QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND KNOWING CONSUMERSSeveral years ago, as part of an internship with the New York office of a transnational advertising agency, I was dispatched to do laundry. My destination: Astoria, Queens, where I visited the home of Lois, a white, married, 40 something, college-educated, middle-income mother of two school-age girls. Lois had been previously identified by the agency as a brand loyalist-someone whose last six purchases of laundry detergent were of a brand that I shall call "Wave."During a previous one-on-one interview at the agency, a Wave account planner asked Lois to make two collages by cutting and pasting pictures from dozens of glossy magazines spread out across a conference table. One collage expressed how Lois felt when her dirty laundry had piled up or when a favorite piece of clothing had become irremediably stained; the other collage expressed how Lois felt after she had finished washing and drying her clean laundry. My field trip, during which Lois and I did a load of whites together, was intended to follow up the office visit both by comparing word and deed and by gleaning bits of the laundry process that had not been gathered in the interview. The goal of my qualitative research was, in effect, to ascertain the unspoken emotional and symbolic implications of doing laundry by determining the social contexts and relations that Lois constructed through her use of Wave detergent.

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This article considers the instrumental role of commodity marketing and mass consumption in producing nationality as a dimension of personal and collective identities. It asks: if nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily refer to political identities, then to what sort of imagined communities, if any, do they refer? It addresses this question in part through a discussion of commercial images from Papua New Guinea, one of the ‘new nations’ of the South Pacific.

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