Archive for October, 2008
Small talk, Ziva and art: more thoughts on ‘culture above’ and ‘culture below’
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When I was in Charlotte last week, I noticed my taxi driver had a copy of Common American Phrases in Everyday Contexts: a detailed guide to real-life conversation and small talk. I paged through it on the way to the airport and thought, "this is a book I have to have." It came today from Amazon. Here are a couple of outtakes.
Let's call this the Ziva effect, after the character on NCIS. Trained Israeli assassin, Ziva is smart, beautiful and dangerous, but she always gets the little phrases wrong. She retrieves them from their familarity.
Noise in the signal
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Last night on The Mentalist, the police were interviewing a suspect and the suspect was complaining.
He says (something like),
“When you weigh what I do, women don’t even notice you. I’m just not a good looking guy.”
One of the detectives (Tim Kang) says (something like),
“That’s not true. If you went on a diet that was low on fat and rich on protein, you’d look completely different.”
And he says it earnestly. Obviously, the detective a) had thought about this sort of thing a lot, and b) felt he had to share.
The chief detective (Robin Tunney) smiles a little smile. She is charmed.
And we’re charmed too. So far, this has been a grueling interrogation, the police humorless and unrelenting, the suspect openly scornful of their authority. For the detective to hold forth in this way goes against the grain of the event, the script that informs every interrogation, and the role the detective has played in this interview so far.
A couple of days ago, I was commenting on the dialog in a recent episode of Life On Mars. A detective (Michael Imperioli) has offered what he thinks is an analogy, and conversation then turns on what an analogy is. I don’t remember conversations of this kind happening on The Rockford Files. In fact, I think we watched the Rockford Files with the implicit promise that we were never going to hear the word “analogy” or watch characters break from character.
Dialog in the Rockford Files had a job to do: move the plot along. If necessary, it could provide emergency service. If things got muddy, if the plot was unclear, dialog would step in and offer exposition. As in, “So you’re saying the butler did it!” Remarks were never “stray,” dialog didn’t wander. Philosophical speculation and idle advice was not forthcoming.
The police procedural has been with us for the beginning of recorded history. (The cave paintings in the south of France? Obviously an equine chase scene.) And now it’s on the rise. CBS owes its current success to the fact that it is all about the procedural.
But notice that this sort of dialog signals, or may signal, that something is trying to tunnel out of the procedural. In this the most formulaic of the TV shows, there are stray remarks and wandering dialog everywhere. And we are charmed.
Of course, this might be a kind of cultural gilding. Everyone party the police procedural is better than the form. The producer, the writers, the actors, all have skills and sophistication the Rockford team could not dream of. So, inevitably, we are going to see a high caliber of work “leaking” out of the prime time TV. How could it not?
Or maybe interesting dialog is something like the crouton in a Caesar salad, there merely to add variety, texture, novelty. It’s not really essential, but it adds something to the pleasure of the programming.
But there’s another possibility: that even a form as well defined as the police procedure is evolving out of its traditional tough talk form.
A new blog compendium
Posted by: | CommentsThere's a new blog compendium here at THIS BLOG. You can see it's "cover" to the right of this post.
This compendium collects about 45 posts on being anthropologist for hire. It's intended for those who might like to make anthropology their vocation and avocation.
Click on the line that begins "Download…" and you will go to a PDF that will in turn serve as a jumping off point. You come back to this PDF by hitting the RETURN button on your browser.
Hope you like it.
click here
Posted by: | CommentsThis blog compendium is meant to show you how to be an anthropologist for hire.
Anthropology can be your vocation and avocation . You can do it by day…for clients. And you can do it by night…for yourself. At night, you are an anthropologist "without portfolio." You are working on your own projects…by your own lights…for your own purposes. (My consulting work has funded 8 books and this blog.)
Click on any rectangle to go to the post.
Best,
Grant
Finding joy in a joyless economy
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Yesterday, I offered a couple of thoughts on what consumers do in a recession. They cease surging, I argued, and started dwelling. By "dwelling" I mean the metaphor, not the literal activity.
But in fact the pun is apt. When consumers slow down and begin to concentrate on the here and now, the what and the where of their activity is often the home. Dwelling is what consumers do instead of buying.
And in a sense this reverses the Scitovsky effect. You will remember Scitovsky's book The Joyless Economy and his argument that the trouble with a consumer society is that the pleasure of ownership soon degrades into mere comfort. It's not long before we take our new possessions for granted.
What the consumer does in a down economy is roll back the Scitovsky effect. We begin to treasure things. We re-engineer the comfort to get back to pleasure. We begin to savor things again.
One of the things we especially savor is the home. Home, and hearth and heart, this becomes the new geographical center of our lives.
Some brands have always taken an interest in home. Ikea is one of these. Here's a lovely little ad that captures the tone of dwelling creativity and it may well work a path for future marketing.
References Scitovsky, Tibor. 1976. The Joyless Economy. New York: Basic Books
See the Ikea campaign here.
For another Ikea campaign, see a brilliant piece of work by Max Hattler for Beattie McGuinness Bungay here. (The homeyness offers up lots of creative options.)
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Katie Rook again for the conversation in which the aptness Scitovsky notion occurred to me and to Edward Cotton for telling me about the Ikea campaign.
Credits for the second spot Director – Max Hattler Client – IKEA Production Company – Bermuda Shorts Producer – Lisa Hill Agency – Beattie McGuinness Bungay Creatives – Trevor Beattie & Simon Bere Agency Producer – Jane Oak
What consumers do in a downturn
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Roughly speaking, consumers have two modalities: surging and dwelling.
In the surging modality, consumers have momentum. We have a vivid sense of forward motion. Life is getting better. Each purchase is an improvement onthe last one. Clothes change with fashion. The material world teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement. We look ahead constantly, keeping one foot in the present, putting one in the future. The good life is America is always a better life. That’s the fundamental promise of the consumer society.
In the dwelling modality, the consumer is not forward looking, but concentrated on the here and now. Now most of life’s pleasure comes from counting one’s blessings. This is a dwelling modality, because the individual is no longer in transit, racing towards a better tomorrow. Now the consumer is focused on what is good about what one has. The consumer stops anticipating and starts savoring.
We have to move from a surging modality to a dwelling modality when the economy suddenly "softens" and "goes south." And there is no gear box. There is no single or simple way of gearing down from "in motion" to "in place." It’s one of those deals where the consumer must perform his own "interrupt" (to steal a term from Information Processing), see that the world has changed, see that something new is called, identify what is called for, embrace it fast, and hold it tight.
It’s weird that in our economy/culture we go through the surging-modality transition something like once a decade, and you would think this would be enough to prompt us to formalize the transition. I mean, shouldn’t we have a ritual or something? But no. We leave to the individual to figure this out for him or herself. (Those who do not see that the world has changed, may get the news from Donny Deutsche or Suzi Orman.)
But there is a culture form that works especially while as a set of instructions for how to dwell. It’s called "homeyness." This is the set of instructions in an American’s head, the one that helps show them how to turn houses into homes. As culture codes go, it is an amazingly detailed and helpful as a set of instructions. I wrote about this in Culture and Consumption II. Those who are interested in further details are urged to consult this essay.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer goods and meanings. Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings, and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47. Available from Amazon.com here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Katie Rook for the question.
The Windows “I’m a PC” campaign
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On the weekend, I’ll be talking at AIGA in New York City. My argument is that designers could be the ones inside the corporation to deliver cultural intelligence. This would make them, among other things, the ones who help protect the corporation from the "blind side hits" produced by the perfect storm of contemporary markets and contemporary culture.
How to make the argument? Well, I think designers armed with a knowledge of culture could have helped rescue Microsoft from its brand ignominy. As it was, this achievement came from the geniuses of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. And who knows, exactly, how they came to their revelation. But here’s how a culturally-minded designer might have done it.
Our culture has long been predicated in a simple distinction between the mainstream and the avant garde. This construction helped us understand the bourgeoisie as a group of people committed to convention and la doxa. They are, so the stereotype tells us, nervous nellies who are most reluctant ever to depart from their slavish conformity. Thank God, says the stereotype, for the avant-garde. These are risk takers who care nothing for convention or materialism, who bravely throw their personal comfort and safety to the winds in pursuit of artistic truth and social justice.
As cultural distinctions go, this was pretty crude, but it was extremely convincing. It was quite customary to find that people making popular culture after World War II tortured themselves with the idea that they were bourgeois when they ought to have been avant garde. This distinction ruled.
Sometime in the 1990s, something happened. Our two-part system exploded. Now in the place of an inside mainstream and an outside avant garde, there was a great fragmentation. The mainstream lost its ability to police the tastes and believes and behavior of most people. The avant-garde lost its ability to control the restless, experimental margin. Both hegemonies lost their coercive power. (This was an especially bitter pill for the avant garde because it liked to think of itself as a plunky band of misfits who fought the hegemony and not as an interested power-player in its own right. But of course they were.)
In the place of our founding duality, there were many groups who deferred neither to the center or the margin They simply went their own way. Yes, of course, they could hear the impatient scolding that came from center and edge, but, no, they weren’t much interested. They were now prepared to go their own way. Respectable? Who cared? Hip? Who cared? The distinction was dead.
This cultural architecture is precisely what is at play in the Apple vs. Windows contest. Apple choose to ally itself with the avant garde position. And this was of course pretty easy to do. Microsoft was clueless, bad tempered, and unimaginative. And Apple was, or became, the brand of choice for hipsters. So the Apple vs. PC ads almost wrote themselves. All the agency really needed to do was to find two characters who would capture the essential differences between the brands, and of course they did.
And for awhile this was a brilliantly successful campaign. I felt its siren call and in my most recent transition between laptops I almost moved from a Windows machine to an Airbook. And I have to say, that when I heard that Crispin Porter + Bogusky had taken on the task of giving Windows new credibility, I despaired. I mean, surely Microsoft and Windows were beyond saving.
Anthropologist, heal thy self. What I did not see was that there was a cultural opportunity. I did not see it, at least, until Crispin Porter + Bogusky rolled out there "I am a PC" spot. But of course. Why didn’t I think of that! There was a third position, created by the great cultural flowering of the 1990s. If Apple was avant garde, the path was clear for Windows to be the new alternative to the alternative. It could step out of the old contest that left it a clueless and bumbling mainstream play. It could embrace the great cultural efflorescence that emerged of the1990s and make itself a brand too concerned with real difference to care about merely hip difference. It could embrace real diversity instead of the single, predictable difference that comes from being cool. It could embrace authenticity instead of a pose. At a stroke, Apple was made to look a little precious and a little self important. Hats off to Crispin Porter + Bogusky. (If anyone can tell me the names of the people inside CP + B who deserve particular credit, I would be grateful.)
This is what cultural literacy is good for. As I say, we can’t know how CP + B did it, but it’s clear that a designer in a strategic mode could with the right training could have been the one who gave Microsoft this opportunity to tunnel out of its captivity. And what’s that worth? A place in the C-suite and no less.
References
McCracken, Grant. 1997. Plenitude. Toronto: Periph. Fluide.
See the CP+B website here.
Post script
Since writing this, I’ve decided not to use it on Saturday at the AIGA talk. I hope readers of This Blog who happen to be there will come up and say hi.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Wordle.net for the image.
Life on Mars and other archaeologies of the near past
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I was home for the weekend, time to ransack my DVR for shows I’d missed in a week away.
Life on Mars was interesting. It feels like a companion piece to Madmen. Together, they are archaeological recoveries of the near past. (Life on Mars is set in 1973; Madmen in 1960.)
The similarities end there. After all, Madmen captures the stark simplicities of mid century modernism, that hustle economy driven by postwar prosperity and the upward mobility it made possible.
Life on Mars give us the great repudiation that followed the Madmen era, as the children of privilege embraced the experimental, alternative, egalitarian, and mystical.
If the two periods had something in common, it was that both treated women badly. In the place of the abused secretaries of Madmen, Life on Mars gives us a police-woman named Annie Norris. The guys in the station house call her “No Nuts Norris,” lest anyone fail to understand she does not belong there.
These shows take advantage of how much we have changed in the last 48 and 35 years (respectively). There is a certain amount of finger pointing. Look! They smoke! They drank! They ignored civil liberties! Our present circumstances may fill us with trepidation, but, in prime time, we’re free to indulge in scorn and self congratulation.
Life on Mars is a police procedural with a twist. The detective in question is a time traveler from the present day. This sort of twist is now standard in TV land. Life has a guy just returned from 12 years in prison. Raines (of sainted memory) featured a guy who talked with the dead. The police procedural has a new procedure. The Jack Webb character now always seems to consort with something other than the facts.
There is some really good writing in Life on Mars. Thanks to my DVR, I can report this wonderful snippet that takes place between stars Jason O’Mara as Detective Sam Tyler and Michael Imperioli as Detective Ray Carling.
Detective Tyler objects to bad treatment of a suspect.
What was that! That money wasn’t from the check cashing robberies!”
Detective Carling replies,
Yeah, and Roe vs. Wade aren’t really options when you find yourself on a river.
Tyler: What does that even mean?
Carling: It’s an analogy.
Tyler: No, I don’t think it is.
Carling (somewhat hopefully): It’s like an analogy.
I laughed and laughed. It is impossible to imagine Jack Webb and his pal having an exchange like this. Steven Johnson is right. TV is getting better. (Hats off to writer, Bryan Oh.)
Then there’s the performance by Harvey Keitel as Lieutenant Gene Hunt. You want authenticity, Keitel is your man. This is bullet proof plausibility. Keitel occupied his character so deeply, it’s hard to imagine how he finds his way home at night.
Midcentury modernism took a blood oath never to repeat itself. Fifty years later, popular culture dwells lovingly upon its recent past. How interesting.
We have no clear idea of what’s happening to us in the present day. Even without the banking crisis, we are in the throes of ferocious change. I guess it’s nice to the end the day with a trip through our collective photo album. We may not know what we’re doing, but at least we don’t look anything like those losers drinking at their desks or wandering around in bell bottoms. Call it serial superiority.
References
For more on the show, go to the ABC website here.
For more on the English origins of the show and the machinations it survived in Hollywood, go to the excellent story by Scott Collins in the Los Angeles Times here.
The quote above is from the second episode of the series, The Real Adventures of the Unreal Sam Tyler.
Post script
I am sorry not to have posted more often and more regularly. Loyal readers deserve an explanation. The loss of my sister has taken something out of me. We were not close in any conventional sense. We did not talk often or confidingly. But I am reeling without her. Not to worry. It’s jut taking awhile to get back on pace.
JS Mill and the banking crisis
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Sitting on the runway at La Guardia, I started wondering what happens to capital now that so many banks are owned by bigger banks or government.
Culture and commerce take turns as the engines of innovation in our world, and you might say both of them have fallen relatively silent. Without them we are vulnerable to "prevailing opinion and feeling" and the eagerness of people to impose terms.
Protection…against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them, to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. (JS Mill, On Liberty)
To take the obvious example, I wonder if the capital that animated Silicon Valley a few years ago would be available this time around? Or does a government hand in the marketplace discourage risk and innovation?
References
Mill, John Stewart. On Liberty. Location 99 – 104. Kindle pagination.
What you can fund with your consulting work
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[This will be the last essay and conclusion to the blog compendium How To Be An Anthropologist (for hire).]
Being an anthropologist for hire should prove remunerative If all goes well, you should be able to use your consulting income to fund…something else.
It could be being a really great mom. It could be working on that career in stand-up comedy. It could be making yourself the world’s expert in Bolivian tin mining, 1920-1932.
My hope is that you will be an anthropologist here too. I hope you will study American culture for clients and then study it again for yourself. It’s a pretty straight forward proposition. And God knows there is plenty of work to do. The academic anthropologists have pretty much forsaken the study of their own culture. If you don’t do it, who’s going to?
The good thing about an anthropologist who does not depend on tenure and promotion committees or government grants is that we can go our own way. The academic anthropologist is thoroughly shaped by his or her community…and, dude, does it show. There is a consensus at work in their world that has shut down all but the most approved discourse. Indeed, the only community that conforms to Foucault’s nutty idea is the academic one that embraced it as an account of the rest of us.
The advantage of being an anthropologist by day and by night is that the two halves of your career can work together. When you are collected data for commercial purposes, you will see things that serve your academic interests. And vice versa. Indeed, I like to think that my clients are paying for one day, but they are actually getting two. All my academic work is there at their disposal when I am "on the job."
But I should warn you. Doing both sides of the proposition did not come easily to me and it may not come easily to you.. In fact, it was like riding uneven circus ponies for much of the time. It was sometimes miserable. It cost me my first marriage and it induced in my a reckless disregard for my self interest. Oh, poor me. Forgive the self pity. But I am obliged to tell you what you’re getting in to.
The upside is pretty interesting. You are you’re own man or woman. You can chose your own questions. You can go your own way. A culture awaits you.
Advice to a young consultant
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This will be Section 5 of the blog compendium How to be an anthropologist (for hire).
There was a time I had traveled so much I had 1.5 million frequent flyer miles with Air Canada. I was the first generation of anthropologist to make my way in the world, to serve as a consultant moving constantly from project to project. Naturally, I made many bone-headed mistakes. From time to time, I have posted on the perils of being a young consultant. I collect these little essays here.
1. How to be a self-funding anthropologist
This is my advice to a young man in Mumbai who wrote to ask me if I had any advice on how to do ethnography for a living. (See the post here.)
2. How to win with culture
This is an interview I did with Scott Berkun who asked me why culture matters to managers. As a young consultant, you will be called upon to explain and to justify what you do many times. I hope you will steal anything that’s useful to you from this essay. (See the post here.)
3. Advice to a young consultant
It’s easy to spot the young consultant. He or she often gets some of the practical matters wrong. Consider this essay a source of useful advice. (See the post here.)
4. The Perfect Black Bag
I had to learn lots of things the hard way as an anthropologist for hire-on my own. One of the things I learned was that it is necessary to have the right kit. In this case, you need a perfect black bag. (See the post here.)
5. Why I just bought a night light.
If you spend enough days in enough cities and hotels, you wake up sometimes with no idea where the bathroom is. Now, of course you can turn on the lights. But this flash of light is sure to reset the body clock you just spent a week trying to get right. Hence the need for a night light. (See the post here.)
6. Learning to notice
Enough practical details. The first order of the anthropological profession is noticing well. Here’s a little essay on say. (See the post here.)
7. Working groups
The good ethnographer improves the value of what he or she accomplishes by learning to play well with others. (See the post here.)
Story time: aka commerce gets more cultural
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I had the honor of doing a call with Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn on Monday. Jerry and Pip focus on "interactions between technology, business and society" and their Monday telephone "broadcast" looks at this topic from many points of view.
To prepare myself, I scratched out these notes to clarify what an anthropologist (or at least this anthropologist) has offer to a group like theirs.
1. I am interested in culture and commerce, especially as they intersect.
2. One of the things you see from this "picture window" is the arrival of new kinds of capital (cultural, social, intellectual, moral) and new kinds of exchange. This may or may not herald the arrival of a "gift economy."
Or to put this another way: Since the 17th century we have seen culture get more commercial. Now we are seeing commerce get more cultural.
3. Here’s a story that means to illustrate what I mean by cultural and social capitals.
In 2000, a client asked me to study rum in the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland).
I did my ethnographic research. I conducted a couple of focus groups and many one-to-one interviews. I asked men in middle age what they thought about alcohol, drinking alcohol, brands of alcohol, pubs, bars, parties, the whole "rum" package.
The first finding, the one just sitting there are the surface of everything else I learned, was that Maritimers are great talkers, that they have a fantastic collection of stories to tell, and that Martimers are especially active as talkers when active as drinkers. (Duh.)
Well, so, was this first finding something I could use, or was it merely an interesting observation, fun to know but not so very useful? I decided finally this finding ought to be the point of strategic and tactical departure. We needed to find some way of getting the brand involved in all these talkers talking.
My recommendation was that the brand ought to hire a handful of out-of-work actors, train them in the art of story telling, and set them into bars and pubs to tell a spell binding story. It was important that this was a bar that the story teller had never been to before, and that he never went to again. I wanted to make the story the original "mysterious stranger," a man for whom no information was forthcoming. I wanted maximize the oddity of the event. (I once had a brother-in-law who was such a good story teller he routinely make the bars of St. Andrews fall completely silent and abjectly worshipful. This guy, David Joy, was my model, I think.)
I wasn’t entirely clear how to feature the brand. Making it part of the story would be too obvious. It would diminish the magic of the story telling at a stroke. Standing everyone a round of the brand was possible but still trying to hard. The art of this deal was to evoke the brand without damaging the story telling. I decided finally that it would be just about right if the story teller merely ordered the brand for himself.
The idea was to create a cultural capital. That’s what a story is. Naturally it had to be a good story, something with stormy seas, calamity, heroism, inexplicable outcomes, ghost ships, nature on the rampage, phantoms, pirates, princesses, Leviathans of the deep, etc. Just a telling of Turner’s Shipwreck of the Minotaur (pictured above) would do. The idea, or one idea, is to tell a story that resonated with the best stories of this maritime culture.
But it wasn’t just the story told that was key, it was the story telling. We wanted the actor to be tall, dark and handsome. We wanted the event to be rich in story but otherwise poor in detail. By withholding the identity, the motive, the mission of our story teller, we were inviting other story tellers to leap into action. In an oral culture this rich, staffed by story tellers this good, I felt certain the the bar would soon teem with many, conflicting ideas about who "this guy" was and why he had come to tell his single, perfect story. Nature abhors a vacuum. So do talkers.
So, the idea was to have the brand gift the community with a story told and the provocation of the story telling. The oral tradition on the Maritimes was now richer by one story and provoked to make up still more stories. And with every story told, the social capital, the connections between story tellers, will be augmented. (We can posit a crude metric here: the more talk that flows between talkers the richer the connections between them. The higher the quality of the talk and the more vivid the telling, the richer the connection. The more and the more richly we interact, the deeper our social capital. This social capital is fungible it can be spent in times of crisis and in aid of those in need. As you can see, I am sketching as I go. This is what precisely what needs working on and I suggested to Pip and Jerry that we find someone to sit out out to the desert in a benign version of the Manhattan project.) Thus does cultural capital begets social capital in moments of exchange.
I am obliged to tell you that the client absolutely hated this idea. He actually looked at me and scowled. (In the corporate world, in my experience, this very rarely happens. In the interests of good relations, everyone’s a cipher.) Part of the problem is that in those days we didn’t have the concepts we do today. The other problem is that marketing for spirits has a long traditional of deep stupidity. A favorite tactic is to paint an RV with the colors on the brand, put a really big image of the logo on the side, and fill it with cheerful, buxom women. By this standard, sending in poetic story tellers may have looked like a college prank, or perhaps an anthropological self indulgence.
But here’s the pitch I would make now, and it is a pitch in the changed world of marketing that might now actually work. In our story teller scenario, the brand is creating a cultural meaning in the form of a story. It sends this story out into its brand community, where the local story tellers will convert it into social capital. These cultural and social capitals return to the brand and augment it as a kind of brand capital. If we have augmented the cultural and social world of the drinker successfully, we will move drinkers to switch to our brand and to purchase same. Now cultural and social capital have become a more fungible kind of capital. Now they convert into financial capital.
This is a value flight. The brand releases value into the world by contributing something not for itself but for the community of consumers. If the brand creates the right capitals, and the conversion chains work successfully, eventually value returns to them. But this is risky. There is no easy Smithian calculation here. It is not possible for the brand manager to judge tit for tat. It’s hard to say how a story will create value for the corporation. It’s harder to know how much should be invested in the story’s creation.
4. It looks as if the old dog of marketing is having to learn a new trick. If we want to create financial capital, we may now have to help create social and cultural capital. This takes us a way from the old calculations of the marketplace. We are no longer creating "utility" (or not only creating utility). We are not making functional goods and services. We are creating culture and society. These have always been the off shoots of capitalism. Here they are the very objectives of the undertaking.
This is not a comfortable notion for many people in marketing. We are asking the brand manager to release value into the world without any reassurance it will return. We are saying that financial value now must sometimes come from complicated conversion chains that include cultural and social capital over which the marketer has no strict control. But this much is clear. The days of firing very simple messages repeatedly at monolithic groups of deeply passive consumer with the big cannons of TV, radio and print are over. If we want the brand to resonate for the consumer, we must make it participate in culture. We must bring the consumer in. We must bid them to help us build the brand. We must make ourselves companionable. And maybe it comes to that. Maybe its time to stop being that bore at the party, the blabbermouth in the corner, and step into the role of the story teller.
This isn’t, in the clue train tradition of Doc Searls and David Weinberger, a matter of conversation. We have much more to do than merely hold up our side of the conversation. We are, whether we like it or not, the more active meaning maker in this conversation. We have to get things started. And we have to supply the conversations with semantic cues and interpretive riches. But after that, then, yes, it’s very like a conversation.
5. The big questions, the take-aways, for anthropology:
5.1 what are the capitals, cultural and social?
5.2 how do they create one another?
5.3 how do they convert into one another?
5.4 what are the models and metrics with which we can clarify this issue?
I am hoping someone will send us to the desert to think about these issues.
6. If I’m not crazy about the "conversation" metaphor, I’m also not sure I’m crazy about the "gift economy." Which this space for more detailed criticism.
Post script:
During the course of the call, I was complaining as I always do about the embargo imposed intellectuals on the serious study of culture and commerce. (I have documented this charge in Culture and Consumption II if anyone wants the details.) I believe we are slow now to think about capital and capital conversion because of this embargo. And this raises the question: what changed? Why is it ok now to talk about the intersection of culture and commerce?
I caught a glimpse of one of these questions this morning when I stumbled upon this comment from Kevin Kelly on the Whole Earth Catalog.
Kevin Kelly: The WEC helped rid us of our allergy to commerce. [Stewart] Brand believed in capitalism, just not by traditional methods. He was the first person to embrace true financial transparency. His decision to disclose WEC’s finances in the pages of the catalog had a profound ripple effect. A lot of those hippies who dropped out and tried to live off the land decided to come back and start small companies because of it. And out of that came the Googles of the world.
References
Kotler, Steven. n.d. The Whole Earth Effect. Plenty Magazine. Issue 24. here.
Culture capture
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This will be Section 4 of the blog compendium How to be an anthropologist (for hire).
Culture is the anthropologist’s stock in trade, the thing that makes us useful.
So naturally we want to be alert to what is happening in the culture around us. There are plenty of opportunities. Things will emerge while we are doing interviews, watching TV, wandering around in the mall or on mainstream, or listening to your spouse or your kids. There’s data everywhere.
1. How to spot a trend
As an anthropologist, you will be on the lookout for new cultural developments. This post identifies the two rules that aid in our search. See the post here.
2. Two and A Half Men: birth of a new male?
One of the engines of innovations in our culture is gender. Our ideas of how to define maleness and femaleness are changing constantly. In this post, I look at the rise of the unapologetic male. I am using the best kind of data: a very successful prime time comedy from CBS. See the post here.
3. Beauty and the death of zero sum
What is beauty? Every culture has it’s own take. (We insist on "thin," some cultures prefer "thick.") As usual our idea of beauty is in transition. One of the parties sensing and responding to this change is the Unilever brand called Dove. See the post here.
4. Celebrity culture
Thanks to PSFK, I got to attend a forum on celebrity. I got to hear Jessica Coen of Gawker and Janice Min of US Weekly, among others. This provokes an anthropological response. See the post here.
5. Pets are people too
We are a wacky culture in many ways. One of our recent stunts is confering personhood on our companion animals. See the post here.
6. The artisanal trend
Artisanal bread? In the culture that created Wonder Bread? Chocolate that used to come industrially from Mars or Nestle’s is now fashioned by skilled workers in closed shops under glass. Even some brands of beer are being called artisanal. This is very clear cultural trend. Here’s my effort to give it the anthropological treatment. See the post here.
7. Just enough
If you have ever been to Vegas or even a local Sunday buffet, you know how good our culture is at excess. But even this may be shifting. See the post here.
8. Not kinship, kidship
How people are related, this is one of the key interests on anthropology. In this post, it seems to me that in our culture there is something interesting happening here. See the post here.
9. Lil Wayne, Prince of the gift economy
The economy as imagined by Adam Smith, the one that sees value move between exchanging parties is short, clear, delimited bursts is now being joined by an economy that sees new kinds of value (especially social and cultural capital) moving in long arcs through collections of strangers. In this post, I am nominating the rapper Lil Wayne as the gift economy’s patron saint. See the post here.
Syd McCusker (1955-2008)
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My sister Syd died on September 25. Not even a really bad photo can conceal how vivid she was.
Syd lived in Victoria, a place that didn’t seem to me ever really to suit her. It’s a place filled with hippies, retirees, and bureaucrats, people sure to provoke her impatience.
As a wife, mother, and gardener, she had a gentler side, something softer and more spiritual.
And just when you began to think that this was the real Syd, you’d find a magnet on her fridge that read:
"Jesus Loves You."
Then a picture of the Italianate Christ (the one with the flowing hair, soulful eyes, and pious expression).
And below:
"everyone else thinks you’re an asshole"
What a magnificent sister. I always felt a bit dozy by comparison, a bit slow on the uptake, a little too credulous. She was the least little little sister.
