Anthropreneur

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.

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.