Anthropologize

For those non-Anthropologists out there, the AAAs are the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In other words, the time when 5,000 or so anthropologists (mostly academics) descend on their city of choice and watch each other watch each other, give papers, and ask very smart questions about very smart questions. We’re in Montreal. I saw over 15 presentations yesterday (none of my friends were here yet, so I packed ‘em in). I have to say, it felt really good to flex my brain a bit and I was super excited that I still remembered what the words modernity, neo-liberal, subjectivities, hegemonies, and agency meant in the anthropological context. Big words are silly, but it’s fun to be in on it.

SO. Here are my notes from day one- basically the ideas that started to hang together in patters and mean something to me. I’ve been anthropologizing everything for so many years now, I guess I just can’t turn it off.

1. The Senses. Especially interesting presentations about the implications of the senses on marketing. How we no longer use only text-based communication, but also other types like smell and sound. The cool idea that “cultures map out different sensory experiences” and “they way we see things [or smell them or taste them, etc] is affected by what we believe..”

2. Awareness can be an analytic category. We have many types of awarenesses. From ideas like prejudices and assumptions, to sensory thinks like expectations and perceptions. This can be useful to brands in both external marketing and also INTERNAL systems and mechanisms. I loved an ethnographic anecdote about how to employ this idea in the business to business realm and started thinking more and more about the disciplines of strategic and brand planning and how to Pitch.

3. Brands need to think about “what they are doing rather than what they are being.” Like I’ve said a thousand times, BRANDS ARE SOCIAL.

4. Smell has colour.

5. We’ve only been using the tip of the iceberg when it comes to applying semiotics to branding.

6. There is “meaning-making” in the creative process as well as in the creative product. Or any product. Huge implications for anthropological inquiry here… might have found an interesting paper… maybe an interesting PhD.

7. Hope. Hope was the topic of the PhD I was working on in 2005-6. At the time, I couldn’t convince funding bodies that it was relevant. I was lucky to have advisors that, even though one of them admitted she had no idea what I was talking about or how it was anthropological, supported me anyway. Turns out we were on to something- there was a whole brilliant panel on Hope and Temporality at this year’s meetings… and the room was PACKED. I was thrilled, frustrated and sad about the progress those awesome scholars have made without me all at the same time. Sigh.
Questions I was asking that they are asking:
“What is the object of Hope?”
“What is the relationship between education and hope?”
“How is one’s capacity for self-realization influenced by Hope?”
“How does Hope create a reorientation of knowledge that inspires action?”
“Does Hope have productive power?”
“Who act as agents of Hope?”
And one cool twist, thinking about Hope vs anticipation… apparently someone called “Adams” in 2009 defined anticipation as “the palpable effect of the speculative future on the present”. I’d been saying something along the lines of “Hopes are objects, like memories of the future, that influence the present.” Again, sigh.

8. There was a whole paper on the photographer as ethnographer (and vice versa). Turns out that thinking “your camera is like your eye” is a whole lot more complicated than it sounds. Cool takeaway? “There are cultural dimensions present in image making”- from realistic to expressive photos, from documentation to representation, there are a lot of analytic tensions to choose from when developing one’s voice. !!!

That was Day One.