meet
his monetary troubles have not abated, he has assimilated Omnilife’s
message of personal transformation through internal reform. He states,
“I don’t want to ask for help. I had to suffer, but now I want to reap.
I’ve changed so much, people wouldn’t recognize me.”
Figure 3
A distributor from Morelia
attends the Omnilife rally in Guadalajara in 2003. The theme of the
rally, depicted graphically on the t-shirt and seat cushion, encourages
the audience that “It’s time to cut the fear.â€
Photo by Peter S. Cahn.
The schools that
enabled Luisa to confront the bitterness over her divorce reinforce the
importance of conquering paralyzing fears. Participation in the
workshops, which cost a modest $11 for each session, is voluntary, but
strongly encouraged in company literature and by meeting leaders.
Taking a cue from quasi-religious 12-step programs, the first session
begins with the axiom that “we don’t know what we don’t know,” breaking
down the egos of the participants so that they can be receptive to a
new way of relating to the world. In successive sessions, the
counselors tell students not to assign blame to others for their
problems and to “accept ourselves as we are,” as one man told me. The
final lessons aim to cultivate the habit of generosity, illustrating a
karmic principle of reciprocity summed up by one alumnus as, “those who
give, receive.” Graduation exercises take place at a beach resort in
Mexico, uniting 1,000 students from around the country. There, a
motivational speaker dispenses fashion advice on the premise that
external beauty reflects the newly ordered internal state. The weekend
climaxes with the presentation of selected remade women and men, who
appear on stage with their supportive families.
Luisa was not alone in attending the schools multiple times and seeking
to apply their lessons to her life. She, along with the ex-juice
salesman and many other distributors, supplements her training with
self-help books. These slim paperbacks, though not officially endorsed
by Omnilife, employ allegories and anecdotes to reiterate that the only
barriers to financial and emotional wellbeing are the ones we erect
ourselves. Confronting and vanquishing their fears, the protagonists of
the books liberate themselves from conformity and begin “to reap” God’s
abundance. As with Omnilife’s campaign of self-transformation, the
books refer obliquely to a generous divine power who makes riches
available to all regardless of religious denomination. Simonds shows in
her study of women and self-help books that readers seek “to discover
how to achieve a balance between self and other, and to develop
self-identity they feel they lack” (1992:6). The same desire to locate
oneself in a world fraught with uncertainty and to forge enduring
connections with others motivates Omnilife distributors.
Finally, Omnilife exhorts its adherents to affirm their new worldview
by teaching it to others. In business trainings, leaders represent
downlines of recruits on overhead transparencies as successive
generations on a family tree. This linearity belies the continuous
cycling that distributors experience. Inviting others to join the
company carries the responsibility of guiding recruits through the same
shift in outlook and showing them how to impart the company’s
philosophy to their own invitees. This process strengthens the
sponsor’s commitment to the Omnilife worldview while ensuring that
recruits hear about the belief in a personal transformation from a
familiar source.
Lest the spreading of the Omnilife message resemble Protestant
proselytizing too closely, company leaders prefer the term “sharing,”
defining the task as a charitable mission.6 In this way, the work of
multilevel marketing delivers satisfaction and respect, benefits that
traditional salaried employees lack. By privileging the non-material
rewards that distributors accrue, Omnilife also blunts criticism that
the pyramidal structure guarantees wealth only for those few at the
apex of large organizations.7 Measuring success by the number of people
distributors help and not by the size of their paychecks turns the
insecurity of contemporary economic conditions into an asset. While no
employer or state agency can provide a substantial salary to the
majority of Mexicans, Omnilife at least offers a less concrete payoff
that is available to all who want it: work that is spiritually
significant and personally fulfilling.
Conclusion:
Reintegrating Work and Spirituality
Throughout the developing
world, workers thrust into a capitalist economy confront increasing
competition and diminishing public support. Multilevel marketing
naturalizes the magic of the free market, which turns money into more
money for a fortunate few. For this reason, Wilson (1999) maintains
that studying direct selling in places like Mexico and Thailand allows
anthropologists to make contemporary capitalism the subject of
analysis, not merely the subtext. Yet to contend that a desire to
function as more efficient moneymakers motivates participation in
direct selling grants an instrumentality to these capitalist subjects
that is not borne out by ethnographic data.
Little evidence supports the claim that earnings from direct selling
surpass those from other forms of employment, especially since most
distributors, unlike Luisa, devote only a few hours a week to the
business. Despite testimonials of miraculous health cures, Omnilife’s
expensive nutritional powders prove a hard sell for many distributors.
Earning high levels of income depends on building a network of
thousands, a prospect at odds with the claim that no specialized
training or social standing is necessary for success. Far more
rewarding for direct sellers are the intangible, spiritual benefits. An
Omnilife distributor, who supplements the income from her work in a
corner grocery store, explains why she joined the company: “I was
restless. I wanted more, and I wanted more.” Omnilife’s quasi-religious
ethos supplies the “more,” the connection between a source of income
and a source for ordering the world.
Instead of aligning people’s mental frameworks with the conditions of
capitalist work, direct selling brings concordance between their work
lives and their spiritual beliefs. MLM corporate philosophy masks the
calculated pursuit of profit with a benevolent image of helping others.
Rather than a rationalist guide to surviving in a neoliberal economy,
direct selling suffuses its business practices with mystical qualities.
Counter-intuitively, profit appears when distributors spend their own
money to consume mega-doses of health products. None of the
Omnilife-produced videos or motivational talks delves too explicitly
into the medical explanations for the supplements’ efficacy. They
merely assure the audience that consistent application of the company’s
products will guarantee improved health, which others will
automatically notice and inquire about.
To make the message believable, Omnilife borrows both rhetorical and
ritual techniques from ecclesiastical institutions. This emphasis on
obedience to enlightened leaders and constant self-examination enhances
corporate control over a two million-member army of independent
entrepreneurs. It does not represent sinister brainwashing; no matter
how coordinated the spiritual campaign, distributors frequently defect
from the organization without repercussions. Those who remain with
Omnilife do so willingly because the quasi-religious work atmosphere
resolves inner struggles to extend goodwill to others while
safeguarding their own self-interests. Neoliberal policies have made
this balance even more precarious, so multilevel marketers welcome the
emotional labor required of them to harmonize their economic with their
spiritual lives.
Seen as fostering continuity between professional activities and
religious beliefs, direct selling in the developing world shares
similarities with direct selling in the United States and Europe.
Though anachronistic in an age of Internet shopping and strip malls,
home parties remain a vibrant sales strategy that allows distributors
to perceive their work as a charitable mission.8 In places like the
conservative southern United States and working class Britain, direct
sellers of sex toys see their work as empowering women to pursue erotic
pleasure (Baumann 1991; Senior 2004; Storr 2003). Along with self-help
literature and motivational rallies, quasi-religious organizations like
Omnilife form part of a wider effort by contemporary laborers to
re-enchant the workplace. That many traditionally Roman Catholic Latin
Americans have embraced such an individualistic, therapeutic brand of
faith demonstrates the reach of born-again religiosity in an era of
neoliberal economic reforms. Direct sellers’ desire for
self-improvement and spiritual significance through work felicitously
matches the goals of corporate executives to cultivate loyalty and
productivity among their distributors. This symbiosis ensures that
quasi-religious organizations will continue as key players in
contemporary capitalism.
Endnotes
1 In response to such
criticism, two researchers have applied economic models to answer the
question “Is multilevel marketing a cult?” (Bhattacharya and Mehta
2000). They conclude that it is not exploitative for distributors to
invest more resources than they receive in compensation from MLM since
it is an occupation with high social satisfaction.
2 The flattering interview, a cover story for a prominent newsweekly,
was on sale at Omnilife wholesale centers. Vergara has repeated the
same story to reporters for the Wall Street Journal (Friedland 1999),
Newsweek (Zarembo 2001), and the New York Times (Malkin 2003),
contrasting his inauspicious beginnings with his current achievement.
3In reality, the original slate of products came from the line of
“designer foods” promoted by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw,
California-based longevity researchers. Early Omnilife publications
make this explicit, but as the company introduced additional products,
it obscured the provenance of the catalog. Most commonly, distributors
attribute the powders to “a team of international scientists.”
4 Morris (2000:473) has suggested that in the midst of Thailand’s
economic crisis in the 1990s, direct selling served as “the economic
counterpart” of spirit mediumship. In both, the idiom of directness
through individual mediation conceals and mystifies the movement of
capital.
5 As a recent pop culture example, consider the overwhelmingly positive
reception of Mel Gibson’s orthodox Roman Catholic film “The Passion of
the Christ” among evangelical Protestants in the United States.
6 In corporate communications, many direct selling firms downplay their
for-profit status, preferring to promote an image akin to a charity’s
(Kong 2001).
7 Omnilife does not release figures for the average earnings of
distributors, and many who do not receive a paycheck still pocket
profits from retail sales. However, data from other multilevel
marketing firms obtained during legal investigations reveal that only a
fraction of distributors receive the enormous checks that company
leaders promote. A review of the 1979-1980 tax records of Amway’s
20,000 distributors in Wisconsin showed that merely 139 reported an
annual adjusted gross income over $12,000. The average adjusted gross
income for all distributors in the state totaled $267 (Streiker
1984:129).
8 Since the 1990s in the United States, direct selling has been tinged
with a kitsch factor whose larger mission is entertainment and ironic
commentary. Top-selling Tupperware distributors in Los Angeles include
a drag queen (Cruger 1996) and a self-described “all-American Jewish
lesbian folk singer” (Aubry 1999).
Acknowledgements
A junior faculty summer
fellowship from the University of Oklahoma's
College of Arts and Sciences funded fieldwork in Morelia. The Omnilife
distributors of Morelia graciously shared their experiences with me and
patiently answered my questions. Ara Wilson, Cristina Gutiérrez,
and
Fran Rothstein provided useful bibliographic references. I am grateful
to Keith McNeal, Jane Park, Virginia Domínguez, and the
American
Ethnologist reviewers whose constructive criticism helped hone the
argument.
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