In this post, I offer an anthropological account of the entrepreneur, challenging the model proposed at TEDxOxford by Marc Ventresca of the Said business school. Please come have a look.
Tag Archives: anthropology
Anthropologist as talking head
Yesterday I did an interview with USAToday on the t-shirts, coffee mugs and other memorabilia that greeted the death of Osama bin Laden. And seconds ago I did an interview with the BBC.
The USAToday approach was “what are we to make of these crazy t-shirts, the ones that read things like “Obama got Osama. You’re an anthropologist, you figure it out!”
I welcomed the challenge and fell to thinking how useful t-shirts are as a kind of bulletin board. They are cheap, cheerful, and almost instantaneously available.
I figured you could say at a minimum that t-shirts have three functions from an expressive point of view, that allow us to share in the event, in this particular case, they give the wearer an opportunity to diminish Osama culturally, and finally, to reuse the words quoted in the USA Today article, people wear these things “to inflict a final indignity on bin Laden.” Functions 2 and 3 are a little close, I agree. I would nudge them apart by suggesting that function 2 says, in effect, “you are now a t-shirt,” and function 3 says, “you are now a punch line.”
The BBC phoned to ask for an interview. As a child raised at the knee of the CBC, I was happy to oblige. But I must say I drew breath when the interviewer said his Skype handle was “opsbush.” Was this to be an interview or an ambush?
It turned out to be an interview. And I am sorry to say that I rambled in answer to several questions. Worse than that I stumbled once or twice. It was one thing to be bad television, and I believe my Oprah appearance demonstrates that I can be very bad TV indeed. But to be bad radio. Really, what excuse can you possibly have?
I opened by saying that most Americans were feeling conflicted, that most people felt the occasion called more for solemnity than joy. But this was not the point of the interview.
Acting as if I had not just said that Americans were feeling conflicted, the interviewer pressed on to ask whether these t-shirts were not perhaps “a little sick.” To which I replied something like “Americans had suffered cruelly as a result of Osama. Perhaps it was not be surprising that they should feel relief and even joy at his death.”
There was one of these long silences that only the English do with real gusto. (We Americans say nothing comes of nothing, speak again.) I had delivered exactly the answer hoped for in these circumstances. I had confirmed the English suspicion of our barbarity.
To which I say, again anthropologically, that one of the differences between the US and the UK is precisely on this side of the ocean we own our emotions, even the ones of which we are not especially proud.
Oh, behave
Lucky me. Pam and I are going to dinner tonight with a distinguished anthropologist and his wife. I am guessing we will talk about the state of the anthropology, and I will want to talk about how little and how badly anthropologists understand American culture.
The distinguished anthropologist will reply by offering several counter examples, including someone who has studied American culture from a Marxist point of view.
My reply will be that every reductionist reading of American culture is wrong. (How’s that for a reduction?)
(For those who don’t use this social scientific lingo, a reductionist reading is one that says there is a single truth beneath all the surface noise of a social world. Thus does the Marxist, the functionalist, the economist, the primatologist, the Freudian insist, each for their own reasons, that the apparent complexity of American culture conceals a single driver, the revelation of which makes everything clear. Class, says the Marxist, that ‘s what’s really going on here.)
The trouble is sometimes it is class. But sometimes it’s lifestyle. And sometimes it’s a new cultural formation unanticipated. Sometimes it is economic choice driven by self interest of the naked kind and sometimes economic choice of the mediated kind. And sometimes it is the influence of politics and sometimes religion. And sometimes it is an idea from on high, that comes to us from deep thinkers in Europe, a fashionista in New York City, or Steve Jobs in California. And sometimes it’s an idea, if that’s the right term, that is fully emergent, leaping not from one mind or even from several minds, but from a new practice, or a new industry or a new part of the world.
Even if it was one thing, there are many things this one thing could be.
But it’s never one thing. Not any more. The real problem is that it is always all these things engaged in a violent game of bumper cars, rippling through our worlds in unpredictable chains of cause and effect.
So the person who insist that American culture is all about class, or any one thing, must be wrong.
I get why these ideas appeal to us. We live with so much noise and confusion that it is thrilling to think there is some secret key explaining everything. And when these ideas come up, they have the force of revelation. “But of course,” we say, slapping our foreheads, “it’s so obvious now that you say it.” But eventually we begin to see that the new idea doesn’t discover everything and sometimes that it doesn’t even explain the important things. This can take a very long time and there is always a group of people who are so wedded to the new idea that they argue it to their grave. We don’t know why they can’t let go. They just can’t. Of course they get “read out” of the discipline. No one listens anymore. They inflict their orthodoxy on some of their students, but this really is a monstrous a betrayal of the teacher’s responsibility. These kids are being marked for failure and obscurity, removed from usefulness much before their time.
This is an ancient debate. And it has been taken up and debated more ably than I have here. The point I wish to make is that there’s a new answer to this old problem. And that answer is us. It may once have been true that there was one or a few factors that could explain everything, but we are so various and multiple and changeable, those days are over. Only a multiplicity of explanations can explain a world like ours. And indeed, all those monolithic ideas are welcome to the debate, but they may not dominate the proceedings.
That’s what I’m going to say at dinner. Wish me luck!
Making culture, provoking culture
Social worlds tend to settle. And once they settle, a fine coating of inevitability forms around them.
Who is what to whom under what circumstances as constrained by what rules, eventually this is completely "done." We’re weighted down by stasis.
Case in point? A couple I saw years and years ago in a restaurant. They were in their 70s. I guessed they had been married a long time. Occasionally, he would raise his eyebrows and she would smile. They had shared this meal so many times it was terra completely cognito. Jokes didn’t need telling. They just need referencing. This tiny, social world had settled. They were now riding the inevitability through to dessert, and, no, there weren’t going to be any surprises there either.
What happens to couples happens to corporations, universities, cities, countries. Countries? Sure, Canada. Once dynamic, these social worlds have settled into stasis. They are now going through the motions, even when those represent a bad, lifeless idea.
What these static worlds need are provocations, events that "short out" the stasis, so to say. People are suddenly released from the confinement of their settled social world. They are not freed for long, and revolutionaries are inclined to believe that this moment of liberation will last for longer than it does. But there has been an "interrupt" as the psychologists call it. For a moment, the inevitability cracks, the rules become clear, the stasis is suspended.
There are a million possible provocations. Some years ago, Abby Hoffman showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills. [Please share other examples in Comments.] There are species of art and/or politics that live for the provocation that will accomplish through imagination what cannot be accomplishment through more structural economic, political and social change. Some of these groups believe in an "open sesame" event, the one perfect provocation that will set all the dominos tumbling till real and lasting change is accomplished. This provocation may exist, but it will take a lot of very careful thinking and experiment to discover what it is.
This is where pie comes in. A couple of years ago, a group of people stood on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, and handed hand slices of pie, pecan, pumpkin and apple, to passers-by. "The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time." (in Edge, below.)
Pie is an interrupt. It forces people out of that habitual frame of mind, the little script that reads, "Ok, that’s the shopping done, now I have to get to the library and pick up Betty at 4:00." Oh, what’s this? Pie? And before you know it, you are sharing pie and a joke with the guy who coaches Becky, your daughter’s best friend.. You are broken out of your routines, out of stasis.
What happens next depends upon the skill of the pieman. In this case the pieman is Project M, something established as part of the "design for good" movement by John Bielenberg in 2003. Project M is works as what Edge calls an "idea incubator." Younger designers meet to "generate social problems and enhance public life." Pie provocations had taken place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Working with the design firm Winterhouse in Connecticut, Project M has also staged a Pizza Farm.
Designers are very good at thinking about provocations. After all, they are in the imagination business. They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new. What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation. Handing out pie and pizza does have the potential for provocation. But something substantial happens if and only if new arrangements are made visible, thinkable and doable. Pie qua pie will not get this job done. Pie has to be the start of something more than a jolly conversation with a soccer coach. It must do something more than "spur conversation."
There are social and cultural mechanics here. (Again in my humble opinion, designers tend to assume and ignore these mechanics when addressing the design issue at hand. Well, so do we all. That’s the point of being an anthropologist or a sociologist, getting at the rules and meanings culture works so hard to conceal from view. I am not accusing. I’m just saying.)
The Point of Pie
We have used pie to draw people out of their routines, their stasis. The point of pie is that it carries with it very particular cultural meanings. It is indulgent, festive and when served on a street corner surprising, funny and lighthearted. Pie sets certain meanings in train. It has drawn people not just out of their stasis, but into an amused, curious frame of mind. We have mobilized them.
Talk to me, not to Becky’s friend’s soccer coach
This is NOT the time to encourage them with one another. This is the path pack to stasis. Oh, sure, tiny trace elements of community will be generated, but these will begin to generate almost immediately and they will have disappeared within a month.
No, we want to talk to us, and this means taking the people who make up our Project M, Pie Lab, and Pizza farm and press them into conversational service. We want them to be there serving pie and chatting up the people who get the pie.
Building a gift economy
There is a social science about these social moments, and we will want to consult this literature. But for present purposes, let’s just say the following. You the Project Pie person are building a little gift economy. It begins with free pie. But that is merely the beginning. Now we want the pie recipient to feel the full effect of our absolute interest. (Almost all conversation is the opposite of a gift economy. I give attention and time and interest to you in proportion to the attention, time and interest you give to me.)
The idea is to gift the pie recipient with complete attention. This means refusing our turn in the conversation. (See the linguistic literature on turn taking for more on this topic.) It means looking at the pie recipient as if we expect them to say something absolutely wonderful. It means approving everything they say as if it were especially apt and especially well said. It means, in effect, showering the pie recipient with complete approval.
But is this manipulation?
Well, I am sure some will say, but this is manipulation. You are asking Project M people to fake interest, as if they were used car salesmen. And this would be absolutely true if the Project M person’s heart was not pure, if his or her interest were not sincere. But I am assuming this is wrong. I mean otherwise you wouldn’t be standing on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, handing out pie to perfect strangers.
No, it isn’t manipulation
Our interest is sincere. We do want to know about them. We want to seize this opportunity to find out who they are, to listen to anything they’re prepared to tell us. We are doing ethnography in tiny bite size bits. (Here too we want to consult the work on methodology.) Some people who wish to make a social difference don’t really care to hear from the Pie recipient. They have a vision of the new world, and they mean to keep banging away at this vision until the pie recipient embraces it. But if we have learned anything about engaging the world it is that it can’t be about us. Our best efforts must begin with a study of them.
Here’s what we hope for. Gifted with pie and sincere interest, the pie recipient is now prepared to find out who we are and what we are doing here. They are reciprocating our interest with their interest. More than that, at this point they kind of like us. We are funny and approachable. There is no evidence of cult enthusiasm. We are by every marker out culture holds dear likable. And at this point, something miraculous happens. Several things actually. People come up out of stasis. Their mood warms. Their interest is mobilized. They identify us as someone interesting.
Pie Project Failure
And this is precisely where most provocateurs leave them. This is where the pie projects really fail. I believe. Provocateurs are mezmerized by their act of imagination, and by their sudden, charming departure from social convention. Free pie. Brilliant. God, we’re groovy, Our work here is done.
Pie Project Success
But pie is, as I have labored to demonstrate, merely the first step, the opening gift. And almost nothing will come of it unless the Pie provocateurs are prepared to follow through with some jewel-like intervention, a further project that takes the pie recipient to the verge, indeed into the very grasp, of a new arrangement of idea and practice. What the pie recipient needs now is a culturematic.
(More on "culturematics" and other things to come. This post took much longer than I can afford, and I am completely behind schedule!)
References
Edge, John T. 2010. “The Healing Powers of a Pie Shop.” The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/magazine/10pielab-t.html
Post Script
Please come join Jack Conte tomorrow for a conversation on Ustream.tv. See the link in yesterday’s post.
Making culture, categorizing culture
Good things happen when we loiter.
We start to notice.
Someone was noticing at the Boston Book Festival.
Here’s what they saw:
literary tattoo
moleskin
cat jewelry
Chicago Manual of Style tote back
funny hat
drunk author
These are telling details. They are not a perfect rendering of Book Festival culture, but they’re a charming first start. Next Book Festival, everyone will be a little more alert. Except for of course for the drunk author.
BusinessWeek sent observers to airports in Paris, Montreal, and New York City.
They began to notice and then to generalize:
Luggage Riflers
CNN Segment Chortlers
Twitchers and Touchers
Fortress Builders
Food Stuffers
The Wired Neurotic
Tabloid Readers
Chair Hoarders
Stuck at an airport, people try to make the best of a bad situation. They resort to several strategies, all of which test the rules of public life. Noticing happens, categories blossom. Is this perfect anthropology. But of course not. We have a very short while to make our observations. The trick is to see whether we can find a "square inch" and work it.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the anthropological work of Normal Bob. He has done a typology of the people we see at Union Square in New York City. Normal Bob, (aka Bob Hain) has observed "skaters," "scenesters," "models," and "junkies." He also has documented Ramblin’ Bill, The DJ and Quarter Guy.
Spotting culture is a way of creating culture. Everyone is smarter and more observant when we’ve given them the ethnographic head’s up. Cat jewelry? I had no idea. But now I will look for it. When I am stuck at the airport, I will use the BusinessWeek typology to observe the people around me. New categories will suggest themselves. Old ones will get refined. Union Square? I will keep my "Normal Bob" cheat sheet in mind as I go.
Our culture is that it is in a state of constant churn. There is lots to observe. Patterns come and go. And when we notice stuff happening, our work is only particularly done. Now it’s time to create artifacts like Bingo cards, BusinessWeek typologies and Normal Bob categories. Having observed culture, it’s time to create it.
References
Anonymous. 2010. Boston Book Festival Bingo Card. Boston Phoenix. click here.
McCracken, Grant. 2010. Normal Bob, Extranormal Anthropologist. This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. click here.
Murphy, Tim. 2011. Airport Gate Semiotics. BusinessWeek. January 10 – January 16. pp. 76-77.
Acknowledgements
Patti Wood, author of Success Signals; Jason Barger, author of Step Back from the Baggage Claim, David Givens, author of Your Body at Work. Wood, Barger and Givens are the authors of the Airport Gate typology in BusinessWeek.
Square Inch Anthropology
I just had lunch with a young professional called Gloria who wanted to talk about what might be involved if she were to prepare herself for a career as a Chief Culture Officer.
We had a good conversation and at some point in the proceedings, I found myself encouraging her to work on her "square inch anthropology."
I had never actually heard of square inch anthropology before. It just sort of thing you find yourself saying.
Here’s what I think I meant. To do the study of contemporary American culture, we are obliged to break it down into square inches.
A case in point. I was telling the young professional about a project Mark Earls, Andrew Barnett, Ana Domb, and I did last year when we were commissioned to study "cocktail culture" in the Northeast. "Cocktail culture" makes up one square inch of my map of American culture.
We interviewed hundreds of people by the end of the Cocktail Culture project, and Gloria and I ended up talking, for some reason, about two of them, a couple of women in a bar in Brooklyn who were "dolled up" and entirely glamorous in a not too assuming way. Gloria has some interesting thoughts on these women and we christened their style "Betty Page." This is a square inch too.
Square inch anthropology says, in effect, "look, we don’t claim to know everything about this culture, but we do have relative confidence in one or two things within it. In this case: Cocktail culture and the Betty Page style." We may now make claims to knowledge without pretending any overarching knowledge or competence.
Why proceed by square inches? Here are 5 reasons.
1) American culture is vast, endlessly various and changing all the time. We can’t know it top to bottom. We can’t map it end to end. The best we can hope for is to establish small pieces or pockets of clarity.
2) We can’t be entirely certain we have something. We are always on the look out for more data and we are perfectly happy to discover that "cocktail culture" or "Betty Page" femaleness actually isn’t anything after all, or that it isn’t the something we thought it was. Our square inches are posted as possibilities.
3) As we begin to accumulate square inches we are in a position to begin to assemble them into patterns. If the squares are provisional, so are the patterns. We are constantly reassembling, looking for a better configuration. And the good thing about the squares is that they prove to be ever so slightly magnetized, which means that they will often "suggest" connections, and when we made them proximate they will come together with that wonderful magnety "snap."
4) Square are an excellent way of getting starting, of baby-stepping your way to an understanding of American culture. We are not claiming to know everything about this culture. We are merely claiming to know, if a tentative, provisional way, about this square inch.
5) Square inches are an excellent medium of exchange. As it turned out, I had a clue about cocktail culture. Gloria in turn had some useful things to say about the Betty Page thing. Swapping square inches in this way is really fun. And it’s generative, very gift economy. Gifting Gloria with my square inch did not diminish it. Taking possession of her Betty Page square inch left her none the poorer.
In a perfect world, we would turn http://www.squareinchanthropology.com into a place to post things we think we know about American culture. (Perhaps not surprising it’s available. I checked.) Please will someone give this a go!
Acknowledgments (and thanks)
To James Michael Starr, the artist responsible for the image used in this blog. John Wong created the image. For more details, click here.
Normal Bob, extranormal anthropologist
So little useful anthropology is being done in/on contemporary American culture(s), This Blog celebrates anything that serves the cause.
Last week the New York Times wrote up a guy who calls himself Normal Bob. NB (aka Bob Hain) has made himself a student of the Union Square area. His blog is a treasure trove of ethnographic observation. Bob has made a typology for the Square, including "skaters," "scenesters," "models," and "junkies." He also has documented individuals: Ramblin’ Bill, The DJ and Quarter Guy.
Bob’s view is unblinkered and unsentimental. In this passage, he documents the passage of a runaway teenager from Goth to Punk to heroin addict.
One of the funny things that I’ve experienced since moving here to New York that I’d never seen before is witnessing first hand the frequent and predictable junk-related falls of the human being over the course of just a couple years. This girl is one of those cases.Just a few years ago she was another teenager hangin’ around the cube, goth, bashful and (found out later) a runaway. Then the winter comes and goes, and in the spring I see her doin’ more of the punk thing, hangin’ out with squatters, a little less feminine, a little more soulless. The transformation is so predictable.Then another year passes and there she is, a useless junkie squatter nodding out in a Starbucks with her Grande Mocha Frappuccino and her forehead on the tabletop. Now I’ve almost gotten to the point where I can see the kid and predict their nodding routine almost to the month. It’s sad but true.
References
Hain, Bob. 2010. The Union Square Chronicles. here.
Kilgannon, Corey. 2010. “Normal Bob Chronicles a Park’s Oddballs.” The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/nyregion/26union.html?_r=1 [Accessed December 3, 2010].
Acknowledgements and thanks
The photo in the upper right corner is from Normal Bob’s website. I have used it without permission. If Mr. Hain has any objection to my use of it here, I would be pleased to take it down.
Tony Blair? Dark fantasy? Really?
Last month, Tony Blair’s memoirs hit the book store.
Almost immediately some copies got reshelved.
A Journey got moved out of "Politics" into "Fantasy."
Into "Fairy Tales."
Into "Horror."
Into "Dark Fantasy."
Into "Crime."
As political protests go, this is something for nothing.
A lively and effective point is made at no cost.
Someone need only pick up the book in one section and move it to another.
Those who dislike Blair have made a point. In a public place. At no real expense. And at no risk. (Moving books between sections isn’t actionable. Not even in Britain.)
And of course, none of this is possible without the new media. Someone created a Facebook group called "Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops" and in almost no time it had 13,000 members.
"A Journey" cost Blair months and months of difficulty to write. It cost agents, editors, and publishers fair sums to bring to market. And all the protester needs to do is to walk the book from here to there. The gesture is easy. The coordination effortless. The point quite damaging.
But of course in a democracy we don’t want to police debate by costs of entry. We don’t want opinion confined by the obscurity of speaker or the expense of the media at his/her disposal. But it is not always pleasant to see what surfaces in public discourse now that there is virtual no barrier to entry. (Me, I think, Blair is probably an honorable man who served the British body politic at some personal expense. We vilify or mock him at our peril. Unless of course we don’t mind driving honorable people out of the political pool. We may not like Blair, but there’s a good chance we will hate the alternatives even more.)
But there is a cost here that’s not obvious. It is the intelligence with which the gesture is conceived and the skill with which it’s executed. And in this case, no complaints. The idea of reclassifying Blair’s book was fun, interesting, witty. It found a way to use the structure of the bookstore, and to the extent it mirrors the categories in our head, the structure of thought, to make a point. Well done.
Of course, the bookstore and those categories were just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity. And I don’t remember this happening before. So the anti-Blair campaigners get credit for the act of intelligence with which they saw what they could do.
Wit gives message a certain credibility. To be sure, it’s not exquisitely clever, but it is much better and more winning than graffiti scrawled on posters. And this gives it a place in discourse. People note it. The Times writes about it. I blog about it.
Even in the "wild west" of the new media, we earn our way in. And in this case, we earn our way in by grasping the structure of our culture and the opportunities it opens up.
Look, there’s a bookstore.
Look, they shelf books by category.
Look, some of these categories capture what I think is true about this book.
Something for nothing. But not something out of nothing. We have to know our culture to make it speak.
References
Enrich, David, and Paul Sonne. 2010. “Bicycle Mischief Targets Barclays.” wsj.com, September 18 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858304575498031387359768.html?KEYWORDS=barclays (Accessed September 19, 2010).
How do we make culture?
It’s like a tune I can’t get out of my head. It keeps circling.
“From its opening sentence, every novel is an argument for its own reality.”
This is the sentence with which Mark Kamine opens his review of the new Joshua Ferris novel, The Unnamed.
But of course it’s going to appeal to an anthropologist. We’re in the business of observing how cultural artifacts serve as arguments for their own reality.
But there’s still something breathtaking about the “reality argument” process. Doesn’t Marx have a line about how we build worlds, and they then build us? Worlds issue from artifice and end up as perfectly actual, so actual you can bounce a nickle of them. The arbitrary becomes the indubitable. Miraculous. And then not. And therefore miraculous.
We have a pretty good idea how this works in natural systems. The complexity theory shows us how things emerge. The Fibonacci series is a nice illustration of how the application of the same logic over and over again produces a robust, complex system.
We have a somewhat less clear idea of how this works in economic systems. How enterprise starts from tiny acts and scales up into enterprises. We can start with simple acts of exchange and, whoa nelly, before you know it, we have a market and a world. Economists are more inclined to posit this miracle than study it.
We are not at all clear on how this works culturally. How do cultures create “mattering maps.” (And who was the novelist who coined this term? Elizabethan Spencer, I think. Can’t find her with Google, but the search tells me that Lawrence Grossberg has also used the term.)
How does a world makes itself? Collecting gives us a glimpse. No coins matter till you have a 18th century penny. Then more and more 18th pennies do and, then, eventually, 19th pennies start to exercise their fascination. The mattering builds its own scaffold, piece by piece. We posit one thing, and another becomes necessary, still another becomes plausible, and a third hoves into view.
It’s all very vector-ish and critical path-ish, isn’t it? With these creations, we want to choose our starting point carefully. It will impose certain limits. It becomes a substructure, potentially an imprisoning assumption.
I think this is what Kamine says finally about the Ferris novel. Eventually the conceit is exhausted. The “what if” ceases to be generative. The novel starts with a man possessed of the urge to keep walking and, er, follows him as he walks. This builds a world and a novel of some interest. But eventually the conceit empties out. The novel does not become a complex system, a world of meaning. It isn’t a plausible argument for its own reality.
And that is of course the big problem with our culture at the moment. Now that we are so various, multiple, contradictory, and dynamic, we have plenty of arguments against our own reality. Making culture in our culture is difficult.
And the makers of culture are tempted by two options.
The first is, perhaps, the one exhibited by Ferris, to build a world from a single conceit, to play out the “what if” until a world results.
The second is to embrace the noise and in that once radical act of abandon to construct a post-modern world that is filled with empty signifiers in chaotic flight. This novel is exciting to write (and read) the first few times, and then it’s “Dude, the novelist’s job is to make meaning, not distribute it.”
The “man who must walk” conceit is a courageous one. It says, “what if I posit this guy with this condition, what if I am true to this, what I write where this (sorry) takes us. What if I “vector” this and see what happens.” In effect Ferris’s peripatic hero is Mosiac. He promises to walk us out of our post-modern condition to something that can be lasting and substantial.
But Ferris fails (nobly) because fictional terraforming of this kind can only work when some of the noise is let back in. It works only if the critical path is not allowed to cul de sac. At least, I think that’s it. The problem, I think, in a nutshell: How can cultural artifacts serve as arguments for their own reality, how can they build worlds? It’s clear they do. It’s up to us to figure out how.
References
Ferris, Joshua. 2010. The Unnamed. Viking. Available at Amazon here.
Kamine, Mark. 2010. Going in Circles. Times Literary Supplement. March 5, p. 20.
Popular Culture Goes All Anthropological
The Steve Carell character is funny because he doesn’t "get it." We can rely upon him to leap to the wrong conclusion. He’s "often wrong but never in doubt."
There is something endearing about this guy. We wish we were as sure of anything as he is of everything. He may be a bull in the china shop of daily life, but he means so well we cannot fault him.
There is something flattering too. Because by this standard, we are all social virtuosos. We do get it. By the Carell standard, each of us is a genius.
But something more than intellectual slapstick going on. When the Carell character [hereafter, Carell] gets it wrong, he makes a small piece of our culture materialize before our eyes.
In Dinner for Schmucks, Carell states the obvious, "She’s talking to the lobster." This is funny because a smarter person would know that the obvious "goes without saying."
When Paul Rudd is accused by a ventriloquist’s dummy of looking down her dress, Carell asks, "Tim–were you? God, don’t do that man." We understand that this discipline of gaze, this new standard of male sensitivity, does not apply to an inanimate object, even an animated inanimate object. But Carell doesn’t quite see this. (The joke within the joke: is the dummy sufficiently animated that social rules do apply to her. But of course it’s a mute question because, this is the still deeper joke, this is really just dummies in conversation.]
Carell doesn’t grasp what the rest of us take for granted. In fact, he draws some of his humor from the fact that he is violating rules the rest of us obey but cannot see. And in this respect he acts as a kind of dowser. He can detect and to bring to the surface cultural rules otherwise invisible.
The Paul Rudd character in I Love You, Man is almost the perfect opposite. He couldn’t find cultural rules with both hands and a map, as they say. The humor of this movie turns on the fact that the Paul Rudd character [hereafter, Rudd] doesn’t understand how to act like a guy. Almost every male socialized in our culture gets "guyness." Somehow Rudd just missed it.
What a splendid piece of anthropology. The movie acts of a catalog of the rules of maleness. Which is a way of saying that Rudd ends up drawing his comedy from the same well as Carrel, from the violating of cultural rules that govern the rest of us invisibly.
All comedy, with the possible exception of slap stick, toys with the expectations installed by culture. This is why the Billy Crystal character in Mr. Saturday Night is always saying, "Do you see what I did there?" He is asking the viewer to admire the intelligence with which he played a trick on our cultural expectations.
But it seems to be that the rise of this school of comedy marks a shift of some kind. I am not sure what to call this school. We could use the names of its leading directors: Judd Apatow, Jay Roach, John Hamburg or its stars: Steve Carrel and Paul Rudd. Or just call it culture comedy.
But the question is this: why culture comedy now? If I weren’t rushing to get to the airport and would have a go at it. I would be your grateful for thoughts and comments.
References
Friend, Tad. 2010. First Banana: Steve Carell and the metriculous art of spontaneity. The New Yorker. July 5. pp. 50-59, p. 50.
Will Digital Culture ever invent a Homer Simpson?
First Observation:
Entertainment Weekly recently gave us the "100 greatest characters of the last 20 years." The list includes Buffy, Jack Sparrow, Rachel from Friends, Harry Potter, John Locke, Miranda Priestly, and Ron Burgundy.
Second Observation:
In his latest book, Clay Shirky suggests that we now have around 1 trillion hours of creative surplus at our disposal. We use this time variously, offering Lolcats and, yes, blog posts.
The question:
Will Shirky’s surplus ever create a character that will appear on the Entertainment Weekly list? Will we ever create our own Homer?
Some thoughts:
I am not being argumentative. This is an open question. The answer could be "soon" or it could be "never," and I’ll be happy. However we answer this question, we will have improved our anthropological understanding of contemporary culture.
There is a general presumption, I think, that we are sitting on a gusher. Shirky’s surplus is so vast, so inexorable that the creation of an EW "100 winner" can’t be far off. And it’s not that we are talking about the proverbial 100 monkeys. It won’t happen by evolutionary accident. It will happen because our use of the Shirky surplus gets better and better. This argument says "soon."
Some will say our surplus is already in evidence on the EW list. They will say that these creatures are the result of user participation, consumer cocreation, the agency and activity of fans, transmedia assembly, textual poaching, and a liberal borrowing from the cultural commons. Homer Simpson is all about borrowing and, like any bard, his standing depends finally on our consent. This argument says "already."
But there is an argument that says "never." The red neck version of the argument rehearses the idea that popular culture is a waste land. Thus speak Keen and Bauerlein. But there’s a more sophisticated approach that says the creativity of the internet is a derivative creativity, that mashup culture must begin with something first to mash. Our culture may be in the direction of the consumer-producer but it will always depend on the producer-producer as a kind of "first mover."
Let’s push things a little further. (And again I do this for the sake of argument only. Living at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics, I can be ecumenical on a question like this.) What if the people who make Homers and Buffys must be funded by something other than the "creative surplus." Must there be an enterprise that engages people to invest financial and creative capitals in a (relatively) expensive and therefore risky productions which then compete in some cultural marketplace.
By this reckoning, the EW 100 list will not exist without the intervention of commerce (of some pretty literal kind that goes well beyond the gift economies of the cultural commons.)
I’m just asking.
The Upshot:
This would make a dandy topic for a Futures of Entertainment session, with Shirky, Henry Jenkins, Larry Lessig, David Weinberger, Dan Snierson, Jeff Jensen, and several other thinkers. With Sam Ford moderating, of course.
References
Anonymous. n.d. "Lolcats" entry on Wikipedia here.
Bauerlein, Mark. 2009. The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future. Tarcher.
Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. Faber and Faber. (For an argument that anticipates and, I believe, dispatches the kind of argument made by Bauerlein and Keen)
Jenkins, Henry.2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. NYU.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU
Keen, Andrew. 2008. The Culture of the Amateur: how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values. Broadway Business.
Shirky, Clay. 2010. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Penguin Press.
Snierson, Dan, Jeff Jensen, and many others. 2010. The 100 Greatest Characters of the last 20 years. Entertainment Weekly. Double Issue. No. 1105 and 1106. June 4 and June 11. here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Gareth Kay for telling me about Shirky’s new book.
Kagan’s smile: negotiating difference in the American body politic
It’s lunch time at 100 Highland, and I am watching the confirmation hearings.
Russ Feingold is imploring Elena Kagan to be god-like as she exercises the powers with which she will be endowed as a (likely) member of the Supreme Court.
Feingold is solemn. Kagan is watchful.
Then, quite suddenly, a small show a humor from Feingold as he acknowledges her origins
I also hope we will continue to see greater diversity on the court in other ways, including representation from MidWestern and Western states. It’s important that all Americans feel that the court represents their life experiences and their values.
And here Kagan is suddenly all smiles (as pictured).
It’s one of those things that strikes a Canadian. In the US, there are some differences that are considered non-provocative. People will shout out passionately to declare their loyalty for a sport’s team, a university, or in this case a part of the country. No one takes offense. More likely, they will shout "Go Wildcats" in support of their own team.
In this non provocative world, everyone, apparently, gets to shout their enthusiasms, and no one minds. At the very worst, they will shout back with their own. This part of the American body politic, body cultural, is entirely non zero-sum. Your enthusiasm costs me not all. These identity differences are, as they used to say during the English Reformation, things indifferent. We can let them stand. We don’t need to fight them out.
But only some enthusiasms are allowed. Had Feingold and Kagan shared a broad smile over a shared political or gender identity, as in "Hey, let’s hear it for Heterosexuals," or "We are lawyers. Hear us roar," there would have been an explosive controversy and an abrupt end to Kagan’s judicial aspirations.
Which raises a possibility. Could the US now so cruelly divided by provocative difference, ever be a place in which all differences, even gender and ideological ones, are things indifferent. Isn’t this a crude measure of what we’re heading for: a world in which every identity differences is treated with this sense of largesse.
There are several anthropological and political science questions here. What precisely is the difference between identity differences that are and are not provocative? How do the things indifferent become things indifferent? What would we need to do to move things different into the things indifferent category?
A couple of posts ago, I was worried about the formation of an American body politic in which the phrase "You just don’t get it" is heard so often. One place to go to work on this issue is to have a closer look at Kagan’s smile
Virginia Postrel was kind enough to interview me for Enterpreneur Magazine.
You can find an edited version of the interview at Enterpreneur.com here.
For the full version of the interview in which you will find me chatty and discursive.
Virginia Postrel: What do you mean by “culture”?
Grant McCracken: I was just watching the movie I Love You, Man. It’s a funny movie, and it’s a wonderfully observed piece of anthropology. The Paul Rudd character doesn’t understand how to act like a “guy.” Somehow this knowledge has escaped him. That’s what culture is: the meanings and rules with which we understand and act in the world.
This makes culture sound amorphous and absurdly abstract, I know. But let’s put this another way. Culture is the very knowledge and scripts we will someday build into robots to make them socially sentient creatures. At the moment, we’re still teaching them to climb stairs. The more difficult task is to read social situations. Unless we’re autistic, most of us do this effortlessly and in real time. That’s because we have this knowledge “built in.” Notice what it will take to build it into robots. This is programming, exact, finite, and incredibly specific programming. Nothing amorphous or abstract about it.
VP: What’s the biggest mistake business people make when they think about the intersection of culture and commerce?
GM: Business people think that because they can’t see it, culture doesn’t exist. They suppose that the moment of sale consists of a rational decision, a calculation of interest, a pursuit of benefit. But every purchase is shaped by meanings and rules. Whether a new product finds a place in the market depends on whether and how it squares with the meanings in our heads. Think of all the innovations that were technically brilliant but failed because the consumer “couldn’t really get a handle on them.” This is another way of saying that the innovation was not designed or positioned in a way that made it consistent with the culture in our heads.
VP: What can a small startup without the resources to have a dedicated “chief culture officer” do to make sure it pays attention to the relevant cultural trends?
GM: Start ups have access to lots of culture knowledge. No need to hire a guru or a cool hunter. They can boot strap this knowledge. (They probably do need to read Chief Culture Officer. I can’t urge this strongly enough. But, hey, it’s my start up.) The thing is to formalize all that cultural knowledge we have in our heads. Right now it’s tacit knowledge. Like how to be a guy. Or things we know about culture, about television, cocktail culture, the local food movement, Burning Man. We have to get it out of our heads onto the table. And then we have to tag the changes we see happening. Then we need to build a big board in order to track the changes that matter to us and we have to start making estimates about when they will reach our markets. For the culture knowledge we don’t know, the trick is to start combing media more systematically. In Chief Culture Officer, I talk about an investment firm in NYC that keeps track of culture by having 5 people read 300 magazines. We don’t need to hire a cool hunter or a guru to learn about culture. We just have to pay attention.
GM: I think Alan Moore put his finger on the problem here in Crossing the Chasm. In the early days, tech start ups are selling to people who are savvy enough to figure out the value proposition and make the product work. Eventually, however, we are speaking to much larger audiences and this means talking to people who don’t get tech. Now we have to build not from what’s technically possible. Now we have to build to what fits in the world of the consumer. Consumers are no longer coming to us. We must go to them. We have to cease being an engineer for a moment and become an anthropologist. We must find out who the consumer is, how he lives, and what will make the product make sense to him. In a perfect world, we build a product that understands the consumer so perfectly, he or she doesn’t even need to read the manual. We all remember our first experience with the iPhone. It was as if the iPhone understood us so completely, it was teaching us how to use it. This is cultural knowledge in action.
VP: Could you give us an example of a startup that beat the big guys by understanding culture?
GM: The world of carbonated soft drinks is filled with examples of start ups that managed to spot the next trend and steal a march on the big guys: Snapple, Red Bull, Vitamin Water, Odwalla, and so on. These startups spotted the trend and rode it to glory. They get in early and ended up owning the market. In the book, I try to show how Snapple accomplished this miracle. The rewards here at breathtaking. Snapple sold to Quaker for $1.7 billion.
VP: People often say, “You can’t teach taste.” At least when it comes to business, you disagree. Why?
GM: Culture is a body of knowledge like any other body of knowledge. Saying we “can’t teach taste” is like saying we can’t teach finance, operations, or human relations. Of course, we can. But of course we have lots of people in business who have a vested interest in making it voodoo. This is the way gurus, cool hunters, and various agencies keep themselves in business. It’s time to get culture out of the black box. I don’t say we don’t need gurus or agencies. For certain purposes, they can create exceptional value. I do say that they should not be allowed to make themselves sole source for what we know about culture. In the run up of 1990s, serial startups found that the guy who was CFO for the last startup was now CMO for the next one. The C-Suite is filled with fast learners, with mobile learners. We need to get culture into this mix.
VP: A.G. Lafley is one of the heroes of Chief Culture Officer. What can entrepreneurs learn from him?
GM: He’s the guy who helped teach P&G, that great temple of marketing, that it had much more to learn about being consumer focused. In Game-Changers, Lafley insists that the marketer must dolly back from narrow utilities to see the larger social and cultural context, to see the consumer in all of his or her complexity. This is the corporation making sure that the product services is “not about us,” not about what the engineers can build, not about what the marketer’s can sell, not about what the corporation has traditionally done. It’s about who the consumer is and how he or she lives. It’s about that software in his or her heads.
VP: What’s wrong with “cool hunting”?
GM: Cool hunting is heat sensitive. Cool hunters only care about the latest stuff, the fads and fashion. But culture is vastly more than this. It is deep cultural traditions. These traditions change, but they do so slowly. And when they change, they do not show on the cool hunter’s radar. Hard to know how to quantify this, but my guess is that fads and fashions make up only 20% of culture. Slow culture is all the rest. What kind of professional ignores 80% of his or her domain?
VP: You’re a creative, divergent thinker, yet you seek to avoid what Claude Levi-Strauss called “wild thought.” How do you balance creativity and structure, and what would you advise entrepreneurs about striking that balance?
GM: I’m Canadian, a notoriously tidy people, the Swiss of North America. But I am prepared to go where ideas take me. I have this from my parents and from my education at the University of Chicago. (The latter looks a little like Lafley’s P&G. It accepts that the exercise is “not about us,” but about the ideas. You adapt as you must to honor them.) I think this makes me like most entrepreneurs who know that good things happen only when wild creativity is routinized and systematized. Entrepreneurs have range! They are there when the big ideas happen, driving people “outside the box.” They then find a way to rebuild the box. They then find a way to make something actually come out of the box. Then they find a way to put that something out in to the market where it turns into ROI. Phenomenal! They are very smart and very determined. But they are also masters of many cultures.
VP: You introduce the idea of the “lunch list” as a way to stay in touch with culture. What is it, and how would it apply to the owner of a small startup?
GM: No one can keep track of contemporary culture but there are people who really understand individual pieces of it. The CCO solution? Take these people to lunch. (Or otherwise engage them.) My editor at Basic Books, Tim Sullivan, is a great guy to take to lunch. He will give you the world of emerging ideas. He will let you his astounding powers of pattern recognition. Chefs, journalists, politicians, CMOs, diplomats, all can give us a glimpse of the forces shaping the world.
VP: You talk about “fast culture” and “slow culture.” What do you mean, and how do their implications for business differ?
GM: Fast culture is great churn of our culture at any given time. Some of the fads will cool into fashion, some of the fashions will cool into trends, and some of the trends will actually stay on to become culture. But most fad, fashion and trend just keeps going, out of our world, eventually out of memory. As I was saying above, it is fast culture that preoccupies us most.
But there is also “slow culture,” and these are the long standing traditions that are part of our bed rock. These get some attention from the academics. The historians have warmed to the idea of culture over the last 30 years especially and this has results in some very useful work. I am just reading a book called Hotel: An American History by Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, a wonderfully interesting look at the hospitality industry as it has shaped and been shaped by the American culture. We need to know about fast culture, but this is like taking a major leaguers’ stats for the season and not the career. We need to know about slow culture too.
VP: Why would Chris Rock make a good chief culture officer?
GM: Mr. Rock knows about African American culture and he knows about non African American culture, and knows how to pass back and forth between them. This makes him a cultural entrepreneur. We might say he’s in the shipping business. Anyone who knows two pieces of our culture is well on his or her way to mastering the larger whole. It’s a lot like language learning. The second language is always the toughest. The third and fourth come more easily.
VP: How can social media tools help small businesses keep in touch with culture?
VP: Does being Canadian give you an advantage as an anthropologist?
GM: An American journalist asked Martin Short why it was so many American comedians were Canadians by birth. Shore said, “Oh, that’s because you grew up watching TV. I grew up watching American TV.” My sister and I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons. We enjoyed them immensely, but there was always a small sense that we were watching something from another world. Now that we are a diverse society everyone has access to a difference of this kind. As a culture we are so decentered that everyone has an exceptional point of view.
VP: How much TV do you watch every week?
GM: I watch the national average, plus I have friends who are not as diligent as they should be, so I watch their hours too. As a civic gesture. TV is a wonderful listening device for our culture. The networks and cable run out a constant series of experiments (aka, new shows) and these shows are so expensive that choice are made with great care. Which is another way of saying the experiments are very carefully crafted. Then the TV view audience votes with their viewership and we see, hey presto, America likes Modern Marriage and it doesn’t like the show that comes after it on ABC, Cougar Town. It’s not impossible to draw cultural conclusions from this event.
VP: What do you make of Lady Gaga?
GM: Lady Gaga burns brightly at the moment. She has crafted herself in the tradition of David Bowie and Madonna, changing dramatically, vividly, and often.Indeed, Lady Gaga ups the transformational cycle. Bowie changed several times. Madonna changed many times. Lady Gaga appears to change with every performance. So we can take her as a measure of the speed at which we change. But she is also a fad struggling to stay on as a fashion and then a trend and then a fixture in our culture. Bowie and Madonna made the cut. Chances are she will not. But I hope I’m wrong. She is a vivid, interesting presence. (The real mystery here is why the music is so utterly ordinary. Bowie and Madona were transformational here too.)
VP: You ran a “CCO boot camp.” Who came and what did they do? Do you have plans for more?
GM: We had a great mix, people from the strategy world, the C-suite, entertainment industry, the military, designers, senior managers, grad students, a real range. In the morning, we reviewed 6 parts of American culture. In the afternoon, we looked at how to monitor and manage culture for the corporation. It was amazing fun. I am now planning to do one for a gigantic corporation. I now have a poll on my website to see where people want the next one held. At the moment, Boston is winning.
Books
Brooks, David. 2001. Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Simon & Schuster.
Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.
Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, Frances. 1986. Cities on a Hill, A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures. Simon and Schuster.
Florida, Richard. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books.
Fox, Kate. 2008. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Revised. NYU Press.
Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books.
Kamp, David. 2006. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. Broadway.
Katz, Donald R. 1993. Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America. Perennial.
Klein, Richard. 1993. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Duke University Press.
Lamont, Michele. 1992. Money, Morals and Manners: the culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Long, Elizabeth. 1985. The American Dream and the Popular Novel. Routledge Kegan & Paul.
Martin, Roger. 2007. The Opposable Mind. Boston: Harvard Business School Press
Postrel, Virginia. 1998. The Future and Its Enemies: The growing conflict over creativity, enterprise and progress. New York: The Free Press.
Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Reprint. Penguin.
Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Wesleyan.
Warner, W. Lloyd, J. O. Low, Paul S. Lunt, and Leo Srole. 1963. Yankee City. Yale University Press.
Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press.
Weinberger, David. 2003. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Basic Books.
Wolfe, Tom. 2001. A Man in Full. Dial Press Trade Paperback.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1993. The Fine Line. University Of Chicago Press.
Rusting Buicks and the destruction of wealth
|
[This little essay was originally posted February 26, 2010 and then was lost when Network Solutions was attacked by malware and "misplaced" my database. I wanted to get it back in circulation. Apologies to those who have seen it before. Special apologies to those who left comments on the original post. There were some beauties. Thank you, Network Solutions for being entirely uncooperative, unreliable, and unrepentant.] Picture yourself in the hinterland of British Columbia. You are many hundreds of miles from Vancouver. You are in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of road so desolate it feels like something out of an X-Files episode. (Cue the X-Files orchestra for that eerie theme music.) There’s a mining camp at one end of the road and a mining camp at the other. Most everyone here get an hourly wage. And the wage is generous. (These rough necks are paid like princes. Who would come to this god forsaken place otherwise?) And because there is nothing much to do here, the roughnecks work extra hours, most days and even Sundays. Add "time and a half" and "double time," and it’s not long before these people are worth a bundle. Periodically, they head for town. For most the destination is Vancouver, many hundreds of miles away. Guys, they are mostly guys, will hitchhike for a while. And they take buses when they must, and eventually they say, "F*ck it, I’m buying a car." And they do. They buy a Buick with all the trimmings. And away they go. The trouble is, the guys have been drinking since they left camp and by this time they are often blind drunk, and so, well, it’s not uncommon to come off the road and wrap the Buick around a tree. And here’s the weird part. The guys don’t get the Buick fixed. They just keep going. What they have done to the Buick captures what they do for the remainder of this trip to Vancouver and for the duration of their stay there. Make a hash of things. The "skid row" in Vancouver is there to greet them. The card sharks, hookers, and bars are seasoned tourist professionals, skilled at various kinds of value transfer. It will take a couple of weeks. But eventually our guys will wake up in a gutter without a dime. And here’s the other weird part. They will brush themselves off, and go back to the hinterland. Some will do this many times over several decades. Which is way there are so many rusting cars on the roads of the interior of BC. From an conventional point of view this is deeply irrational behavior. Why endure the privations of life in the bush, and the exertion and the danger of this kind of labor, unless you are going to keep some part of what you earn? Surely, the point of coming here is to earn your way out. Not to spend your way back in. But the hinterland is a prison to which inmates keep returning by choice. In a sensible world, people would come here just long enough to make enough to buy the motel, dry cleaning store, or bowling alley that will release them from wage labor forever. But no, they take their stake and they squander it. These guys seem bent on destroying wealth. Which brings us to Pirates. I know you were waiting for the Pirate passage. I’m reading a nice little book called And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis. Here’s a passage.
Which brings us back to British Columbia, and an aboriginal practice called "potlatch" when rival communities would take turns dumping Hudson Bay blankets and other valuables into the Pacific ocean. One of the explanation for this practice is that it is undertaken as a very deliberate act of wealth destruction. ( I don’t know the literature here as well as I should so I am penciling these data in provisionally.) This destruction of wealth is a wonderful thing. Wealth for miners, pirates, and perhaps aboriginals is charged with potentiality. To keep this wealth is to do its bidding. Once you’ve made a small fortune in a logging camp, some convention says, you must leave the hinterland, pay that motel, and "start a new life." Which these loggers and miners devoutly do not wish to do. Hence those trips to town. These loggers are fighting demon wealth. Our loggers, miners, pirates (and aboriginals?) are defending their way of life. They are destroying the money that threatens it. They can see the potentiality of all this wealth, they can feel the cultural instructions embedded in it, and they are damned if they will give in it. Better, easier, truer to their life missions, to piss this money away. Actually, there is nothing irrational about this behavior. It has a job to do and it does well. But there is no economic model that came help us retrieve the rationality of this behavior, I don’t believe. To do this we need to look beyond "rationality" narrowly defined, beyond "interest" and "benefit" as it is usually construed. We need to capture the culture that supplies the meanings that shapes the lives that demands the destruction of wealth the results in all those rusted Buicks. There’s a method to the madness. In fact, it isn’t madness. Indeed, under carefully scrutiny a lot of economic behavior, even the b to b variation thereof, is not fully rational. But when the economists find things that do not find the paradigm, they insist these are "irrational." Um, but surely there is a grey area in between. That economic actors are not rational doesn’t mean that are irrational. The trouble is that the idea of rationality is so narrowly defined is to leave much of the human experience out of account. It is true that actors are sometimes not rational but they are almost never not interested. They are always driven by an idea, a concept, a preference, an "interest," and almost always this idea, concept, preference or interest comes from culture. So when Adam Smith excises culture from the proposition in a sense he assumes what he means to prove. And he leaves us with a model that can’t explain new Buicks any more than it can rusted ones. I mean if transportation is the object of the exercise, there’s an awful lot chrome that doesn’t seem germane. And no, we may not put the model on life support by evoking status competition and conspicuous consumption. Nice try, Mr. Veblen but there are so many more cultural meanings besides status at issue in any give Buick that you did not so much rescue the model as cleared the way for a more thorough going assessment of its insufficiency. I guess this post is my way of saying there is a lot of learn from loggers, miners and pirates. It’s just so very difficult to get them to come in for guest lectures. |
- Posted on: Fri, Feb 26 2010 3:23 AM
Melville Herskovits: the Elvis of African-American studies
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.