Ok, I am going to be in the field and on the road for the next week or so.

If I can blog, I will blog.

If not, have a look around.

There must be something you haven’t read.

Best, Grant

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on artists who can serve an anthropological function by observing and “analyzing” contemporary culture (now that most anthropologists neglect this opportunity), see a remarkable book:

Gould, John. 2003. Kilter: 55 fictions. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press.
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As a follow-up to the post 5 days ago called “From Cultures to Markets,” in which I observed why anthropology needs economics with this remark

But there was a problem with the notion of culture. It encouraged anthropologists to suppose that order is, as it were, grammatical, that it comes from a shared code of ideas and rules. And we know that very little of the order of First World cultures happens this way. Most of this order comes from the interactions of parties who are multiple, various, competitive, and sometimes contentious…parties, that is to say, who have very little in common and almost never a shared code. Merely by agreeing to a few, simple ideas (and nothing so sophisticated or embedded as a code), these parties can engage with one another. This order is, as we say, emergent. It is not code or culture based. Parties can interact without much sharedness and that they come away with their differences intact.

This means two things: first, that the anthropologist’s great theoretical mainstay will not serve them in the First World as it does in traditional societies, and, second, they must visit the disciplines that understand order that obeys an “invisible hand.”

Here is Hayek:

What the economists understood for the first time was that the market as it had grown up was an effective way of making man take part in a process more complex and extended than he could comprehend and that it was through the market that he was made to contribute “to ends which were no part of his purpose.”

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 13-14.

Monday opened with an essay that showed the discontinuities that exist between anthropology and economic, culture and commerce. These are sometimes as distant as a little girl growing up on the Canadian Prairies some 70 years ago and the real estate market of present day Manhattan.

Tuesday’s essay was about the same. Pip Coburn is a wonder of clarity, intelligence, and exposition that the social sciences cannot begin to match. So Will (Straw) and I are left to scratch out interesting questions but to do so in a self created void.

The social sciences and humanities have taken so little interest and exercise so little intelligence in the pursuit of the connection between culture and commerce, it might as well be a “Northwest passage”…except of course that most of the people teaching in the humanities and social sciences doubt that it exists—and will send no boats in search of it. Oh, for a small band and a sturdy ship like the Saint Roche.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were all about brands. This is the easiest place for social scientists when it comes to thinking about what commerce is and how it works. After all, brands are those magical devices that add value to the product and come mostly from, often, exquisite manipulations of contemporary culture, virtuoso expressive accomplishments, of marketers and marketing teams, creative directors and advertising agencies. Naturally, we know next to nothing about this activity because of the great clanging stupidities that are routinely turned out by Naomi Klein and company.

Where it not for these clanging stupidities, I believe that marketing and brand building would not remain a nascent art and, as we see in the case of Silicon Valley, an amateur entreprise. Ebay, Adobe, and Google are all making rookey errors. This despite the fact that markets is at least 100 years old. Some day, marketing will look like Pip’s world of the leading intelligence that directs capital markets.

But that little boat has a very long way to go.

This coming week I hope to finish up the manuscript for a book called Culture and Consumption II and send it off to Indiana University Press. It won’t help a lot but it may help a little. Two essays from this blog will appear there.

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