Anthropreneur

Big scientific theories are not contracted in heaven. There is always something earthly about the way they were conceived. In the case of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the formative insight came from the clubs of pigeon fanciers in London. Darwin grew up on a farm and was therefore used to animal breeding. When he moved to London, he entered the circles of pigeon breeders, with their flamboyant exhibits, soemwhat unhealthy enthusiasm for avian beauty, and arcane conversations. Kaboom! The grand theory was born. Grateful to the breeders for solving one of the world’s mysteries, Darwin in turn gave these amateurs a scientific status.

Enters fantasy football that has become an all-consuming passion for millions of Americans. These guys are sport and football junkies, amateur experts who know everything about football. They do not play themselves, they only sit in front of the TV or computer and watch, absorb information, process it and store it. This wealth of knowledge contrasts with the high unpredictability of a game’s outcome. (More so than in baseball, which eventually allowed football to outcompete baseball in terms of popularity.) Even such non-football states as Connecticut sport millions of fantasy footballers. Now these closet experts have a way to turn this knowledge into gaming and go public. They can “own” a dream team by handpicking real football players at will. They know everything about these players – their ways, strengths, weaknesses, signature moves, who is a sleeper and who has been overated, whether the player’s style fits with its realtime team or not, etc. Whether they win at the end of the year largely depends on the actual physical behavior of their favorite players. They segment this behavior into constituent parts (low tackle, high tackle, pass, throw, squatting, etc.) They follow their record of injuries (ankle is the most common injury in football) because injuries impede performance, hence lower their chances to win. Behind this behavior are convoluted laws of physics (center of gravity, velocity, acceleration, trajectories of passes, etc.) and skeletal anatomy that they half consciously know or they would like to know more about.

There seems to be a weird but unmistakable similarity between pigeon fancy (and other animal breeding for this matter) and fantasy football. The human mind subjects all animate matter, whether fellow human or fellow animal, to its selective design. Not only that Darwin’s “natural selection” was inspired by purely modern human practices but the modern proliferation of sports as pure athletics may stem from the same interest in constructing natural orders and manipulating them to human advantage. We do have been gambling at both animal races and human tournaments for hundreds of years now but the desire do turn chance in human athletics into controlled selection assited by the new media and the Internet is a new development. A strange mix of video games, sports and animal breeding.

What kind of vision of nature would a fantasy football team owner have?

CNN’s Alina Cho reports of a growing number of “fertility tourists.” The Sperm Bank of New York offers women, whose husbands are infertile, an opportunity to get pregnant with a child that phenotypically matches their husbands. In Europe, artificial insemination is cheaper, hence the market for blond, blue-eyed Danish babies is the fastest growing in the U.S. to the extent that a version of anti-trust regulation has been adopted by some sperm banks who try to cater to the needs of other breeds and races. I could add that, in a reversal of the common logic, certain would-be moms from Germany are keen on conceiving a Native American child. To accomplish this task, they travel to a Native American reservation and befriend a full-blooded Indian. In the morning, the Indian man brags to his less lucky tribesmen that he “counted a coup” on a white woman. In Denmark men count money and are known as “sperm donors,” in Indian Country they count coups and are probably thought of as “absent fathers.”

No, this is not a post about a mystical connection between the delivery of babies and the delivery of mail. It is about something totally different.

My agency has just won the Domino’s Pizza account. And it is worth $150 million. To kick off our partnership, Domino’s delivered free pizza to all three of our offices. It took me 30 minutes to wrap my mouth around one, though. Because we all (some 400 hungry admen at the Boulder office) had to stand in line. It made me recall Russia during Communist times and shortly thereafter. We did not have a food delivery culture at that time. Instead, we had another exciting cultural institution. We had to stand in queues to get bread, sausage, cheese and other essential staples. Until today, I’ve never thought that delivery and queues are connected. But so is democracy and totalitarianism: you may have freedom of speech but the main challenge is to get heard.

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.

American Anthropological Association and American Automobile Association were founded in the same year. 1902.

For while, I was wondering if this serendipity may contain a lead into an interesting cultural truth. Then I saw the recent Toyota commercial called “Human Touch.” The invention and rapid spread of automobiles in Europe and the U.S. has dramatically altered both cities and the countryside. Most importantly, cars gave people autonomy and independence. Cars were especially instrumental in ripping individuals out of their local communities, making mobility part of individual humanity, and tacitly converting loyalty to roots into love for routes. In the U.S., automobility spawned a whole infrastructure comprised of highways, motels, garages, gas stations, fast food stations, and drive-thrus.

The influence has been mutual, for no other vehicle looks so much like a human being. Trains look like snakes or centipedes, airplane like birds, submarines like whales. Cars certainly look human and behave intelligently, and the Toyota commercial has highlighted this old truth in a new way.

In the U.S. the car constitutes the second major purchase in a person’s life (after the house; or third, if small business can count as a purchase). In Russia, as we read on CNN, the worsening demographic slump has led to the introduction of a nationwide rewards-and-incentives program. Governor of Ulyanovsk (ironically, the town in which Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin was born) has decreed September 12 a Day of Conception and awards successful couples with cash, cars, and other valuable goods.

The metaphor “car as a human being” easily translates into a pragmatic metonym: child is a particular kind of human being, birthing a child is causally related to getting an actual car. The transaction transcends the marketplace: in a version of the Communist ideal, Russian lovers obtain cars (again, the second major purchase in the U.S.) for free from the state as a reward for their reproductive activity. American Anthropological Association and American Automobile Association may use this example as an new idea for partnership.

People share with goods the fundamental quality: both people and goods tend to circulate. Anthropologists have a history of describing tribal societies in which children circulate between households as if they were goods. Inuits and Melanesians are now especially famous for that. Oftentimes a newly-born is named after a recently deceased relative or neighbor, takes on his soul and status and grows up living in a new house with a new set of parents. The child may address them as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘younger brother’ or ‘younger sister’ depending on the relationship his deceased namesake had with them during his life. These bizarre practices have been recorded among ethnic groups as far apart as the Khoisans in southern Africa, the Dravidians in India, and the Ob-Ugrians in western Siberia.

Anthropologists have developed a sense that tribal, or “cold,” societies produce, exchange, distribute and consume (sometimes literally as ritual food) people/persons/bodies/souls/names/kin terms, while industrial, or “hot,” societies do exactly the same thing to goods and symbolic signs. Meillassoux, Godelier and other French Marxists and their American sympathizers (think of Terry Turner) summarized human evolution as a transition from “systems of reproduction” to “systems of production.” The phenomenon of adoption has been a recalcitrant aspect of kinship theory, for it baffled both positivists (why would there a need arise for extensive networks of adoption if genealogical connections are at least as good in expanding one’s universe of kin?) and constructivists (if people openly construct kinship, what is there to demystify and denaturalize?). Do people adopt children (and enter in other relations of ritual/fictive kinship) in imitation of existing genealogical bonds and as a way to fill in genealogical gaps (kinship), or in an attempt to cope with the constant emergence of new generations and new phenotypes (production)?

Once again we find that kinship and economics are mysteriously related.

In the 1980-1990s, Western companies began to capitalize on the disparities in labor prices and buying power between the First World and the Third World. Nike, Inc. developed a new business model that involved the outsourcing of the production of sneakers and soccerballs to Indian, Pakistani or Southeast Asian teens. Saving millions on the production end, Nike could then splurge on marketing in the U.S. Around the same time, Western Europe and the U.S. experienced an explosion in transnational adoption, with the Swedes as trailblazers in this new intercountry adoption movement. Indian, Pakistani, Southeast Asia, Chinese and Russian kids found new homes in Stockholm, for the Swedish government declared adoption a “social responsibility.”

Over the past 20 years adoption has developed its own global marketplace supported by a network of international organizations and legal statutes. Or do I have the right to apply the term “marketplace” to the process of giving a biological child as a gift to foreign parents, on the one hand, and donating money to a foster institution in gratitude for its services in locating and negotiating the transfer, on the other? Does Angelina Jolie expand the bounds of materialism and consumerism by “shopping” for kids in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Vietnam, or does she fulfill the ancient human desire to think in terms of “human” (think of Lewis Henry Morgan) rather than “nuclear” family?

Or, note another intriguing similarity: mass customization, consumer-generated content, co-creation are all equally recent business and management trends that invite the consumer to participate in the production of goods. At the dawn of writing, every book was handwritten and unique (there are very few of those left in national libraries and museums). The Gutenberg revolution allowed people to generate an unlimited number of book copies. Now Google digitizes those very books that Johannes Gutenberg brought into our possession. All we need is a file, or a web link.

These days the producer supplies the market with bare ingredients, oftentimes giving you just a digital file or a piece of software from which you, the consumer, can generate a product the way you like it. As Europe and the U.S. were moving into Information Age, they discovered the gene, and now we understand ourselves increasingly as scripts to enact rather than as finished fruits of nature. With transnational adoption, the situation seems to be similar: biological parents offer “raw” human material, uniquely characterized by such phenotypic and geographical features as ethnicity, race, gender, age and locality, and it is up to the First World adoptive parents to raise these children as personalities and citizens.

Or, think about the phenomenon of European re-creation of American Indian cultures from books and movies. I remember watching a Bulgarian youth prancing in an Indian warbonnet in front of a mirrot, waiting for his friend to take us to a powwow. “Mom, do I look like Indian?” he yelled across the hallway. “Sure, son, as long as your mother is one” was his mother’s response. The consumption of American Indian cultures leads to “reverse transcultural adoption”: for it is the self-conscious choice of European men and women that challenges the traditional authority of their biological parents, rather than the solicitation on the part of a foreign couple.

Culture induces massive tectonic shifts in society. Surprisingly they rarely come in isolation from each other, and such seemingly disconnected spheres of life as transcultural adoption, customization, digitization, and genetic engineering are affected by the very same process of adding new codes and then enacting their scripts.

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.

Finally, after exactly a year of working at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, I’m entering the fields of global blogging. Ploughing my way through the myriads of brands my illustrious agency has amased, I finally achieved some level of clarity between the order of theory and the order of practice. Time to blog…

And by way of kicking off my thinking on advertising, marketing, business and consumption, I decided to coin another new term. Before it was gignetics, now it is kinsumption.

Kinsumption, ain’t it something? This is what happens when an academic anthropologist, with a background in evolutionary, sociocultural, linguistic and other kinds of research, moves into the private sector. At some point Australian anthropologists invented the term “kintax,” instead of syntax, to refer to the propensity of Australian aboriginal languages to bend grammar to reflect social structure. So, I guess I am not alone here.

But seriously, what am I talking about here? I was inspired by the classic volume by Grant McCracken entitled “Culture and Consumption I,” which documents how individualism and consumption were born in early modern Western Europe out of the traditional concern with “family status.” Remember? The original function of objects in European culture was to increase family status and preserve continuity between ancestors and descendants. Patina on an object was an “icon” that signified the duration of the family. Then something happened, and Europeans started to shop for new commodities instead of inheriting timeless artifacts. Fashion came to replace patina.

The argument itself has a patina on it. Most famously, in the 19th century the British legal historian, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, advanced a theory according to which European societies evolved from status (kinship status, status obtained at birth) to contract.

But back to ‘Culture and Consumption I.” As a result of the collapse of the original family estate system, a whole new order of cultural meanings came into being. Advertising and fashion industries evolved as main mediators between culture and material objects (or between culture and production).

Complementing Grant, I would add museums here as well. Museums emerged with modernity. If fashion is about novelty, museums are about antiquity, and advertising is about currency. The continuity between past, present and future has therefore remained intact. An object leaves the hands of a designer, makes a pause in an ad agency and achieves immortality in the hands of a curator. The collapse of one “kinship” order leads to the creation of another kinship order. Where are the noble families in this new order of consumption? Brands are these families. And iconic products (Harley Davidson motorcycles, pardon my banality) continue to be valued for their symbolic patina.

That’s what I mean by kinsumption.