Archive for Anthropology of Contemporary Culture
Oh Canada
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A friend of mine, a deeply observant and credentialed observer of human affairs, told me this morning that when Canada played the US in the Olympics a couple of days ago, the fans, the Canadian fans, were tepid. (I missed the game.) It was as if, he said, they were trying to be enthusiastic but just couldn’t manage to find enough oomph.
This reminded me of being on the Toronto Subway just after a Blue Jay World Series win. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, sharing the car with12 other people, also minding their own business. This is a Toronto thing.
When suddenly this guy, a Jamaican Canadian to judge by his accent, leapt up and began to berate us.
What is the matter with you people? You just won the World Series for crying out loud! The World Series! And you’re just sitting there. What does it take to get you people out of your seats?
We just sat there, blinking at him with confusion. And stayed in our seats. Even with encouragement, we would betray no happiness.
Naturally, there were some Canadians somewhere carrying on with reckless, unreserved abandon. But the statistical average is probably closer to what we say in the subway car. World Series win. Who hoo.
This is a long standing problem for Canadians. And it’s a vexing one. You don’t have to be Emile Durkheim to observe that emotion matters when it comes to nationhood. Truly, sometimes it matters too much, and produces the murderous episodes.
But more often it is the standard, necessary stuff of nationhood. Collective matters are marked by collective enthusiasms and accomplishments, and these are marked by big, broad, unstinting expressions of shared emotion.
I leave you with the question posed by the Jamaican Canadian: what is wrong with my home and native land?
OSCAR AWOL!
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What do Oscar winners think when they lay down to sleep? In a world that's fickle and filled with critics, they might well think: Life at Macy’s from Life at Google
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Apologies for the radio silence. I am hard at work on a manuscript that needs to be done by the end of February to be out next fall.
homeyness triumphant
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A couple of days ago, I argued consumers would respond to the present economic downturn by "dwelling" instead of "surging." I argued that this change would be governed by cultural subroutine called "homeyness." (Both Virginia Postrel and Tyler Cowen were kind enough to point their readers to the post, and I am grateful for the coverage.)McCracken, Grant. 2008. What consumers do in a downturn. This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. October 22, 2008. here.
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 Sue and her website How to Keep House here for the image. This house captures one of the seven symbolic properties of the homey home.
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.
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
