Anthropreneur

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.

In 2001, The Observer published an article by Ashley Alsup that advanced a thesis that America, or the U.S., is a brand like any other, and moreover a brand whose equity has declined in appeal and significance. (At the time of writing, Ashley was an American working for a British ad agency BBH. As of now, she lives in Britain and speaks with a British accent – which makes her British in a lot of ways – but works for an American ad agency, namely CP+B.) Since then, I’ve heard other advertising planners also talking about America as a brand.

This observation is ingenious, and the article is well-written and insightful in many a small nuance of argument and example. For a quick blogsec, I will take it up an anthropological alley, though.

Anthropology has long been fascinated with things ethnic and national. Ethnology and ethnography are often used interchangeably with anthropology. (In France, Sweden, Russia and other Slavic countries, ethnology/ethnologie/etnologia are words for sociocultural anthropology. “Anthropology” is more about physical and evolutionary anthropology there.) Among anthropologists ethnicity is seen in two ways: as a contextual construction and as a primordial unity. Constructivists presently vastly outnumber priomordialists.

Constructivists say: Ethnic groups, nations and the phenomenon of ethnicity have so far escaped a logical definition. Anthropologists know that ethnic groups exists, but they cannot put their finger on the objective properties that distinguish an ethnic group from a manufacturing guild, a religious sect, or a biological species. A common language, a geographical territory, shared sentiments, a common history, a distinctive culture, a myth of common origin, all seem to work in some cases but not in others. What seems to be constant is “ethnic consciousness” or an “ethnic identity.”

But then, priomordialists retort, how can we distinguish statements “I am American” from “I am a geek” or “I am Darth Vader”? The same problem of definition recurs. Or, alternatively, how can we understand ethnic violence, which oftentimes takes cosmic proportions, if the only solid fact is subjectiive perception?

Now, America is often used by constructivists as an example of a nation that lacks one of the constituents of a convincing logical definition, namely a myth of common origin. Indeed, America is a country of immigrants, and even American Indians were co-opted into this “nation” as “citizens” in 1924. But Ashley’s article raises a question whether America is a nation at all, or is it, more properly speaking, a brand among nations. Adam Morgan says about brands that they are “something that is created, rather than naturally occurring” (Eating the Big Fish, 1999, 27), but so does Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) about nations: they are “imagined communities.” Marketing theory can enrich theories of ethnicity through its awareness of the fact that brands are co-created by producers and consumers. Neither constructivists nor primordialists have realized that an ethnic group has its own producers and consumers (or interconnected and ethnicity-specific social roles), rather than stems from the imagination of a unitary but whimsical subject endowed with an ethnic identity or from a stable arrangement of language, culture and geography.

No surprise that democratic nations do not fight with each other (see Democratic peace theory), for they are not nations, they are brands and brands do not wage wars, they compete. But when a brand faces a nation or an ethnic group (sometimes called “a non-democratic state,” such as Hussein’s Iraq), it wakes up, resorts to violence and becomes a nation again. In the course of this metamorphosis, it may lose a bunch of loyal customers. But who cares.

Ethnicity is a matter of definition. True. But ethnicity can be is a matter of substitution, too. An order of objects interferes with an order of people, and vice versa. Ernest Gellner’s late and poorly-known article (“From kinship to ethnicity,” in Constructions Identitaires, Quebec, 1989) on ethnicity as a modern version of primitive or premodern kinship continues to fascinate me as it contains an uncanny and unfinished insight.

That’s why I talk about kinsumption.

I am still playing with words. But now I seek to understand what was the original problem of constructivism. David Schneider said, Kinship as a system of biological relationships is a “sheer nonsense.” Kinship is a symbolic system that exists solely in the minds of Euro-American anthropologists.

Enough has been written pro and con Schneider from the point of view of kinship studies. My response to Schneider comes from the other end. If kinship is a symbolic system, why did he still think that it is a construction of biological relationships? If brands are families, and their continuities are preserved through fashion, advertising and museums, why not to talk about them and leave kinship studies to their own devices? The relationship between modernity and the “post-modernists” is not that of temporal succession but of syncronic symbiosis: modernity’s blind spots are postmodernism’s blind spots, too.

Schneider once again exposes a bias and a tunnel vision: in the 1960s anthropologists only began to discover Euro-American cultures, and Schneider was firmly trapped in the old pseudo-contradictions of the descriptions of “primitive societies.” But at least once he got it right: “In short, kinship studies might profit by joining Mythologiques in backing up to the question of what sort of analogical systems people make out of whatever they make them out of, instead of assuming they make them out of genealogical kin” (Schneider & Boon 1974, 815).

Kinship systems are constructed in their own, “kinship,” way, while consumption systems are constructed in their own “consumption” way. These ways of constructing things are identical on the level of media and methodology, rather than content and substance.

This unity of media of cultural description is what I call kinsumption.