Anthropreneur

Anthropology often grows in unexpected places. This time around, Melissa Febos, the author of Whip Smart and an ex-dominatrix, declared herself a “cultural anthropologist.” While in college, Melissa worked in a S/M dungeon for three years and her book is a gripping memoir of her experiences being a trusted partner for the lawyers, bankers, rabbis and bus drivers who have a secret passion for being sexually dominated (without engaging in real sex). Without conducting formal participant observation but collecting rich memories fueled by exhilaration and a good pay, she emerged from an exotic world carefully tucked away from the public eye to write a memoir full of keen cultural, social and psychological insights. This one I like a lot:

“For many, it was a very private experience. They were often led to the dungeon by their own desires and fantasies — ones that they didn’t feel safe or brave enough to explore or voice in their personal lives. The dungeon felt like a safe haven, their domme a trusted person with whom to explore their obsessions. I think even the fact of it being a business transaction lent them some feeling of safety. It is an emotionally vulnerable experience to divulge your secret desires to someone. That it was our job to hear about such things was comforting on some level. I never made them feel strange or wrong for having their desires, and I was never shocked. Or on the rare occasions that I was, I certainly never acted shocked. I saw a lot of clients attain more self-acceptance through the experience. I certainly did myself.”

Melissa’s “anthropological” experience was fully immersive, reciprocal, transcultural and relational. She ended up on the fringe of society, enjoyed every bit of it and worked back to the boring but promising mainstream. Her journey was not driven by academic curiosity and did not involve the typical anthropological sublimation of the forbidden desire to “go native” into a “thick description” of a culture but by a deep social and psychological context which gives Melissa’s narrative the authenticity and nativity many academic ethnographies do not have. Actually, Whip Smart reminds me not so much of anthropology but of interpretative sociology as exemplified by Howard Becker‘s experience working as a real dance musician and subsequently writing Outsiders.

Through Cubemate‘s guiding hand, I came across Watson Phillips Norman‘s Todd Norman’s thoughts on planning and creativity. The gist of the article is that people like one double first from Oxford in physics and mathematics are bad planners because they’re too smart, while humble and empathetic enthusiasts of pop culture and media who occupy a grey zone between creativity and ignorance are great planners because they are dumb. A good test of this hypothesis would involve a generation of systematic hiring of Ph.D.-carrying anthropologists (oddly omitted by Todd), archaeologists (understandably omitted by Todd), sociologists, psychologists and other social scientists for planning positions around the globe and an improved curriculum for these young professionals that would include applied training for product design, advertsing, PR and business strategy consultancy. Anecdotal cases of Nobel laureauts not being able to establish a rapport with an art director are hardly convincing. Alternatively, in order to fully exploit their teams of planners and not relegate them to self-deprecating advisors to all-powerful creatives, ad agencies should start working with the clients and the consumers at an earlier stage in the evolution of the relationship between the latter two. Product innovation, business strategy, field research into corporate and consumer culture are just the few trends that may help “planners” find their unique identity, an identity rooted not in imagination and not in rationality (both of these remain within the “known”) but in the discovery of the “unknown” about human culture and behavior. That’s how originally anthropology built its brand equity.

I attached a photo of a pen-as-toothbrush that I’ve picked up at a dentist office for a reason. This mutant is, in my opinion, a symbol of what a planner, a strategist, and an applied anthropologist is. He has to be able to inspire creatives and to remain detached from their creative process just to let it flow naturally and not be bummed by a “wrong course.” But on the other end, he has to be able to author a brand/business strategy, a cultural analysis of a political campaign, a semiotic analysis of old ads, and a case study of an ad campaign that he’s just let go of in order to recapture it later on a new level of execution. Finally he should be prepared to write a book of his own experiences doing all that. There’s definitely a grain of truth in Todd’s article, and a good balance of hardcore analytics with serendipity makes a great planner, but the wonderful workings of this mechanism still need to be explicated in order to salvage Todd’s thoughts from falling into a grey zone between banality and failure.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.