In Dallas, on the weekend, I talked to a woman who spoke good but accented English.  She told me that spoke an aboriginal language most of her childhood. She didn’t learn English till she was about 10 years old.  She learned it from the women who came to live with the family and the 13 kids after her mother fell sick.

She didn’t have a chance to use her English outside the community until some years later.  She and her brother went in to Tucson to buy the hose and the bucket they needed to build an outdoor shower.

She went to the hardware store and placed her order.  The person behind the counter looked at her and raised his hands in the air, the sign of incomprehension.  So she tried again: "can you sell me a bucket and a hose?" She got the same reaction. 

Now she said, “What is the matter with this guy? Doesn’t he speak English?”

The man beside her looked at her with surprise and said, “Lady, you’re speaking Spanish.”

If you want to survey the experimental margin of our culture, chances are you don’t go to Dallas, Texas. Austin, with its aggressive food and film communities, maybe. But chances are you’ll stay clear of Texas altogether. It’s too large to be subtle, too monolithic to be interesting. I mean this is a place that worships football.

But we are learning that a number of unlikely places can play sunken ship—not the dead space that environments warned us against but a place diverse species congregate and multiply. Dallas might, I think, be one of those places.

My first clue was the galleria attached to my hotel. Extravagantly upscale shops all around and at the center of everything, a skating rink.  Witty!  In a land where summer temperature are measured in three digits, this is what “oasis” looks like. 

My second clue: one of the shops in the Galleria has a shoe store called Gregory’s that has devoted one window to the work of Ed Hardy: conventional baseball caps, heavily customized and each of them apparently unique.  One of them showed a skull and cross bones and the legend: “love kills slowly.”  I’m not sure who would wear this or where.  It’s too expensive and dramatic for private use.  So you wear it publicly—with a spouse? With a friend?  By yourself? It’s a little Darwinian possibly, but could we suppose this hat tells us there must be a time and a place where it can be worn and a group who would appreciate it? 

The third clue was the music in the elevator of my hotel, a Westin. Brazilian and interesting, I think, but out of my range. To be fair, my range is not very broad, but this is the first time the music in a hotel elevator has exceeded it.  (Yeah, I know. It is possible that I have finally achieved a complete cultural senescence.  Not recognizing elevator music, that would have to be the first symptom.) 

The fourth clue: Central Market, a food retail operation so aggressive that it makes Whole Foods and Trader Joes look completely pedestrian.  The place was packed with consumers, with variety (over 20 kinds of salsa), with experiments, free samples, exotics foodstuffs I did not recognize, and brands I have never heard of.  The only thing that was not jammed was the check out line.  What a novel idea. Dallas is a place with lots of experiments in the restaurant and food world.  The local notion is that “if you can make it in Dallas, you can make it anywhere.”

Some sunken ships works best when there is one very large, public, and well defined idea in place. As long as this remains in place, as an apparent consensus, the thing everyone KNOWS about Dallas, then everyone can go off and do whatever the hell they want.  And this might be the strategy by which Dallas makes itself more various and more interesting than a place like Austin with its self conscious feeling for the alternative.

This could be one of those cunning identity plays in which the background and foreground are switched.  (A Canadian example: Quebec claims to be a society with one language and culture, but in fact everyone there is bilingual. In the rest of Canada: a great show is made of being bilingual but in fact most everyone is monolingual.)  In this case: Austin is putatively experimental and ends up being a relatively small universe of well policed options while Dallas claims to be narrow and monolithic when it is in fact free wheeling and multiple.

A last note: I had dinner on Saturday with every thinking person’s notion of a power couple: Virginia and Steve Postrel.  I had just finished 7 hours of interviewing so I was pretty sure that my head was going to explode on several occasions.  But I came away with this conclusion. Every business school has the same problem: how to give the MBA student a cultural literacy and the strategic sophistication needed to act on it. I mean some of these kids are going to have to fight the cola wars, decide how Kroger should fight the Central Market threat, find a way to make design a standard part of the Detroit automotive product, or think about the difference between Dallas and Austin.  The b-school curriculum is way under weight on this one.   One way to solve this problem: hire the Postrels and give them the Coca-Cola, Kroger, General Motors Power Couple Professorship. 

(posted from Atlanta)

Yesterday, the Pope warned against "DIY" religion. The BBC represented it this way:

The Pope told the crowds there were dangers in people finding their own religious routes.

"If it is pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product," he said.

 "People choose what they like, and some are even able to make a profit from it.

 "But religion constructed on a ‘do-it-yourself’ basis cannot ultimately help us," he said.

"Help people to discover the true star which points out the way to us: Jesus Christ."

I understand that in matters of religious belief and doctrine, the correct interpretation is whatever authorities say it is. There is no such thing as a sensible or strategic approach. Religious leaders are obliged to represent the will of God as this has been revealed to them. 

Still, the Catholic Church has from time to time done the strategic thing rather than the orthodox one. Keith Thomas documented one historical moment of this accommodation and the adjustments were extraordinary and thoroughgoing. 

Ironically, the Pope has put his finger not just on any feature of contemporary culture when he objects to “DIY religion.” No, he has managed, no doubt in his wisdom, to identify what is perhaps the single most important feature of contemporary religiosity. 

It’s a pity then that he insists on using this particular language. To use "DYI" makes religious belief sound like a home improvement project, regrouting the bathroom, say, or building a new deck out back. (And the Pope would diminish still further by attributing a profit motive.) But it is wrong to think of the DYI aspect of our culture as self indulgent, giddily wrong headed or opportunistic. This is to miss the anthropological point, and to underestimate how formidable is DYI as a competitor for even faithful hearts and minds. 

How much better it would have been if the Pope has used a term like “chosen religiosity.” In our culture, the act of commitment (to marriage, to identity, to commitment of many kinds) almost always now begins with an act of choice. We are a culture that has moved from assignment to choice in virtually all the dimensions of personal belief. Certainly, there was a time when people were Democrats because, and so to honor the fact that, their parents were. But now this idea is unthinkable. People choose. It’s not doctrine that is obligatory. It’s choice that is. This is what it is to be a culture devoted to individualism. More simply, every one of us is more or less entirely DIY.

I understand that choice is precisely what the Reformation was for, and that the Protestant churches may be seen as so many deliberate variations on how much freedom of choice the individual may exercise. But there must be a way of making room for choice within approved options, say. Or, declaring some things open to choice (yes, “indifferent”) as long as the fundamentals are honored. The alternative is to insist that the Church knows better than the individual even when the individual is prepared, accustomed, and in many cases obliged to decide for themselves. 

References

Anon. 2005. Pope warns against ‘DIY’ religion.  BBC. here.

Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Penguin. 

I spend the day at Northwestern, giving a paper to the Marketing department. I was talking about reading trends. I have worked up a new model for doing this, borrowing heavily from Complexity theory and the work of Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute.   

I blew by one opening slide called “trends trending upward.” The point of this slide is to note in passing, and much too summarily, that the dynamism of consumer taste and preference appears to be growing.  

Here’s the slide as I presented it.  

1. trend sensitivity is up: Russian glasses

2. more trends at work: end of big slow breakers

3. producing stations more numerous (NY, LA, London, Paris to Atlanta & Iceland)

4. end of mass society: fragmentation of taste

5. trends penetrating new sectors: paint at the hardware store

6. trends peak faster

7. so far the corporation plays catch up

8. what happens when corporations become fully engaged?

Most of these are pretty transparent. The “Russian glasses” notion come from the experience of a friend of mine who examined the possibility of selling prescription glasses in the 2^nd and 3^rd world, only to discover that Russian visitors are really quite well informed about that fashions in glasses. We used to be able to take advantage of a “back water” effect.  That’s gone.

Point two was about the old days when we had plenty of time to spot new trends and to watch them roll through the marketplace. Now it is closer to a perfect storm, with several trends colliding with sometimes unpredictable results.

Point three noted the problem of how many centers can now participate in cultural innovation. At one time it was enough to keep an eye on NY, LA, London and Paris because innovators else would find themselves shut out by the gatekeepers. Now we know that innovators can happen even in Iceland.  This means we must monitor more widely and the changes that we will miss something (and suffer the blind side hit) have gone up.  

Point four is clear enough, as is point five.   A good way to make point five, I find, is to note that trends have penetrating even that bastion of function and pragmatism, the hardware store.  Our great grandfathers would be astonished to find that paint colors in hardware stores now change routinely.

Point six says simply that trends move more quickly. And this is just about the only reason I think to feel good about the amount of money we pay our cultural icons.  Their moment upon the stage of celebrity can be very brief indeed.

Points seven and eight suggests that as it stands the corporate world is usually playing a game of catch up, often hanging onto trends by their fingernails.  This won’t last long. In the next decade we will see corporations solve the trend watch as they have solved every other problem.  And once this happens, our dynamism will be redoubled. Once corporations are full participants in the trend game, we will set off in a cultural adventure that will be pretty darn astonishing.

This is another way of saying that as people like me create models to track and predict change, the corporation will get better at creating this change.  And then the model building will have to begin again. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  In Press: 2006.  Flock and Flow: tracking consumer taste and preference in a dynamic marketplace.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

I was in Santa Monica last week doing ethnographic work for a client. In the course of an interview, one of my respondents said, “it’s all about attitude.”

He was commenting on suits. I was wearing one. He was not. He was telling me Californians don’t need suits to make an impression. They wear attitude.

CA has a symbolic economy very different from CT. (Break out the Pulitzers! Anthropologist reports breakthrough finding: CT and CA not the same!)

One of the important differences is that there is a very well marked elite in this system. At the top of the hierarchy sits anyone who is “recognizable.” This category sorts very finely, from the extraordinarily famous (Brad Pitt) to a face you remember from TV (“wasn’t he on that X-Files episode, the one where…”). In this world, merely having a face that has been seen before puts you in a special club and the first category…even if it leaves you a long, long way from Brad Pitt.

The second category is made up of people who might well be a very big sneeze in the larger scheme of things. They could be producers, power brokers, star makers, even. This group needs to let you know that they may not be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean they are obscure. Yes, sometimes membership is declared by an “S” class Mercedes but the rest of the time it is attitude that sends the message that this is someone to be reckoned with.

The third category is made up of people who are not players in the game. They are ordinary people with no status card to play. The good news? We, the witless bystander, don’t know that. The trick here is to summon enough attitude to create a shadow of a doubt.  We should look upon them and say, “wow, this guy must really be something.  He carries himself like Napoleon.”

The fourth category is people who cannot sell the lie. These are people working in restaurants or Starbucks.  There is no shadow of a doubt. This person is not famous and they are not powerful. Some of these people cultivate the anti-attitude. They cultivate pure self possession. They carry themselves with that air that says, “I don’t need your admiration, I have my own.”  Now, some part of us knows that these people would trade this self possession for even a little stardom without a second thought.  But we are nevertheless impressed. To be this close to the Hollywood game and to summon a counterweight celebrity, a self constructed stardom, this is not easy.  Some part of us is impressed by the sheer acting talent on display and we are likely to mutter, “this kid should be in pictures.”

The fifth category is people who want you to know that they despise the star system and the hierarchy it creates.  How do they do this?  You guessed it.  Attitude!  They use attitude to say that they don’t care about Hollywood or stardom, that they are glad that they are not famous, glad, get it, glad! Now attitude sends a new message altogether: f*ck you, buddy.  I’m a Goth and in that world, I’m a God.” 

Hmm, let’s review. It is all about attitude.