Anthropreneur

We had Russian friends from Houston and Stanford over for the Thanksgiving weekend. Thinking back about what we did in the Great Denver Area, one thing continues to come to mind. The weekend was comprised of disparate events that nevertheless showed strange family resemblances. We visited the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave on the Lookout Mountain in the morning and then rushed to catch the Titanic IMAX movie and artifact exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (formerly the Denver Museum of Natural History). Close by the museum was the All-Saints of Russia Orthodox Church, and we went there for a vespers mass. We finished our day by catching a late night showing of Beowulf. We didn’t plan it to be this way, it just happened so: from an icon of West American entrepreneurialism, mass marketing and showmanship to an ill-fated luxury ocean liner that has been slowly coming back to life for the past 20 years to a place of worship guarded by ancient Russian saints to a cutting-edge mocap jewel built on a pre-Christian European saga, the themes of death, revival and immortality alongside globalization, migration, virual space and localization ran through all these events. One recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (borrowed into literary studies from Einstein’s theory of relativity through the medium of Russian physiologist Alexei A. Ukhtomsky): “time thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise space becomes charged and responsive to movements of time, plot and history.” Not being much of a poet (or a believer or a movie junkie or a Western pioneer or a serious Russian emigrant), I gathered my scattered thoughts into a some kind of verse.

Between a church and an embassy

Between Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull

Between a sunken boat and a museum

Between memory and motion capture

There is a vast field of unintended meaning

Of which a whole life can be spun.

From Egyptian mummies to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the BODIES and Body Worlds traveling exhibitions to now the Titanic exhibit, display/deathplay is a dark abyss of revenue. As we entered the Titanic exhibit – which is a simulated Titanic ship with portholes, cabins and luxury dining rooms – we received “boarding passes.” Every boarding pass carried on it the name and short bio of a Titanic passenger. First class, second class, third class. Thus you become a customized Titanic passenger. At the end of the exhibit you skim the lists of survivors and victims to determine your destiny. I was an agriculture inspector from Sweden traveling to Illinois to learn more about botany. I found myself among the lost. As I walked through the crowded “ship,” I saw an old razor blade in a paper sheath (they don’t make those anymore, but I remember my father using one), personal documents, perfectly preserved au gratin saucers, a leather boot, a menu and other memorabilia. The exhibit gradually turns into a gift shop where the replicas of these and other memorabilia are offered at high prices. Walls featured the details of lives of several passengers adding to the experience of personalization, identification and reincarnation. Intricate computer simulations told a story of hitting an iceberg. The ship sank in 1912, there is still a survivor left out there, and on all other occasions one would have a feeling that he visited a graveyard or a looted cemetery. Looting a grave and bringing back the dead is sacrilegeous in our culture, but Titanic is a special case. Since its rediscovery in 1985, a consistent effort has been invested in recovering the historical minutia, reconstructing the technical details of its collapse, retrieving the artifacts buried on the sea bottom at 12,536 feet, making their replicas and selling them as “gifts” and reenacting the lives of the Titanic passengers in movies, musicals and now exhibitions. Commodifying, marketing and selling Titanic is a way to deal with death that has taken cosmic proportions and destroyed a ship that was a model of Euro-American society at the turn of the century. Titanic was the Hobbsean Commonwealth devoured by the original Hebraic Leviathan. A hundred years later the new Western man armed with Russian submersibles and American commercialism perform the ritual of requickening the dead social capital.

Traveling across a huge body of water is an old synonym of death. This metaphor can be found in Greek myths, in the perceptions of West African slaves transported to the West Indies in the 16th century, in the Makah Indian ritual captured by Jim Jarmusch in Dead Man, in the reminiscences of Buffalo Bill’s Show Indians who traveled to Europe at the end of the 19th century, and in the old northern European tradition of putting a corpse on a ship as portrayed in Beowulf. Once at a party at Natalia Mislavsky’s house in Redwood City I ran into a Russian guy who worked in hi-tech industry in the Silicon Valley. An immigrant to the U.S. for thirty years, he said: “You live twice, once in your homeland and then once abroad.” In one phrase, he plotted life and death onto the world map. (Incidentally early American educators such as Stanley Hall and John Dewey were also concerned that immigration broke the lives of Americans into two halves making the U.S. in sync with aging rather than youthfulness.) When I left the Russian Orthodox Church in Denver I gave it another thought. We always think of church in opposition to the state. For a Russian in America, the Durkheimian opposition between the sacred and the profane is clearly represented by the Church vs. the Embassy/Consulate. If two countries enter a war with each other, they call off their diplomatic service. The Russian Orthodox Church in America continued to exist even after the contacts with the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union had been severed. There are two different temporalities involved here – an Embassy/Consulate is a current extension of the State, a church is an instantiation of the Church in the past and in the future. No surprise the corporate culture of many a successful company (take Nike or Red Bull or Google) tends to look a bit like a cult. Cult means continuity, or the survival of a corporation with the passing of time and the stretching of space.

Interactivity is at the core of new marketing. Consumers have to be commodified before they start buying products. Titanic the exhibit is much more profitable than Titanic the movie. The same concerns the employees or in the case of Beowulf by Robert Zemeckis, the actors. Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone, Crispin Glover, John Malkovich and others participated only on the motion capture stage, then their images were modified and manipulated by a team of digital artists. I wonder how they felt watching their own ghosts recreating a findamental story of life, death, love, fear and intergenerational continuity in an effort to attract the new consumer. In tribal cultures, copying is associated with death, hence the proverbial resistance of a “primitive” man to having his photograph taken or his sacred ceremonies recorded.

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.

Fedor Emelianenko signed with M-1. Randy Couture resigned. I am talking about mixed martial arts.

As per FightNetwork, the reigning PRIDE champion from Russia and the aging king of American UFC were not destined to square off in either the ring or the octagon. The long-anticipated brawl that was supposed to determine the best heavyweight and pount-for-pound MMA fighter in the world did not pan out. The half-a-century-old marketing hype immortalized by Rocky Balboa, namely a “clash of systems and civilizations” (Soviet/Russian and American) this time failed to materialize.

Why did this happen? I think the power of numbers simply ruled in favor of the Russian. Couture’s overall record is 16-8, Emelianenko’s 30-1. All Internet polls ranked Emelianenko as # 1 in the world. Couture is 44, Emelianenko is 31. Couture is 228 lb, Emelianenko is 233 lb. Couture was not happy with his UFC salary, Emelianenko found a great deal. It is not surprising that Couture resigned in a split second after learning that Emelianenko did not sign with UFC but instead chose M-1. It is surprising that Emelianenko’s rejection of the UFC and Couture’s resignation came as a surprise to the majority of fans and pundits.

Reportedly, nobody else but Emelianenko was challenging enough to Couture, that’s why he surrendered. UFC owner, Dana White, and a few Internet commentators, have used all the traditional marketing techniques to boost up Couture’s image: a compelling story, a great demeanor, the “Captain America” nickname, a square jaw, and a consistent anti-Emelianenko rant (“overated,” “has problems with Greco-Roman fighters,” “hasn’t fought in the Octagon,” “fought for only three minutes in 2007,” etc.) were supposed to bring Emelianenko to the UFC only to be destroyed by the all-American champion. Meanwhile Couture’s record demonstrates that he has not successfully fought any of the world-renowned heavyweights. He was knocked out by Josh Barnett and Ricco Rodriguez. Yes he defeated Pedro Rizzo. Yes, he came to reclaim a heavyweight title from the giant Tim Sylvia and defended it against the up-and-coming Gabriel Gonzaga. But Sylvia was only a place-holder in the UFC’s rather lukewarm heavyweight division. Gonzaga is a promising fledgling who capitalized on Mirko Cro Cop’s lackluster performance in the UFC.

Between 2002 and 2006, Couture fought in the light heavyweight division where he was eventually destroyed by Chuck Liddell and sent into his first retirement. Couture is a very good fighter but at the age of 44 he has absolutely no world-class heavyweight experience. Instead of resigning from the shaky UFC throne, he should have sought bouts with Cro Cop, Nogueira, Barnett, Kharitonov, Alexander Emelianenko, Mark Hunt (although here Couture would have probably won due to Hunt’s absolute lack of ground game), Mark Coleman, and a few others. Emelianenko convincingly defeated most of them, and those who he has not fought lost to those who he beat.

In the same way as the outcome of the Cold War was determined by sheer numbers, the UFC’s search for world dominance was thwarted by White’s reliance on archaic marketing techniques and by Couture’s self-defeating oblivion to statistics. In the absence of a unified MMA organizational structure, certain close combat events should probably be resolved at a distance.

There are two ways of nominally signaling a crossover between two academic disciplines or spheres of life. One way is to mechanically juxtapose two terms. Example: neuromarketing (neurology + marketing). The other one is to seamlessly weave one word into the other. Example: kinsumption.

Neuromarketing is the new buzz in the marketing and business circles these days. Some people adore the baby and wish it grows fast, others want it gone.

These days neuromarketing exists in labs and in a few research-and-consulting shops such as Neurofocus in Berkeley founded by A. K. Pradeep. Neurofocus studies brainwaves, uses eye-tracking devices and skin-response meters to measure the viewer’s response to TV commercials. Mya Frazer from AdAge initiated a recent flurry of blogs by presenting expert opinions against neuromarketing. Although some neuromarketing tools (such as electroencephalography) are inexpensive and portable, many say that it does not yield useful results, it is intrusive, and it is naive. John Winsor points out that culture (hybrid cars in Boulder vs. trucks in Cody) is a better predictor of the consumer’s behavior and his response to advertising. Mark Earls echoes him by saying that “the major influence on human behavior is other people (real or virtual, perceived or imagined) and not the volition of the individual agent.”

For a sociocultural anthropologist, this debate is painfully familiar. Academics have been waging wars over nature vs. culture for decades. Between 1999 and 2007, my alma mater, Stanford University, used to have two departments of anthropology: Anthropological Sciences would spin an anthropology off genes, the brain and the environment, while Cultural and Social Anthropology would derive its interpretations from culture, creativity and political economy. This year Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences put an end to this short-lived institutional sepraration and reunited the two warring camps into a single Department of Anthropology. Now it has a rich and fine texture.

For some companies, the real goal is devising a perfect consumer, the one whose brain is pre-wired to respond positively to an ad and make the body storm off to the mall. For other companies, designing a perfect product is key. On the one side of the spectrum we have labs like Neurofocus, on the other creative boutiques such as Fahrenheit 212, Ideo, Insight, Ziba Design who use a trial-and-error approach to help companies design products that will incorporate cultural and consumer insight right away. I predict that product design will gain more success in the marketplace but brain design will not go away for a simple reason that brain matters. While it is true that we are influenced by “others,” or by “culture” around us, those others are specific to the individual. People live their lives enveloped in very specific (sometimes unique, but usually partially shared) networks of significant others. “Friends and family” is an abstraction. “My friends” and “my family” are the real thing. The brain as a highly-complex interactive organ promises access to these microsocial circles that are eventually responsible for who each one of us is. (Academics call this process “subjectivation,” “subjectification,” or “individualization.”)

Brain hemispheres are asymmetrical: the left hemisphere controls logic and science, the right hemisphere language and art. In our demographic samples there are men and women, older people and younger people, but also left-brained and right-brained people. All these binaries are equally natural and cultural. A left-brained person will solve a puzzle even if the puzzle makes no sense in the real world. A right-brained person will hardly be able to think in abstract terms but he will wisely reject an absurd puzzle. Culture, animate and inanimate nature (think of chirality in chrystallography) are all profoundly affected by these asymmetries. Brain asymmetries influence dexterity and facial structure. (That’s why brands are endorsed by strictly symmetrical celebrities and not by people whose faces are disfigured by the Down syndrome.) The fact that there are companies who try to design brains vs. companies who work on designing products is an immediate confirmation of it. Like everywhere else, symmetry and balance is a highly desirable state of mind.

Kinsumption is about interconnectedness, balance, and peace between holistic and linear perspectives.