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.

Yesterday Ed Kramer, formerly of George Lukas’s Industrial Light + Magic, delivered an amazing lecture on the history of computer graphics before the Boulder Digital Arts Salon. From Lee Harrison’s seminal insight that came upon him while he was watching a TV signal shrinking to a dot to the first analog computer images (with one guy prancing in real time like in a theatre of shadows and the other moving the knob or joystick to control the beams of light) to Qantel, Abekas, Crawford and RenderMan and the production of first rendered 3D images and to finally Werewolf’s attempt at a complete simulation of a human being, the whole evolution of a new technology rolled before my eyes. The very first primitive analog images looked remarkably similar to what anthropologists find in ancient cave dwellings. It took a while before humans mastered a perspective; 3D images also came in relatively late. It means that the evolution of art everywhere proceeds according to the same master plan. The difference is that evolution speeds up on each new level making it possible for people like Ed Kramer to witness during his lifetime the same amount of change that used to take thousands of years to unfold. Another thing I noticed was the precision with which teams of digital artists measure the actual landscape or the movements of a living creature before embarking on “motion capture.” This reminded me of us, anthropologists, who get out there to do ethnographies in order to capture those intangible feelings and patterns of thought that we eventually try to simulate in an academic or industrial setting. Are we ever going to be able to simulate a human being on the screen (a “celebrity” would then simply patent his or her physique and then collect royalties from each movie while engaged in a more sophisticated social activity), to genetically engineer a human clone and to predict human behavior, or we will always be that close but no cigar?

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.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. The catalyst came yesterday during my 1.5-hour long discussion of the ways to study the origins of modern humans and the peopling of the Americas with James E. Dixon, the author of Bones, Boats and Bison (2000). (I am also reading Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing by Alex Wipperfurth, which might have contributed to my desire to blog about amateurs.) A professor at the University of Colorado – Boulder who has recently accepted an appointment as Director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, James Dixon is famous for his unorthodox but thoroughly scientific approach to Pleistocene Amerindian cultures. We discussed the bold Stanford-Bradley proposal of a transoceanic contact between Europe and America, Meltzer’s strongheaded purism, Polynesian-Amerindian contacts, Boas’s back-migration from America into North-East Asia, mtDNA, Cavalli-Sforza, Joe Greenberg, Johanna Nichols, Christy Turner, Tom Dillehay, On-Your-Knees, Topper, Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Monte Verde, Uptar, Ushki and what have you. An overarching theme was a conflict or co-presence of amateurish and professional perspectives on distant human past and the problem of their definition. American archaeology has long been a site of vociferous mutual accusations of dilettantism and arrogant fundamentalism (after Monte Verde’s success “dilettants” seem to be winning the game). Amerindian linguistics experienced a similar clash between lumpers led by Greenberg and splitters led by Lyle Campbell (here the “professionals” were right). We agreed that there exists a vast terrain between the two extremes – between a stubborn insistence on timeless methodological values and irrefutable facts, on the one hand, and childish and irresponsible finagling with the data, on the other. True professionalism and true passion (a quality of amateurs, from Latin amator ‘lover’ and amare ‘to love’) must somehow combine to produce a class of entrepreneurs/anthropreneurs, creative and analytical at the same time, committed to innovation and genuinely curious about history, willing to entertain radical ideas and possessing a refined sense of taste and style.

In the current marketplace amateurs have a strong momentum. Successful brands (Google, Craigslist, Palm, Starbucks, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, etc.) break industry conventions and launch remarkable products or eye-popping advertising stunts to the utter bafflement of Hollywood, Detroit or Madison Avenue. Revolutions often begin out of nothing. Napster started its stellar career in music-sharing business (some 27 million users in 2000) from a software written by a college freshman for personal use. This made me think of my friend Alvah (Pardner) Hicks who, during the 1990s-early 2000s, developed an entirely unique theory of American Indian origins. In a nutshell, he reversed the traditional direction of migration from the Old World into the New World and suggested that available evidence in fact points to the origin of man in the Americas (ultimately from the New World monkeys) with his subsequent expansion into the Old World. The 500-year-old myth is therefore shattered, and an entirely new world of human prehistory opens before the academic and popular eye.

By strict academic standards Pardner is an amateur. He doesn’t have a graduate degree and all his credentials come from being a California backcountry boy with a passion for outdoors and sports and an uncanny ability to win. Self-taught in archaeology and population genetics through independent research, conference attendance, the UC-SB library, TV and the Internet (those who have recently taught in academia know how students’ access to new media has altered power relations in classrooms), Pardner developed a thorough knowledge of the subject that he uses to prove his fantastic theory. “A flashback from the past,” Tom Dillehay (who introduced me to Pardner in 1999) once called him meaning that Pardner represents a unique survival of the ethos of 19th century American archaeology. The establishment of archaeology as a university discipline in the U.S. resulted in the extinction of a wide diversity of opinions regarding the origin of American Indians. We’re dealing here with an analogue of population bottleneck – only a small number of genes survives and those that do tend to approach fixation. Pardner believes that with the bureaucratization of archaeolgy truth was lost. His job as a survivor is to recover the truth and bring Cinderella to the ball.

Seen against the background of the radical changes in the contemporary marketplace, Pardner’s ideas do not seem aberrant. He is a genuine part of our times when change, innovation and the spirit of discovery sweep across the world with the speed of an electric signal. He is a testimony of how closed-minded, slow-moving and straitjacketed certain academic quarters remain. Boasting professionalism and dismissing amateurs, they forget that a successful idea (whether iPod or a new theory of human origins) is born of entrepreneurialism. There is no other way to generate profit, be it truth or cash, but through a risky combination of the vigor of an irreverent amateur and the rigor of a far-sighted professional. Pardner Hicks certainly deserves an Entrepreneur of the Century Award from the American Archaeological Association.

My conversation with Jim ended on a very positive note – academic archaeology is changing towards more flexible models into which all other disciplines (linguistics, genetics, kinship studies, craniology, odontology, etc.) can fit their growing body of data. Whether in academia or in commerce, we are exiting the world in which our own arrogance determined our view of reality and entering a new era in which we will work under an assumption that we don’t know upfront how the world is constructed. We are trying to figure it all out.

Society is an organic whole. The same change happens at once in different places. Co-creation is a major trend in the marketplace toward the collaborative construction of brands, products and advertising content by the producers and the consumers. The impact of co-creation is dramatic: consumers develop new cultures around brands, while companies alter their rigid organizational principles to become more democratic. Academic disciplines are a lot like traditional corporate citadels: they “study” society and then claim an exclusive right to represent it by means of books, universities, museums and think tanks. One of these disciplines, archaeology, is responsible for the production of cultural heritage. Archaeology seems to be an unlikely place for a change to occur. However, as Archaeology Metamedia Lab at Stanford demonstrates, it has also started to embrace the spirit of co-creation. As Michael Shanks writes, “archaeologists and heritage managers have come to accept their responsibility to listen to stakeholder interests in history and the archaeological remains of the past.” One of the most unusual cases of collaboration between academic archaeologists and lay communities is the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Site in Turkey. The grandiose remains of the earliest urban center dated back to 9,000 YPB and the traces of an ancient feminine cult attracted the international Goddess movement. The Goddess feminist movement draws some inspiration from various archeological and anthropological findings claiming that many ancient societies were matriarchal. Director of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project, Stanford professor Ian Hodder, invited representatives of the Goddess movement to the site and solicited their interpretations of the findings. The Goddess groups went as far as setting up, with the help of UNESCO, a version of local crafts inspired by the findings. Reflexive archaeology that Hodder and Shanks advocate acknowledges that our interpretations of history are capable of determining our future.  New archaeology takes responsibility for the academic production of the past and opens the gates for the consumers to participate in the construction of their own cultural identity.