Anthropreneur

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.

I was thinking again about my old days as an Indianist in Russia. These memories came to me at an opportune time as I was reading Wipperfurth’s Brand Hijack. Apparently the phenomenon of co-creating the brand is at least one hundred years old and Native Americans pioneered it. However one may ask who’s calling the shots here – Europeans (the fan club, the consumers) or Indians (the tribal brand, the producers). As Native Americans were diminishing in numbers in the late 19th century and widely conceived of as a vanishing race, sympathetic white Americans and their acculturated Indian collaborators initiated a long-term branding campaign by highlighting tribal untarnished purity, aesthetic simplicity, military prowess and spiritual depth. Through the medium of Buffalo Bill shows, arts and crafts exhibitions, museums, performative arts (music, theater), fiction books, ethnological monographs, newspapers and movies, the tribal brand went global. For many modern American Indians the goal is to reclaim its brand without losing the national and international cache that this unique branding campaign has generated. The relative autonomy of tribal lands, their tax-free status and the concurrent phenomenon of Indian casinos exists thanks to the efforts of such a powerful Indian afficionado as John Collier, the architect of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. The recent Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People (adopted by the general Assembly of the United Nations on September 13, 2007) legitimized collective rights of tribal peoples worldwide, again thanks to the many decades of promoting Native American cultures as possessing inherent group values. We may redirect this observation to answer Ronald Coase’s dilemma, namely why there are companies and corporations in the first place instead of just networks of self-employed and mutually contracting individuals. Transaction costs is one thing. But it is not even marketing or management, it is a survival strategy. Read Piotr Kropotkin on mutual aid or W.D. Hamilton on kin selection. But then comes Ross Mayfield with his thesis that social networks increase choice within companies and drive efficiency. They decentralize companies, flatten internal hierarchies, relax corporate culture, break corporate silos, intensify exchnages between system and its environment, unleash creative potential and thus increase profit. Maybe that’s what happened to such recent tribal brands as the Pequots. Indian tribes used to attract philanthropic support aimed to preserve their ancient cultural core; now their casinos generate tons of revenue and move these ancient cultures into the future. The dialectics of survival: from corporations to networks and back.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was Charles Darwin’s cousin.

A true child progeny who learned alphabet by 18 months, Galton later achieved fame as the founder of eugenics . He believed that talent comes from heredity. The perfection of the human race is possible by means of studying and harnessing hereditary forces.

There was indeed a great deal of talent running in Darwin’s bloodlines. Charles’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood I (1730-1795), single-handedly launched modern marketing through the mass production of pottery and its distribution among European nobility. Charles’s paternal grandfather, zoologist and botanist, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), prefigured a theory of evolution. Charles’s maternal uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II (1769-1843), was an eminent breeder of Merino sheep. Even Charles’s mother bred pigeons. Charles Darwin invented natural selection. Galton did what I just said. One of Charles’s sons, Francis (1848-1925), followed in his father’s footsteps (they co-authored the book entitled The Power of Movement in Plants) and became a botanist and an editor of his father’s voluminous correspondence. Charles’s other son, Leonard (1850-1943), was Chairman of the British Eugenics Society. Talent as an ability to produce endless variations on a single main theme, be it pots, pigeons, sheep, or humans, eventually generates a theory of itself doing all that, again with multiple variations.

Now, the fan circles around the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) have announced the results of the 2d annual Top Fantasy Fighter vote. Mixed martial arts practitioners associated with PRIDE, UFC, K-1 and other organizations are not only rated within their weight-class or pound-for-pound, but also broken down into their constituent skills and prominent body parts. These skills and body parts are then reassembled to produce a superhero. This year they took fists from Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, chin from Dan Henderson, elbows from Kenny Florian, legs from Anderson Silva, etc. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is somewhat akin to mass customization applied to sports: there is a limited set of rules (no eye-gouging, no hair-pulling, no chin-in-the-eye submissions, etc.) but, apart from them, fighters can employ any technique derived from boxing, wrestling, grappling, kick-boxing, jiu-jitsu, sambo or sumo in order to knock out or submit their opponent. MMA fighters, therefore, enjoy a great deal of freedom by mixing and matching different skills to achieve a win. This creates unpredictability and, hence, a high marketing momentum. Boxing is losing to MMA on this unpredictability factor because boxing bouts are largely predetermined by the rules of the sport. While the MMA fighters enjoy a great deal of freedom in their skills, strategies and body movements, their fans take more liberty in manipulating the fighters themselves.

The popularity of MMA is nothing like the popularity of boxing. MMA fans want to play with their favorite fighters, they want to appropriate their identities and their martial talents in order to construct their own version of an ultimate fighter. The same is happening today with brands.

The hype of Randy Couture or Chuck Liddell is nothing like the hype of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. MMA fans do not want to emulate their heroes. Their heroes are not those rigid, fixed, monolithic endorsers standing for a specific set of values. They often lose to other heroes. Recently, Cro Cop lost to Gabriel Gonzaga and Cheick Kongo, Tim Sylvia lost to the ageing Couture, Liddell was dropped by Jackson and outpointed by Jardine, Jackson earlier had been mauled by Wanderlei Silva and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua who in turn lost to Forrest Griffin. The moment the old-fashioned heroic halo/marketing hype begins to envelop a fighter and he climbs the front page of a magazine (e.g., Georges St. Pierre, Chuck Liddell), he loses to a reality TV star (Matt Serra) or to a popular jester and a vocal new-born (I just misspelled it as “new-brawned”) Christian (Jackson). It looks like athleticism is becoming truly “Olympic” (rather than Biblical) in the sense that power is more equally distributed across the pantheon and does not concentrate in a single pair of hands.

The MMA fans want to simulate their own heroes on the basis of available raw material. But, unlike Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, MMA fans are not interested in breeding an actual physical superhero. They leave it to nature (as testified by one of the nicknames of the top heavyweight, Fedor Emelianenko, “The Russian Experiment”), and they leave nature alone. Instead, they apply their breeding zeal to the cultural representations of biological differences by piling up tiers of phenotypical simulation. These simulations mirror the way in which the sport is organized.

This is what has fundamentally changed since the 19th century: today’s nature is about nurture, today’s culture is about commerce. And their relationship to each other is not a matter of rational decision.

In 2001, The Observer published an article by Ashley Alsup that advanced a thesis that America, or the U.S., is a brand like any other, and moreover a brand whose equity has declined in appeal and significance. (At the time of writing, Ashley was an American working for a British ad agency BBH. As of now, she lives in Britain and speaks with a British accent – which makes her British in a lot of ways – but works for an American ad agency, namely CP+B.) Since then, I’ve heard other advertising planners also talking about America as a brand.

This observation is ingenious, and the article is well-written and insightful in many a small nuance of argument and example. For a quick blogsec, I will take it up an anthropological alley, though.

Anthropology has long been fascinated with things ethnic and national. Ethnology and ethnography are often used interchangeably with anthropology. (In France, Sweden, Russia and other Slavic countries, ethnology/ethnologie/etnologia are words for sociocultural anthropology. “Anthropology” is more about physical and evolutionary anthropology there.) Among anthropologists ethnicity is seen in two ways: as a contextual construction and as a primordial unity. Constructivists presently vastly outnumber priomordialists.

Constructivists say: Ethnic groups, nations and the phenomenon of ethnicity have so far escaped a logical definition. Anthropologists know that ethnic groups exists, but they cannot put their finger on the objective properties that distinguish an ethnic group from a manufacturing guild, a religious sect, or a biological species. A common language, a geographical territory, shared sentiments, a common history, a distinctive culture, a myth of common origin, all seem to work in some cases but not in others. What seems to be constant is “ethnic consciousness” or an “ethnic identity.”

But then, priomordialists retort, how can we distinguish statements “I am American” from “I am a geek” or “I am Darth Vader”? The same problem of definition recurs. Or, alternatively, how can we understand ethnic violence, which oftentimes takes cosmic proportions, if the only solid fact is subjectiive perception?

Now, America is often used by constructivists as an example of a nation that lacks one of the constituents of a convincing logical definition, namely a myth of common origin. Indeed, America is a country of immigrants, and even American Indians were co-opted into this “nation” as “citizens” in 1924. But Ashley’s article raises a question whether America is a nation at all, or is it, more properly speaking, a brand among nations. Adam Morgan says about brands that they are “something that is created, rather than naturally occurring” (Eating the Big Fish, 1999, 27), but so does Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) about nations: they are “imagined communities.” Marketing theory can enrich theories of ethnicity through its awareness of the fact that brands are co-created by producers and consumers. Neither constructivists nor primordialists have realized that an ethnic group has its own producers and consumers (or interconnected and ethnicity-specific social roles), rather than stems from the imagination of a unitary but whimsical subject endowed with an ethnic identity or from a stable arrangement of language, culture and geography.

No surprise that democratic nations do not fight with each other (see Democratic peace theory), for they are not nations, they are brands and brands do not wage wars, they compete. But when a brand faces a nation or an ethnic group (sometimes called “a non-democratic state,” such as Hussein’s Iraq), it wakes up, resorts to violence and becomes a nation again. In the course of this metamorphosis, it may lose a bunch of loyal customers. But who cares.

Ethnicity is a matter of definition. True. But ethnicity can be is a matter of substitution, too. An order of objects interferes with an order of people, and vice versa. Ernest Gellner’s late and poorly-known article (“From kinship to ethnicity,” in Constructions Identitaires, Quebec, 1989) on ethnicity as a modern version of primitive or premodern kinship continues to fascinate me as it contains an uncanny and unfinished insight.

That’s why I talk about kinsumption.

I am still playing with words. But now I seek to understand what was the original problem of constructivism. David Schneider said, Kinship as a system of biological relationships is a “sheer nonsense.” Kinship is a symbolic system that exists solely in the minds of Euro-American anthropologists.

Enough has been written pro and con Schneider from the point of view of kinship studies. My response to Schneider comes from the other end. If kinship is a symbolic system, why did he still think that it is a construction of biological relationships? If brands are families, and their continuities are preserved through fashion, advertising and museums, why not to talk about them and leave kinship studies to their own devices? The relationship between modernity and the “post-modernists” is not that of temporal succession but of syncronic symbiosis: modernity’s blind spots are postmodernism’s blind spots, too.

Schneider once again exposes a bias and a tunnel vision: in the 1960s anthropologists only began to discover Euro-American cultures, and Schneider was firmly trapped in the old pseudo-contradictions of the descriptions of “primitive societies.” But at least once he got it right: “In short, kinship studies might profit by joining Mythologiques in backing up to the question of what sort of analogical systems people make out of whatever they make them out of, instead of assuming they make them out of genealogical kin” (Schneider & Boon 1974, 815).

Kinship systems are constructed in their own, “kinship,” way, while consumption systems are constructed in their own “consumption” way. These ways of constructing things are identical on the level of media and methodology, rather than content and substance.

This unity of media of cultural description is what I call kinsumption.