Anthropreneur

There are two ways of nominally signaling a crossover between two academic disciplines or spheres of life. One way is to mechanically juxtapose two terms. Example: neuromarketing (neurology + marketing). The other one is to seamlessly weave one word into the other. Example: kinsumption.

Neuromarketing is the new buzz in the marketing and business circles these days. Some people adore the baby and wish it grows fast, others want it gone.

These days neuromarketing exists in labs and in a few research-and-consulting shops such as Neurofocus in Berkeley founded by A. K. Pradeep. Neurofocus studies brainwaves, uses eye-tracking devices and skin-response meters to measure the viewer’s response to TV commercials. Mya Frazer from AdAge initiated a recent flurry of blogs by presenting expert opinions against neuromarketing. Although some neuromarketing tools (such as electroencephalography) are inexpensive and portable, many say that it does not yield useful results, it is intrusive, and it is naive. John Winsor points out that culture (hybrid cars in Boulder vs. trucks in Cody) is a better predictor of the consumer’s behavior and his response to advertising. Mark Earls echoes him by saying that “the major influence on human behavior is other people (real or virtual, perceived or imagined) and not the volition of the individual agent.”

For a sociocultural anthropologist, this debate is painfully familiar. Academics have been waging wars over nature vs. culture for decades. Between 1999 and 2007, my alma mater, Stanford University, used to have two departments of anthropology: Anthropological Sciences would spin an anthropology off genes, the brain and the environment, while Cultural and Social Anthropology would derive its interpretations from culture, creativity and political economy. This year Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences put an end to this short-lived institutional sepraration and reunited the two warring camps into a single Department of Anthropology. Now it has a rich and fine texture.

For some companies, the real goal is devising a perfect consumer, the one whose brain is pre-wired to respond positively to an ad and make the body storm off to the mall. For other companies, designing a perfect product is key. On the one side of the spectrum we have labs like Neurofocus, on the other creative boutiques such as Fahrenheit 212, Ideo, Insight, Ziba Design who use a trial-and-error approach to help companies design products that will incorporate cultural and consumer insight right away. I predict that product design will gain more success in the marketplace but brain design will not go away for a simple reason that brain matters. While it is true that we are influenced by “others,” or by “culture” around us, those others are specific to the individual. People live their lives enveloped in very specific (sometimes unique, but usually partially shared) networks of significant others. “Friends and family” is an abstraction. “My friends” and “my family” are the real thing. The brain as a highly-complex interactive organ promises access to these microsocial circles that are eventually responsible for who each one of us is. (Academics call this process “subjectivation,” “subjectification,” or “individualization.”)

Brain hemispheres are asymmetrical: the left hemisphere controls logic and science, the right hemisphere language and art. In our demographic samples there are men and women, older people and younger people, but also left-brained and right-brained people. All these binaries are equally natural and cultural. A left-brained person will solve a puzzle even if the puzzle makes no sense in the real world. A right-brained person will hardly be able to think in abstract terms but he will wisely reject an absurd puzzle. Culture, animate and inanimate nature (think of chirality in chrystallography) are all profoundly affected by these asymmetries. Brain asymmetries influence dexterity and facial structure. (That’s why brands are endorsed by strictly symmetrical celebrities and not by people whose faces are disfigured by the Down syndrome.) The fact that there are companies who try to design brains vs. companies who work on designing products is an immediate confirmation of it. Like everywhere else, symmetry and balance is a highly desirable state of mind.

Kinsumption is about interconnectedness, balance, and peace between holistic and linear perspectives.

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.

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.