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.

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.