Anthropreneur

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.

With Miles Davis in mind, I went with family and friends to the Canary Islands and Spain for the Christmas break. A quick reconnaissance of the islands’ turbulent history and present (from Columbus’s journey to the sad destinies of modern illegal immigrants from Africa) have yielded many scattered observations (some courtesy of Calin Medianu).

The Canarians apparently have no docks between their boats in the marinas.

Their cars are short (hatchbacks are pervasive) and SUVs are rare. Because parking is tough. In Europe, car brands that are struggling in the U.S. (Kia, Hyundai, Isuzu, etc.) flourish. Toyotas are widely used as taxi cabs. Volkswagens show a varied product mix.

The Canarians believe gyms for adults are like playgrounds for children. They should be placed next to each other.

And in their Carrefours they sell shoes next to dairy products.

Some lawyers in Las Palmas who are conscious of their female gender introduced a grammatical innovation into the Spanish language – plural ABOGADAS is now as possible as traditional ABOGADOS.

Germans have colonized the southern part of Gran Canaria to the point of making the German language an inofficial second language next to Spanish (the natives complain that they ship sand from Sahara for their nudist beaches and refuse to support local economy by bringing food from home).

Whoever put together the exhibit of Guanche skulls at the Canarian Museum of Las Palmas confuses brachycephals with dolichocephals.

The Guanches went extinct in the 14th century as a result of Castillian conquest but their personal names, family names and place names (e.g., Tamaraceite) are still in vogue among modern Canarians. Guanches were Afroasiatic-speakers, hence relatives of the Berbers. Well, somehow my local Canarian friend looks like Zinedine Zidane and proudly displays an occipital ridge said to be a marker of North African populations. (Possibly a local racial legend.)

Sustainability is everywhere in practice: from the cave dwellings of the Guanches to early modern Catholic cathedrals built of local stone to modern wind turbines. No Priuses, though. And the aforementioned Germans are frowned upon.

Zara is pervasive – they invest their marketing budget not into advertising but into the building of new retail locations.

One of the tourist attractions in Mogan is … “The Sioux City” featuring cowboys and Indians. Why not Castillian rancheros and vanishing Guanches? Apparently authentic racial dramaturgy has to come from America, although Germans seem flood the Canary Islands and Indian reservations with equal enthusiasm.

In the summer of 2007, Gran Canaria suffered from the worst forest fire in its history (instigated by a forest ranger in protest against the decision not to renew his work contract). In late December we observed a peculiar fundraiser sitting in the middle of pedestrian Calle Mayor of Triana (the main shopping district in Las Palmas). Head-to-toe covered in ashes, he was leaning on a faux tree and was displaying photos of the damage (human homes and the unique Canarian flora was wiped off on 20,000 hectares) and inviting passer-bys to visit his website. Representing the family of a single mother Paloma with two small boys, he was protesting against bureaucratic redtape in distributing aide that the victims of the fire have been subjected to. The government seems to have used long-term environmental damage as a pretext not to deal with urgent human problems – the downside of any environmentalism.

A powerful scene – a combination of primordial and futuristic forms of semiotic expression: taking the role of a street pauper, the artist symbolically alluded to the fear of unemployment that forced the culprit to set the island in flames and to a uncanny kinship between the perpetrator and the victims; camping out on a street iconically depicted the actual refugees driven out of their permanent homes into public spaces such as sport pavillions; ashes masked the artist’s individuality and made him look like a generic human being; the artist used his own body as a billboard reinforcing the pedestrian (pre- and anti-automotive) cobblestone nature of the street; the fundraiser’s self-positioning in the middle of a shopping effervescence cast a dual perspective on consumption: on the one hand, it was a critique of commodity fetishism and bureaucratic management from the point of view of the “wretched of the earth”; on the other hand, it contained a hope that capitalism generates enough wealth to safeguard humans against their traditional enemies, natural disasters. The web address (http://www.palomademontemayor.blogspot.com) scribbled on a sheet of paper and duct taped to a trash can invited visitors into the personal stories of displacement. Poverty has now all the power of the world wide web to spread the word, share knowledge, aggregate money and transcend local communities.

The Sephardic Museum in Toledo (the third museum of Jewish culture after Amsterdam and Miami ones that I chanced upon) has an archaeological dig on-site. I thought it was an interesting case of combing production (dig) and comsumption (museum) in a single location, a kind of reversal to domestic production, very appropriate for a representation of a medieval culture.

I grabbed a museum newsletter Noticias Museo Sefardi carefully reporting on all the nitty-gritty Jewish sightings and activities in Europe (including a Fredian exhibit in Vienna; interestingly enough, Freud once fearful of having psychoanalysis stigmatized as “Jewish science” is now being increasingly re-appropriated by the Jews as a Jewish scholar). Its format and content reminded me strongly of the European Review of Native American Studies (published by Christian Feest in Vienna). American Indians and Jews form two types of European diasporas – the former virtual, romantic and celebrated, the latter – physical and tormented.

The narrow streets of Toledo, another medieval legacy, are very suitable for Segways and the ubiquitous Japanese tourists who in this case were a group of young female students.