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.

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.

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.

Last night, my wife and I watched for the second time Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). I didn’t want to watch it the first time around because I was fed up with Da Ali G Show; I had mixed reaction when I finally watched it; but now I think I am ready to identify what exactly this movie means to me. I’ve just realized how uncompromisingly anti-American the movie is. Maybe it became obvious to others right away, but I’ve been confused by the ostensibly humorous genre of the movie. Tantalizing and disconcerting, it kept me distracted from the main theme: the American jingoism of the rodeo arena, the bulletproof arrogance of the mortgage brokers, the racism and sexism of the drunken frat boys, the morbid elitism of the “dinner ethics” couples, the religious fakery of Pentecostal preachers, porn magazines and DVDs, shallow and self-absorbed celebrities all constitute the picture of the U.S. possessed by every Muslim fundamentalist in the Middle East. Sacha Baron Cohen portaryed the U.S. as an evil country. He is a suicide comedian: imbued with the noble hatred for the U.S., he travels across the country wrapped up in scenarios intended to explode every bulwark of American sinfulness. Cohen comes from an observant Jewish family, he is a partisan of the Israeli cause, and he apparently hates America with a passion of a suicide bomber. His weapon is humor. He risks to be beaten up, apprehended or killed every time he irreverently breaks social conventions. His movie is a blockbuster in the U.S. No underground Muslim fundamentalist group has the resources to deliver its anti-American statement through such an all-American media as cinematography and earn an Oscar nomination. It feels illogical that a British comedian with an explicit Zionist agenda ventriloquizes a radical Muslim critique of the country that has unswervingly supported Israel in its quest for sovereignty amidst a sea of Arabs. Or maybe we should keep Zionism and radical Judaism distinct: pro-Americanism is a secular political crutch aimed at preserving Israel’s security in the region, while radical Judaism, drawing on the same Semitic source as radical Islam, is inherently oppositional to the American way of life? The separation of secular and religious power in Israel (in contrast to the subordination of the secular sphere to the religious authority in most Arabic countries) allows it to relate to the U.S. in two different ways – through political solidarity and through spiritual dismissal.

In this case, what’s Borat‘s genre? Mockumentary? An imitation of a documentary for the sake of achieving a comic effect? More likely, it’s a “maskumentary,” namely a documentary conveying, releasing and perpetuating a deep ethnic, cultural, religious tension packaged as a humorous flick. This duplicity may explain the tremendous sucesss of Borat: the market favors products that contain a contradiction within themselves.