Anthropreneur

Wings of the Rockies Air and Space Museum in eastern Denver is a hangar full of military airplanes and their 24-cylinder engines. Run by volonteers, who fight for every dollar they can make off of entrance fees and merchandise and for every second of your time, the museum nevertheless is full of pride and passion. An elite sphere of life, air-and-space industry is responsible for a number of consumer innovations. The museum prides on first making it possible to accomplish a round-the-world flight in only 37 hours and then bringing to people’s homes GPS, computer chips and space blankets. A pair of Ray-Ban aviators from 1937 constitutes one of the iconic items of pop culture that can be seen on U.S. generals as well as on pow-wow dancers. I was suprised not to find WD-40 among the

examples. (Since 1953, this magic lubricant developed for the NASA achieved almost 100% awareness among the consumers, while yielding niche markers such as sailing and the military to more specilaized products such as McLube, PB Blaster, etc.) In Supercapitalism, Robert Reich documents the process by which

technological innovations originally developed for the needs of the military and NASA poured into the consumer market in the 1970s. Internet was one of them. (I remember Gene Parta of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe recalling that there was an e-mail system installed between the divisions of this Cold War propaganda radio station in the 1980s, long before e-mail became a consumer product.) The importance of the collapse of silos between the military and commercial departments for the marketplace is hard to overestimate, for it resulted in the unprecedented empowerment of the consumer against the employee and the disintegration of the traditional corporation and the trade-union. Swiss Army knife, aviator jacket, camo style backpacks, pants and jackets, Commander’s watch (komandirskie chasy) in Russia among others, are some of the more supreficial retail examples of military chic.

I’ve come across an interesting page from an Indiana University Anthropology professor, Richard Wilk. Wilk collects instances of Western consumer goods in tribal contexts, tawdry replicas of indigenous art, idiotic products catering to silly human desires and preposterous ads. As a person who has experience working in both museums and ad agencies, I can appreciate the crossover between the two. There’s something toxic about these products, no matter what materials they are made of. A ridiculous ad that refuses to disintegrate in public consciousness, a pair of artificial testicles for a dog that will forever remain in a mental landfield, and a Singapore-made “True American Taste” McCoffee that screams phony. What do museums preserve: something good and fragile that we, as humans, are afraid to lose, or something utterly caustic that we’re upset about, want to keep under our control and give it at least a semblance of authenticity? What do advertising agencies promote: a great product that people absolutely need to have around (but haven’t they already found out about it from friends?) or a poor product that needs to be salvaged from the wrath of God?

Richard Wilk’s sphere of academic interest encompasses Mesoamerica, American Southwest, economic anthropology, media studies, human ecology and consumer culture.

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.

People share with goods the fundamental quality: both people and goods tend to circulate. Anthropologists have a history of describing tribal societies in which children circulate between households as if they were goods. Inuits and Melanesians are now especially famous for that. Oftentimes a newly-born is named after a recently deceased relative or neighbor, takes on his soul and status and grows up living in a new house with a new set of parents. The child may address them as ‘son’, ‘daughter’, ‘younger brother’ or ‘younger sister’ depending on the relationship his deceased namesake had with them during his life. These bizarre practices have been recorded among ethnic groups as far apart as the Khoisans in southern Africa, the Dravidians in India, and the Ob-Ugrians in western Siberia.

Anthropologists have developed a sense that tribal, or “cold,” societies produce, exchange, distribute and consume (sometimes literally as ritual food) people/persons/bodies/souls/names/kin terms, while industrial, or “hot,” societies do exactly the same thing to goods and symbolic signs. Meillassoux, Godelier and other French Marxists and their American sympathizers (think of Terry Turner) summarized human evolution as a transition from “systems of reproduction” to “systems of production.” The phenomenon of adoption has been a recalcitrant aspect of kinship theory, for it baffled both positivists (why would there a need arise for extensive networks of adoption if genealogical connections are at least as good in expanding one’s universe of kin?) and constructivists (if people openly construct kinship, what is there to demystify and denaturalize?). Do people adopt children (and enter in other relations of ritual/fictive kinship) in imitation of existing genealogical bonds and as a way to fill in genealogical gaps (kinship), or in an attempt to cope with the constant emergence of new generations and new phenotypes (production)?

Once again we find that kinship and economics are mysteriously related.

In the 1980-1990s, Western companies began to capitalize on the disparities in labor prices and buying power between the First World and the Third World. Nike, Inc. developed a new business model that involved the outsourcing of the production of sneakers and soccerballs to Indian, Pakistani or Southeast Asian teens. Saving millions on the production end, Nike could then splurge on marketing in the U.S. Around the same time, Western Europe and the U.S. experienced an explosion in transnational adoption, with the Swedes as trailblazers in this new intercountry adoption movement. Indian, Pakistani, Southeast Asia, Chinese and Russian kids found new homes in Stockholm, for the Swedish government declared adoption a “social responsibility.”

Over the past 20 years adoption has developed its own global marketplace supported by a network of international organizations and legal statutes. Or do I have the right to apply the term “marketplace” to the process of giving a biological child as a gift to foreign parents, on the one hand, and donating money to a foster institution in gratitude for its services in locating and negotiating the transfer, on the other? Does Angelina Jolie expand the bounds of materialism and consumerism by “shopping” for kids in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Vietnam, or does she fulfill the ancient human desire to think in terms of “human” (think of Lewis Henry Morgan) rather than “nuclear” family?

Or, note another intriguing similarity: mass customization, consumer-generated content, co-creation are all equally recent business and management trends that invite the consumer to participate in the production of goods. At the dawn of writing, every book was handwritten and unique (there are very few of those left in national libraries and museums). The Gutenberg revolution allowed people to generate an unlimited number of book copies. Now Google digitizes those very books that Johannes Gutenberg brought into our possession. All we need is a file, or a web link.

These days the producer supplies the market with bare ingredients, oftentimes giving you just a digital file or a piece of software from which you, the consumer, can generate a product the way you like it. As Europe and the U.S. were moving into Information Age, they discovered the gene, and now we understand ourselves increasingly as scripts to enact rather than as finished fruits of nature. With transnational adoption, the situation seems to be similar: biological parents offer “raw” human material, uniquely characterized by such phenotypic and geographical features as ethnicity, race, gender, age and locality, and it is up to the First World adoptive parents to raise these children as personalities and citizens.

Or, think about the phenomenon of European re-creation of American Indian cultures from books and movies. I remember watching a Bulgarian youth prancing in an Indian warbonnet in front of a mirrot, waiting for his friend to take us to a powwow. “Mom, do I look like Indian?” he yelled across the hallway. “Sure, son, as long as your mother is one” was his mother’s response. The consumption of American Indian cultures leads to “reverse transcultural adoption”: for it is the self-conscious choice of European men and women that challenges the traditional authority of their biological parents, rather than the solicitation on the part of a foreign couple.

Culture induces massive tectonic shifts in society. Surprisingly they rarely come in isolation from each other, and such seemingly disconnected spheres of life as transcultural adoption, customization, digitization, and genetic engineering are affected by the very same process of adding new codes and then enacting their scripts.

Finally, after exactly a year of working at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, I’m entering the fields of global blogging. Ploughing my way through the myriads of brands my illustrious agency has amased, I finally achieved some level of clarity between the order of theory and the order of practice. Time to blog…

And by way of kicking off my thinking on advertising, marketing, business and consumption, I decided to coin another new term. Before it was gignetics, now it is kinsumption.

Kinsumption, ain’t it something? This is what happens when an academic anthropologist, with a background in evolutionary, sociocultural, linguistic and other kinds of research, moves into the private sector. At some point Australian anthropologists invented the term “kintax,” instead of syntax, to refer to the propensity of Australian aboriginal languages to bend grammar to reflect social structure. So, I guess I am not alone here.

But seriously, what am I talking about here? I was inspired by the classic volume by Grant McCracken entitled “Culture and Consumption I,” which documents how individualism and consumption were born in early modern Western Europe out of the traditional concern with “family status.” Remember? The original function of objects in European culture was to increase family status and preserve continuity between ancestors and descendants. Patina on an object was an “icon” that signified the duration of the family. Then something happened, and Europeans started to shop for new commodities instead of inheriting timeless artifacts. Fashion came to replace patina.

The argument itself has a patina on it. Most famously, in the 19th century the British legal historian, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, advanced a theory according to which European societies evolved from status (kinship status, status obtained at birth) to contract.

But back to ‘Culture and Consumption I.” As a result of the collapse of the original family estate system, a whole new order of cultural meanings came into being. Advertising and fashion industries evolved as main mediators between culture and material objects (or between culture and production).

Complementing Grant, I would add museums here as well. Museums emerged with modernity. If fashion is about novelty, museums are about antiquity, and advertising is about currency. The continuity between past, present and future has therefore remained intact. An object leaves the hands of a designer, makes a pause in an ad agency and achieves immortality in the hands of a curator. The collapse of one “kinship” order leads to the creation of another kinship order. Where are the noble families in this new order of consumption? Brands are these families. And iconic products (Harley Davidson motorcycles, pardon my banality) continue to be valued for their symbolic patina.

That’s what I mean by kinsumption.