Archive for February, 2010
Melville Herskovits: the Elvis of African-American studies
Posted by: | Comments
PBS has "must-see" viewing tonight. (It’s on at 11:00 on my PBS station in NYC. Check the PBS Independent Lens website here for local listings and more details.)
It’s a documentary called Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Melville Herskovits (1895-1963) established the African Studies Center at Northwestern, the first at any American university, and he wrote The Myth of the Negro Past, which help re-defined black history.
Harvard history prof, Vincent Brown, calls Herskovits the "Elvis of African-American studies." (Coincidentally, this wins our "best metaphor" award for Winter 2010.)
Here’s what the Independent Lens says about the Herskovits accomplishment:
When a white, Jewish intellectual named Melville Herskovits asserted in the 1940s that black culture was not pathological, but in fact grounded in deep African roots, he gave vital support to the civil rights movement and signaled the rise of identity politics.
Pictured: Vincent Brown, Professor of History at Harvard and project advisor, Christine Herbes-Sommers, Executive Producer, and Llewellyn Smith, Director and Producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness.
Note: this post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle. It was restored December 26, 2010.
The Secret Script at USA Networks (aka the enmeshed male)
Posted by: | Comments
I know you have watched something on USA Networks. After all, it's a hit machine. It has give us Burn Notice, Royal Pains, White Collar and In Plain Sight.
Bonnie Hammer (pictured) is the woman in charge. Ms. Hammer has a formula and I accepted this as the secret of her success.
But a couple of days ago, I was thinking about these programs and I noticed a similarity I had not seen before
See if you do too.
Burn Notice is about a former spy who has been booted out of the intelligence community and must now rely on his best friend, his sometime girl friend, and often his mother to continue in a low rent of espionage.
Royal Pains is about a doctor who was drummed out of his prestigious job as a New York City surgeon and must now rely on his brother, his girlfriend and a rich fella to eck out of living as a concierge doctor, low rent medicine indeed.
White Collar is about a jewel thief who has been fished out of jail by the FBI and can now do nothing on his own without the approval of his handler. He still gets up to crime but it’s now a far cry from the old days of a glamorous thief.
In Plain Sight is about a woman who works as Witness Relocation sheriff and because she, her mother, her sister are emotional train wrecks of one kind or another, she manages only with the help of her long suffering partner, her boss, her secretary and her boyfriend.
See a pattern? It is most clear in the case of the first three shows. A man riding high is brought low. He now survives by dint of his wits and only because he relies on people he never relied on before. This man is now thoroughly enmeshed in a small group of friends and relatives. Without them he is nothing.
Ok, let’s say you’re Monni Adams, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Professor Adams is famous for having detected and then explained patterns in Indonesian textiles. Explain, please, why this new pattern is so much in evidence in these USA Network shows.
What is happening in American culture that might help explain this new vision of our masculinity? After all, American culture has long been home to a notion of the unconstrained, rogue male. Consider all those tradtional TV heroes and movie stars, men who answered to no one. Why a new pattern? Why an enmeshed male?
Usual rules apply. Best answer gets a copy of Chief Culture Officer. Forgive me if I am a little slow getting to my "grading." It is easier to stage these contests than to adjudicate them.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. The Hammer Grammer. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. August 31. here.
Recycling: adding value by adding meaning
Posted by: | Comments
As a comment to yesterday’s post, Jon Foulkes said,
So an extension to this idea: where the bag isn’t just handed down, but can tell you what it’s been up to. Could make second-hand stuff much more desirable than new.
Brilliant.
Most things that are used are seen to be diminished by use. Depreciation is not just an economic concept. It’s a cultural fact. Once something has been owned by someone it is soiled, profaned, yuuky, somehow. We continue to have the idea that things come from the factory in a state of grace. Ready for ownership. Ready for us. Any ownership diminishes them.
But what if these products were blank, storyless, tedious. What if objects straight from the factory seemed somehow orphaned, smaller and less interesting for the fact of their pristine condition. If we care about recycling, we want objects to be better at absorbing and recording and reporting their histories. Of course, some objects will be incapable of telling stories: bottles and newspapers for instance. But clothing, furniture, technology, these could be storyful. And they could spared the landfill for one or more cycles of ownership by the stories they bring us.
There are three problems here. One is technical: how to make the object capable of recording and then retelling its story. One is cultural or rhetorical: how to choose and craft the best stories, the narrative that creates the most value. And the last is economic: how to figure out how to think about what kind of value this is, and how it can be measured, distributed, captured and stored in the marketplace. Oh, we do have our work cut out for us.
References
Shannon South offers to turn "your Dad’s jacket" into a purse at her reMade USA website here.
Note: This post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of early 2010. It was reposted December 26, 2010.
Tumi and the case of the talking suitcase
Posted by: | Comments
Yesterday, I puzzled a few readers.
Let me be more clear (and less alarming). The best way to do this is to talk by example.
Let’s begin with the Tumi bag I bought in Seattle last week.
What I want is a stream of messages from this piece of luggage. It can come in the tweet stream on my iPhone. Or it can print out in the handle of the bag itself. We are assuming the bag is equipped with wireless capability and GPS.
I like the idea of learning on the taxi to the airport that my Tumi bag is, in truth, a little afraid of flying. I like the idea of learning that when in Seattle last week it really liked that carpet in the elevator (pictured here). My Tumi could have an entire, entirely poetic, vocabulary for hotel surfaces. I like the idea that it is noticing things I don’t.
I love the idea of the hearing my bag murmur (by way of twitter) that the man at the check-in desk wasn’t really very polite. Or, more dramatically, that he has only 5 days to live. (The idea of a piece of luggage claiming mystical knowledge of the future is especially charming. Perhaps that’s just me.) I like the idea of luggage that’s a little bad tempered, put upon, inclined to grumble, quick to take offense.
I am not asking for a full time writer standing by. There are only so many hotels in Seattle. When GPS signals that I am staying at the Sorrento, I would be easy enough to determine where the bag is and what it is "seeing." When I am in any moving vehicle on the road, chances are it’s a cab. In other words, it wouldn’t be very hard to feed locational cues into a machine based grammar which could then generate messages so situationally sensitive they have the hum of veracity.
The larger issue is straight forward. We already charge inanimate objects with meanings. We do this routinely through the branding process. The question is are there other kinds of meanings that could be brought into play. They would be more companionable message, more customized and customizable, and, more to the marketing point, they would make Tumi a brand with whom I have a deeper bond. There is no brand loyalty like this loyalty.
How about this as an anthropological indicator. I don’t name my luggage at the moment. (In fact, I don’t think I name anything that’s inanimate.) But if my Tumi luggage were expressive in this way, I pretty certain I would give it a name. Maybe this is what we should be shooting for. Naming. If and when the consumer names the product, that’s when we know something remarkable has been accomplished in the way of meaning manufacture. We have so animated the product that consumers no long see goods as inanimate.
Less alarming. No?
Note: This post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of 2009. It was reposted Feb. 2, 2010.
Buy this product: we have writers standing by
Posted by: | Comments
Today Very Short List pointed us towards a site called Unhappyhipsters in which images like the one above are fetched from the pages of Dwell magazine and then given small narrative indicators that give them new meaning.
"It become their routine…" Wonderful.
Last week, on the post on Significant Objects, I contemplated a commercial world in which new products came with narratives attached, new meanings, which we could use to reimagine our present circumstances.
I just bought a new bag from Tumi. My last one gave up the ghost last week in Seattle. I like the idea of getting messages from Tumi as it imagines the things that are or could be happening to me. With a link to my TripIt file, Tumi could know where I am, even, if I allowed it, what hotel I was staying it. With GPS location permission, I could have a rough idea of my circumstances. All of this data makes it possible to feed me a stream of narrative suggestions that are plausible at least by time and place.
Oh, alright. This isn’t quite right. But the idea remains promising. Consumer goods, thanks to brands and meaning makers in the world of marketing, have always come with meanings. And they will continue to do so. But in addition to these quite general meanings, it is possible for the brand to communicate many more particular meanings. As long as they some how resonate with what is happening in my life, they will be interesting and fun. Animating, actually.
"We have writers standing by!" When does this become a brand promise?
References
The Very Short List treatment is here.
The Unhappy Hipsters website is here.
