Anthropreneur

Wings of the Rockies Air and Space Museum in eastern Denver is a hangar full of military airplanes and their 24-cylinder engines. Run by volonteers, who fight for every dollar they can make off of entrance fees and merchandise and for every second of your time, the museum nevertheless is full of pride and passion. An elite sphere of life, air-and-space industry is responsible for a number of consumer innovations. The museum prides on first making it possible to accomplish a round-the-world flight in only 37 hours and then bringing to people’s homes GPS, computer chips and space blankets. A pair of Ray-Ban aviators from 1937 constitutes one of the iconic items of pop culture that can be seen on U.S. generals as well as on pow-wow dancers. I was suprised not to find WD-40 among the

examples. (Since 1953, this magic lubricant developed for the NASA achieved almost 100% awareness among the consumers, while yielding niche markers such as sailing and the military to more specilaized products such as McLube, PB Blaster, etc.) In Supercapitalism, Robert Reich documents the process by which

technological innovations originally developed for the needs of the military and NASA poured into the consumer market in the 1970s. Internet was one of them. (I remember Gene Parta of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe recalling that there was an e-mail system installed between the divisions of this Cold War propaganda radio station in the 1980s, long before e-mail became a consumer product.) The importance of the collapse of silos between the military and commercial departments for the marketplace is hard to overestimate, for it resulted in the unprecedented empowerment of the consumer against the employee and the disintegration of the traditional corporation and the trade-union. Swiss Army knife, aviator jacket, camo style backpacks, pants and jackets, Commander’s watch (komandirskie chasy) in Russia among others, are some of the more supreficial retail examples of military chic.

I’ve come across an interesting page from an Indiana University Anthropology professor, Richard Wilk. Wilk collects instances of Western consumer goods in tribal contexts, tawdry replicas of indigenous art, idiotic products catering to silly human desires and preposterous ads. As a person who has experience working in both museums and ad agencies, I can appreciate the crossover between the two. There’s something toxic about these products, no matter what materials they are made of. A ridiculous ad that refuses to disintegrate in public consciousness, a pair of artificial testicles for a dog that will forever remain in a mental landfield, and a Singapore-made “True American Taste” McCoffee that screams phony. What do museums preserve: something good and fragile that we, as humans, are afraid to lose, or something utterly caustic that we’re upset about, want to keep under our control and give it at least a semblance of authenticity? What do advertising agencies promote: a great product that people absolutely need to have around (but haven’t they already found out about it from friends?) or a poor product that needs to be salvaged from the wrath of God?

Richard Wilk’s sphere of academic interest encompasses Mesoamerica, American Southwest, economic anthropology, media studies, human ecology and consumer culture.

A cup of civet cat coffee costs some $100 at the Peter Jones department store in London. These mislabeled Southeast Asian felines (in reality a species close to the mangoose) serve as wild connoisseurs. They sniff those rare berries out, eat them and then discharge unprocessed beans for human coffee-lovers to prey on. One could argue that defecation here is only a necessary evil and has no cultural value in its own right.

But look at another example. Nomadic and cattle-breeding peoples use/used dry cow dung (pasture patty, wilson pie, country pancake) and buffalo dung (bufalo chip, meadow muffin, niknik) as fuel, as fertilizer and as a component in adobe bricks. It’s noteworthy that so many verbal metaphors and visual resemblances relate dung to bakery products and fast food.

But my most favorite example comes from the world of scientific discoveries. A team of archaeologists working in South-central Oregon has recently found coprolites (fossilized poop) dated at 12,300 BP (see Gilbert et al. DNA from pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America, Scientific Express, April 3, 2008). It’s of human origin and contained two different mtDNA genetic sequences identical with some of the modern Native Americans. It’s the major discovery in North American archaeology since Clovis and Folsom projectile points were unearthed by a lucky cowboy in 1926. For decades, archaeologists have waged a war regarding the timing of the settlement of the Americans. Since no securely dated and unmistakably human artifacts and bones were found beyond the 11,500 YPB threshold, many respectable archaeologists have developed a profound scepticism for any claims for the greater antiquity of human presence in the Americas. The old paradigm is now being overturned by the most unlikely find - a piece of old poop. Scholars will continue to debate the reasons as to why there’re so few lithic tools in the earliest American assemblages as well as why fairly complete skeletons continue to emerge in the African Paleolithic but not in the Americas, but it seems to be clear that a holistic approach to life in and out of the marketplace and in and out of the human species, in which nothing is left out or biased against, contains a tremedous potential to move cultures forward.

For the coverage of this piece of news on The Onion see here. I was amazed at how accurate one of their “interviewees” reflects the way Clovis proponents dismiss any pre-Clovis finds: “How can we be sure that some ancient nerd didn’t just carry an already thousand-year-old petrified turd with him when he crossed over the land bridge from Asia?”

Through Cubemate’s guiding hand, I came across Watson Phillips Norman’s Todd Norman’s thoughts on planning and creativity. The gist of the article is that people like one double first from Oxford in physics and mathematics are bad planners because they’re too smart, while humble and empathetic enthusiasts of pop culture and media who occupy a grey zone between creativity and ignorance are great planners because they are dumb. A good test of this hypothesis would involve a generation of systematic hiring of Ph.D.-carrying anthropologists (oddly omitted by Todd), archaeologists (understandably omitted by Todd), sociologists, psychologists and other social scientists for planning positions around the globe and an improved curriculum for these young professionals that would include applied training for product design, advertsing, PR and business strategy consultancy. Anecdotal cases of Nobel laureauts not being able to establish a rapport with an art director are hardly convincing. Alternatively, in order to fully exploit their teams of planners and not relegate them to self-deprecating advisors to all-powerful creatives, ad agencies should start working with the clients and the consumers at an earlier stage in the evolution of the relationship between the latter two. Product innovation, business strategy, field research into corporate and consumer culture are just the few trends that may help “planners” find their unique identity, an identity rooted not in imagination and not in rationality (both of these remain within the “known”) but in the discovery of the “unknown” about human culture and behavior. That’s how originally anthropology built its brand equity.

I attached a photo of a pen-as-toothbrush that I’ve picked up at a dentist office for a reason. This mutant is, in my opinion, a symbol of what a planner, a strategist, and an applied anthropologist is. He has to be able to inspire creatives and to remain detached from their creative process just to let it flow naturally and not be bummed by a “wrong course.” But on the other end, he has to be able to author a brand/business strategy, a cultural analysis of a political campaign, a semiotic analysis of old ads, and a case study of an ad campaign that he’s just let go of in order to recapture it later on a new level of execution. Finally he should be prepared to write a book of his own experiences doing all that. There’s definitely a grain of truth in Todd’s article, and a good balance of hardcore analytics with serendipity makes a great planner, but the wonderful workings of this mechanism still need to be explicated in order to salvage Todd’s thoughts from falling into a grey zone between banality and failure.

My book entitled “The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship Terminologies” is finally out from Cambria Press. Cambria Press has been professional and fast, and I am glad I could talk to them not only as an anthropologist but also as a marketer. The book is available for purchase from Amazon.com. It means a lot to me and to those people who shared the toil of proving a Newtonian idea to Platonic academics. But what I am trying to do today is not to pontificate on the delights of successful scholarship but to understand why I got hired by an advertising agency. It’s quite a leap from kinship terminologies to account planning, isnt it? Yes, I wrote this book three years ago (then peer reviews, editing and waiting), and since then I’ve read a lot on culture and consumption, but still… What’s the connection? Overtime I’ve worked with or talked to a bunch of account planners. We both seemed to focus on the same thing: culture. Account planning as a representative of the “voice of the consumer” and a subsidiary to creative agency work emerged in the late 1960s. That happened around the time when anthropologists decided to take “the native’s point of view” and dropped out of business, military and the government. Anthropologists became enamored with their worldwide humanistic mission and hence unwilling to cooperate with the government or the corporation. Anthropologists believe that all cultures are constructed but they refuse to be part of this construction. They prefer to keep the cycle “student-teacher” closed. These days account planners know more about ongoing pop culture, media and technology than an academic anthropologist. They are realistic, optimistic, competent, ironic and professional. But then all the account planners I’ve met are dropouts from various graduate programs: drama, comparative literature, law or medicine. They became disenchanted with the manistream and tapped into their childhood fantasies. Or, they became disenchanted with their childhood dreams because dreams do not pay the bills.

Anthropologists who enter business have some catching up to do. But they bring into adversting agencies, design shops and manufacturing corporations that subtle thing called authorship. In a world driven by ownership, with all the hierarchies and bureaucracies stemming from it, authorship is rare but increasingly valuable. Anthropologists in business are capable of generating content from bottom up (i.e., without taking anything for granted and deriving a truth from signs only) that adds to the traditional creative content and helps define in every specific case where a brand ends and a culture begins, what is a good and what is a service, who is the consumer and who is the producer, who is the manager and who is an employee, who is the investor and who is the entrepreneur, etc. This analytical job leaves the cultural code bare and allows the creatives to recombine it into a new unique whole. Culture is permeated by a kind of mystical kinship that makes this kind of analysis and this kind of synthesis possible.

Just picked it from Datamancer. Previous sightings include Newsweek’s article (from October 31, 2007) on Richard Nagy and steampunk technology. Features: mahogany-stained pine, leather wrist rests, clock-winding key, brass claw feet. Style: steampunk, DIY, user-generated innovation.

And this is a “old-time photo” booth from the ongoing National Western Stock Show in Denver. Anyone can have his image inserted into an Old West picture.

The appropriation of the past takes different forms and has different avatars. Since the early 1990s steampunk recreates the world as it was seen by Jules Verne and Herbert G. Wells in the late 19th century. Probably because their science fiction (remember Captain Nemo’s submarine?) came true in the 20th century. (Even Wells’s Time Machine, which was published in 1895, coincided with the Lumiere brothers’ screening of their first motion picture, i.e. the first time machine.) Western nostalgia has a longer pedigree; it goes all the way to Buffalo Bill, and the imitations of a Wild West show can still be seen in North American rodeos and fairs. While products and people are disposable, brands are built to last.

There’re posts that are written because several independent things have pointed the thought in the same direction. This is one of those posts.

First, Reuters via Nursing Magazine reported on a study out of the University of Sheffield stating that children don’t like clowns. The team of scholars interviewed 250 kids between 4 and 16 in an attempt to understand how to improve the decor of pediatric wards. They concluded that clowns are invention of the adults who do not know or care about what children want. In 2005, Ask Yahoo published a response to the question “Why a lot of my friends have a fear of clowns?” in which they mentioned that doctors’ name for the irrational aversion to clowns is “coulrophobia” (this by itself signals how pervasive this phenomenon is), that serial killer John Wayne Gacy used to dress as a clown when performing his gruesome acts, that Stephen King immortalized the evil clown in his novel It (1986), that Johnny Depp had nightmares of clowns when he was growing up and that phobiaologist Kathryn Cillick believes we are afraid of clowns because we can’t gauge their true emotions and intentions. Then, Neotorama published their commentary with a YouTube video of a woman dreadfully clinging to her stuffed animal in the presence of a Mr. Giggles. She was treated for a fear of clowns by a group of psychotherapists. Pop-culture contributions to this topic include Poltergeist (1982), Batman (1989) with Jack Nicholson as Joker, Kevin Smith’s Vulgar (2000), Steve Sessions’s Dead Clowns (2003), Kevin Kangas’s Fear of Clowns (2004) and the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s It on the Sci-Fi channel (via FilmJunk). Finally, Reuters published a rebuttal of the Sheffield study based on an avalanche of e-mails from U.S. clowns. The Clown Care program launched in 1987 currently employs close to 100 clowns who regularly serve hospitals and nursery homes. It has already spread to Italy and Brazil. According to these professional clown doctors who make 250,000 bedside visits annually, the vast majority of kids enjoy their antics, while only a small portion fears them. An ethnographic study of the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit that entertains children in New York hospitals appeared in the Medical Anthropology Quarterly in 1995 (available through JSTOR). Authored by Linda van Blerkom of Drew University’s Department of Anthropology the study documented the many benefits to the patients brought about by clown doctors and compared Western clown doctors to the shamans of non-European cultures.

I’ve run across all these media reverberations while reading Andrei Znamenski’s recent The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Interestingly enough, when Siberian and North American shamans were “discovered” by the learned Europeans, they were invariably described as “clowns.” Western rationalism refused to grant any validity to these indigenous medical practitioners. In the West, the singular tribal figure of the shaman bifurcated into serious “doctors” and silly “clowns.” What has escaped the recent media buzz is the fact that the phenomenon of clowns should be studied in connection with the phenomenon of doctors.

Hospitals are places where scientific rationalism rules. It has full control over the matters of life and death. While denied effective medical power, clown doctors are nevertheless admitted to hospitals and seem to be mostly successful in alleviating the young patients’ fear of… doctors. I recall, as I was growing up, I loved circuses and clowns but was scared to death of our family doctor, a sweet young lady, the wife of my father’s army buddy. Indeed, the moment you start coughing, doctors barge into your private sphere, touch you, poke you, make you open your mouth, then they thrust their tongue-depressor (what a name, eh?) into your throat and engage in other kind of abuse. And while doing all these antics they smile and soft-talk to you. How creepy! Jeffery Dahmer in his prison outfit looked like a physician in a scrub suit - an ostensibly normal citizen who started off by dissecting animals.

Like doctors, clowns belong to the world of health and death. The movie Vulgar describes a clown who is socially traumatized: he has no father, he can barely pay for his New Jersey apartment, his mother is mean to him, his friend is a mooch, his neighbors are abusive, then he gets gang-raped by a bunch of inbred psychos who later start blackmailing him. Psychologically, however, he is healthy, pure and a bit childlike: he entertains children, he can cope with his trauma, then he saves a little girl from the hands of a gunman, becomes a local celebrity, starts his own TV show, makes lots of money, makes his mother finally happy, and manages to destroy his violators without actually using his gun.

Clowns and doctors equally attest to a perennial conflict between reason and emotion, science and nature, law and society. Gullible emotions are invited into the world only to be mocked by reason. Fear of clowns is risible; it’s actually funnier than the clown himself. Blind trust for doctors is sad; it may be more dangerous than the disease itself. Emotions strike back by wreaking havoc, turning the world upside down, confusing embedded rational distinctions. Science claims control over nature but in many cases we can’t tell if the reality it portrays is true or it’s simply a crafty simulation.

A new cool video game from AtomFilms, Jason Oda and the Martin Agency entitled “Kung-Fu Elections”: I’ve always stayed away from politics and videogames but I do follow Mixed Martial Arts closely. Now I feel like these three things can easily go together. I am tempted to conclude that American politics has been completely swallowed by pop-culture but I am afraid to sound apolitical. Via Melodika.net

Blaine Harden of Washington Post Foreign Service writes on Japan’s use of robots as a cure against a demographic crisis. A rapidly aging society with an intolerance for immigrants adopts robots as a labor force in order to avoid an economic collapse (the number of citizens using pensions and healthcare may soon exceed the number of active workers). Japan’s romance with humanlike robots is well-known: it seems that the Japanese do not have a Western sense of monolithic, singular and indivisible self. Humanity is spread unevenly across a wide range of entities, including the human species, monkeys and robots. Japanese biologists are quick to report that chimpanzees are superior to humans in short-term memory. (The deep structures of Christian consciousness continue to create hurdles between “us” and “lower animals” on all the stages of the evolution of Darwinism.) Toyota manufactures a humanoid robot that plays “Pomp and Circumstance.” The forgotten European character, the wooden boy Pinnochio, now flourishes in Japan through multiple adaptations. (An old article in my archive also reports on the adaptation of Pinnochio by the Nazis as a perfect symbol of Aryan sensibilities.) Foreigners (especially fellow Asians) there are not fully human since they lack the essential component of humanity, namely “Japaneseness.” Japanese teenagers eagerly engage in collective suicide and the mass murder of fellow classmates in such movies as Suicide Club (2002) and Battle Royal (2000). In the U.S. [at this point I dozed off only to be woken up by Dan Ng’s link to an earlier Economist article on the same topic] the fear of robots permeates popular culture and the movies (the robot among humans is a sign of an impeding Judgment Day). Alternatively the U.S. is constantly seeking out cheap labor (especially in the service sector) among fellow humans (in Japan “One Day Without a Mexican” would probably be adapted as “One Day Without a Robot,” while “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would be more like “ASIMO’s Cabin”), while at the same time creating a class of celebrities whose compensation is of cosmic proportions. Other economic systems heavily rely on such artificially created populations as labor camp workers (Stalin’s Soviet Union), Jewish ghettos (medieval and early modern Europe), cattle (the pastoral Maasai) or macaw birds (Amazonian Indians using their feathers for ceremonial purposes), whose status vis-a-vis humans is always characteristically ambiguous. They are at will exploited and lamented, endowed with human qualities and deprived of human rights, made members of families and sent to orphanages. The scientific production of knowledge also resorts to surrogates that propel its growth. Darwin used pigeon breeding as a model of natural selection. Although if taken at face value, this transposition seems far-fetched, his theory has received universal acceptance in the scientific world probably because it was respectful and reflective of the dominant Western economic principles. Alternatively when an Australian lab published results demonstrating that megabats are relatives of monkeys (see Science, 1986, Vol 231, Issue 4743, 1304-1306 for the “flying primate” theory), the scholars were scorned and ostracized by the scientific community because they openly challenged the existing mental surrogates. There’s an intuitive kinship between all these phenomena and one is left to wonder if it’s possible to implement a mode of production (material and ideological) that do not rely on manipulated ethical values and demographic crutches.

See another Economist article on the same topic here. Via Cubemate.

This theme just won’t stop running. NYT reports of a first interface between a monkey brain and a Japanese robot. The monkey’s thoughts has actually made the robot move.

What pen would the late Jacques Derrida endorse?

Maybe this one, from www.go-pen.com. The fountain pen has been around for a hundred years at least with little to no changes. Now, a group of smart people invented a biometric pen that works on any surface, doesn’t leave any marks but remembers your hand moves as you write, converts your handwriting into text and stores the information digitally. Like a Stylus pen but only portable and surface-neutral. Although I’ve always thought of Derrida’s arche-ecriture as a whimsical invention of a French philosopher, technology is capable of materializing his writing fantasies.