The social marketing of elites: the advertised self in obituaries and congratulations in some Nigerian dailies

Abstract

This paper rests on the belief that various forms of advertisement of self such as the obituary and congratulation publications in the Nigerian daily newspapers exhibit a number of common themes in the imagery with which they handle the fact of achievement. Further, it argues that these themes may be a mix of modern and traditional criteria of success and represent an attempt by the elite to restate their superior attributes. The data were collected from Nigerian Daily Times and Daily Sketch, from interviews conducted with the business managers of the Daily Sketch and the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State, with Guardian and Daily Times correspondents, and with newspaper vendors and advertisement agents based in Ile-Ife. A survey of attitudes to the publications and their implicit criteria of success was also investigated. In all, the consensus of opinion is that the publications do raise the revenue base of the print and the audio-visual media, that attitudes to the publications vary across ethnic, religious and class groups, and that the construction of selfhood within each of the advertisement formats is but an aspect of social relationships, mediated in this case through the forms of economic or political development in Nigeria.

The Presentation of Dead Selves in Everyday Life: Obituaries and Impression Management

“…The resulting ritual activities serve identity benefits by communicating to the community that the bereaved family is loving and caring. Lawuyi (1991) identified obituaries as socially legitimized advertisement of deceased and bereaved persons, often built on the aspirational rather than the true identities of the people in the text. An obituary's ability to bridge the gap between actual and aspirational identities relies on the fact that the texts are often written by people other than the deceased and are imbued with the personal and social identities of both the bereaved family and the deceased.…”

“…In obituaries, stars are created for impression management by enacting the positive attributes of the deceased and the bereaved. One important function of obituaries is to present the deceased in a manner that overwrites all blemishes they may have had in life (Lawuyi 1991). Asante obituaries used pictures and other relevant cultural symbols for this effect.…”

“…Using ethnographic and textual analytic methods (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Lofland and Lofland 1995), I explore specific dimensions of the strategic interactions individuals enact through obituary content. Obituaries offer an excellent research site because they are carefully presented texts about people that are motivated by the desire to fashion likable identities for the deceased and, by implication, the bereaved (Arnason, Hafsteinsson, and Gretarsdottir 2003; Lawuyi 1991). Framed within such a context, obituaries provide bereaved family members public resources to aid their pursuit of aspirational identities through their dead.…”

Your story is our story: Collective memory in obituaries of US military veterans

“…Obituaries, after all, are “mediated, abbreviated, stylized biographies” (Long, 1987: 965) that provide “factual information” and a “narrative” about the deceased (Bytheway and Johnson, 1996). A few scholars have used obituaries as tools for examining individuality: Long has examined obituaries as representations of claimed or attributed identity, and Lawuyi (1991) calls them “advertisement(s) of self.” Bonsu (2002) has shown how a person’s identity can continue to evolve after death through his or her obituary (p. 510).…”

The political economy of video marketing in Ogbomọṣọ, Nigeria

“…While the poor cannot afford the cost of one, and rely on the stills photographer's snapshots, 4 the wealthy can hire as many as three, each covering different aspects of the ceremonies. In the case of burial, for instance, there would be one for the wake keeping, another for the church/mosque and graveyard occasions, while the third would cover the eating and drinking that accompanies such ceremonies (Arhin, 1994;Lawuyi, 1991). The same number of cameras may also surface at any of the ceremonies, if the male celebrant has two wives, acting independently because each wants to preserve her own memory of the event and cannot rely on, or trust, the other, or even the husband, to ensure accurate documentation of the activities of her friends and relatives.…”