“We see
not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is.”
--Dorothea Lange, documentary photographer
What do our cars, food, sports, movies, electronics, homes,
and jewelry do for us? How do they
create our world and direct our responses to it? This is the “cultural question.” That’s
because the grand array of culture is never just about things, people, places,
and experiences. To understand our own
ecology, the world made by and for humans, we must be able to move from objects
and events into the depths of what it all means—and why.
This means transforming information by refining it, using
analytical tools, into the far richer material of intelligence. It is not enough to observe and
describe. Somewhere, somehow, the raw
material must be refined to become research gold.
The mandate
This mandate of cultural analysis is simple but not easy: to
search through the record of human behavior and weed out the “ethnographic dazzle”
—a term coined by British anthropologist Robin Fox to mean “blindness to
underlying similarities between human groups and cultures because one is
dazzled by the more highly visible surface differences.” These are the fascinating but essentially
meaningless behavioral variations that divert attention from the deeper core drivers
behind any cultural aspect—a thing or experience—to explain how and why it
motivates its buyers and users.
Over the years our analyses have involved categories as
diverse as diamonds, steaks, swimming pools, shoes, lawns, milk, and car
mufflers. As well as space exploration,
college education, real estate, careers, fine art, and male-female bonding. In
all cases we posed the same questions: How do people actually USE these
categories as tools? What are they FOR? What makes them so useful that the
categories and behaviors are passed down from generation to generation?
If you understand people and their priorities, all this
falls into place as a grand array of exemplars; templates for the way people
think, act, and make decisions on any aspect of their culture. We isolate and clarify the top facts that
describe these aspects as operational on the ground, how they work for us and
evoke action, meshed with what’s already in the mind.
And if people use it, have ever used it, want to use it, or
will use it in the future, it’s part of culture. And very often the way things are designed to
be used are seldom the way they actually get used outside the lab, by real
people in real time.
Examples
As much money and time as people spend on swimming pools,
after the first few months, they stop swimming regularly and instead use them
as water features or as landscaping backdrop
for parties. It’s a cultural trope – a mini theme which intuitively appeals
because, when you think about it, people don’t live on land alone. They settle
where the land meets the water.
Similarly, as exciting as space exploration is, the public
identifies with living human astronauts, not with billion-dollar robotic
equipment. Machines can’t replace humans in the public imagination. The one
exception – the Mars “Rovers” – they have a dog’s name, and look something like
robotic dogs – our oldest nonhuman companion as a species.
In another category, a college education isn’t about
education as much as it’s about becoming a fully socialized person, building class
(as in upper and middle) affiliation. You can’t sell a university by stressing
academic rigor because education as a value is assumed at any school. Excellence
isn’t a distinction here.
Culture on the outside
When most people think of “culture” they think of it on
stage, behind glass, in museums, libraries, archives. That’s one level. Then there is the other end of the scale –
the culture of the houses, the fields, the streets and squares, the direct link
between campfires of 200,000 years ago and the television and social media of
today. It’s what people do around the
fire - tell stories about who they were, how they got here, and what is
expected of them – that our early hominid ancestors did, and we still do today.
It’s not what it is (fire/television) but what we use it for – that’s Culture
the Tool.
Our mission as analysts is to understand how cultural values
motivate behavior and social thinking.
We do this by examining the evidence of these values over long time frames,
from ancient and pre-history to the present.
The historical record of what groups have paid for with their money,
time, and experiences is basic evidence—far beyond what people say they do and
want—for what they really believe is important.
Culture is the ultimate case of groupthink. It is the body of knowledge and custom passed
from generation to generation in the oldest heritage system on earth. But culture is far more. Museums and archives collect and preserve the
rich treasury of past artifacts, from bones and stones of prehistory to
high-tech artworks and computer devices (in their own museum) of the digital
near past.
The jewelry case
While we most often consider culture as the catalogue of
these exhibit pierces, material culture is just the outward production, the
showcased expression of culture in three dimensions. In fact, jewelry is the first finding or clue
(predating clothing) to be discovered as an insight into the mind of
prehistoric people. The beta form of personal adornment (as termed in material
culture) certainly has more to tell us about universal human values (or what we
can call the “permaculture”), as underlying the roots of any culture now
living.
Beyond metalworking, precious and semi-precious stones, and
the earlier bead, bone, feather and stone example, all jewelry has a story to
tell that extends from prehistoric to contemporary and from here into the
future of culture. From wedding rings to
chains of office and military medals, jewelry has been almost entirely about
relationships – to other people, our bonds with them within organizations, and
our attainments of distinction. That’s
not even on the list of where jewelers think value lies in the formula “carat,
cut, clarity, and color.” That’s how jewelers
buy diamonds. Customers buy symbols of relationships. If you don’t believe that,
ask any woman to talk about her jewelry. You’ll get the whole story.
Jewelry is just one visible facet that tells us who we are
by what we value. Sports is ritualized
violence and head-to-head competition in a palatable, rule-bound form of
conflict, running from chess to football.
In the tech arena, computers revolutionized communication by making what
people already do faster, easier, and cheaper—whereas computing was originally
seen as a tool for a scientific elite working with math. Word processing is now the central writing activity,
essentially turning computing into letter-writing at digital speed with global
reach.
By examining the evidence for its core human value, we can
build an analytical system to “read” from the big data what all our artifacts
and behaviors mean at their deepest level.
