Death and Tupperware

The College's first in-house Anthropology Forum, entitled "Death and Tupperware," brought an overflow crowd in early April to listen to two presentations by Professor Michael Dorris's students. Sartorially speaking, it was quite a gathering-Women in fedoras, men in railroad cap and red longies, professors in bedroom s pr*rs. and a corpse in a shroud gathered ro hear about life in the Man,- Hitchcock m( :e and Tupperware parties in the Upper Valley.

Beth Bailey 'B5, introduced by her professor as the Margaret Mead of the Morgue, presented an evaluation of hospital attitudes toward death. She described a hospital autopsy with considerable ap; mb, at one point enlisting Dorris to sit for a coiffure-mussing demonstration of the removal of the brain.

Bailey reported a lot of backstairs scurrving in the transfer of dead patients from hospital rooms to the morgue in the basement and an unexpectedly awed and respectful attitude in the morgue itself. "Not," she went on to add, "that there was anything funereal about the morgue. The people who work there are quite lively."

Her major conclusion was that there is a contradiction between the claims of hospital staff that they regard bodies simply as empty shells and the elaborate respect with which they behave toward those shells. As a finale. Bailey turned to the draped corpse laid out on a table behind her and whipped off its shroud. The corpse proved to be an artful arrangement of Tupperware containers and served as a transition to part two of the forum.

Rob Eshman "82, Edie Farwell 'B3, and Doug Falkner 'B2 gave a lengthy report of their anthropological research into the subculture of Tupperware. Their presentation was pitched slightly right of anthropological center and catered to the audience's view of itself as several cuts above anything so plebian as direct sales of kitchenware.

The Tupperware Corporation, brainchild of Earl Tupper, consists of a hierarchical pyramid founded on "hostesses," women who offer their homes and their friends up for demonstrations of the Tupperware line of high-quality plastic containers for the service and storage of food. Dealers

come to the homes to demonstrate, managers control dealer units, distributors buy distributorships, and, at the top, management rakes off the bulk of the profits.

The researchers had not only attended several local Tupperware "parties" the backbone of the system but had also hosted several of their own, to which they had invited their professors and friends. In their report, the jargon of the corporation's sales approach was dubbed Tupper-speak. the traditional roles of men and of women in the corporation and in the kitchen were described under the heading of Tupper-sex. and the incentive gifts offered to sales personnel were Tupper-carrots. The annual Tupperware Jubilee extravaganza celebrating the efforts of the most successful sellers was described with elaborate drama. Somewhat more serious references were made to the quality of the product (which has a lifetime guarantee) and to the cultural and social implications of this highly successful direct-marketing venture, but they were brief and got lost among the lusty re-enactments of songs and sales pitches used in the Tupperware world. Eshman observed afterward that he was just as glad that the friends he had made in the Tupperware world had not been there.