Learning, Creativity, Ideation, and Laughter

How to structure an ideation session? How do you make ethnographic data useful in a design setting?

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.

Pulchritude, Sex, and Transforming Consumption (I)

This sounds like a rather odd blog-title, but remember: I'm in Colombia, the place the created (or inspired) the likes of Gabriel García Marquez or that anthropologist whose writing seems intentionally obfuscatory and intends to be shamanistic and poetic all at once, Michael Taussig.

I don't aim to be poetic, metaphysical, or especially artistic. But I want to write a bit about a dinner that I prepared in a very pleasant condo in Bogotá last night where I learned a bit about my lovely hosts, deodorant, gay sex, and the idea of consumption. Creation of pulchritude through consumption, perhaps? (What an ugly word that is, considering that it aims to signal beauty, right?)

The label on this (probably) 12 year old bottle of deodorant cream says "Pulcritud a toda hora con Yodora," beauty all the time with Yodora, which is where part (I) of this post ends. Now, on to part II.

Transforming "Consumption" (III)

So all this deodorant-as-lube raises some questions about the nature of what marketers, and now many anthropologists, call 'consumption.' Time to get theoretical for a second, and offer a hat-tip to our academic colleagues who generally think and write with greater depth and (sometimes) clarity about things like this.

Are we trapped into thinking that you can't have human sexuality without "consuming" a product? It seems an odd thing to consider having sex as an act of consumption. Very odd indeed but it is the sort of notion that a lot of cultural critics would enjoy playing with. "Ah, the commodification of sex!" And the anthropologists would get ready to present another paper on the commodification of everything. Following Marx, anthropologists (some of us) have taken quite a liking to that word.

As David Graeber has pointed out (in an unpublished manuscript about consumption) we tend to assign a lot of things to the consumption category that don't belong there. Things like watching television of playing baseball. Or even having sex. There is a problem in doing this.

One problem is that these things have little to do with consumption and a lot to do with human sociability, human interaction and human delight, fun, production, and other things. Sport, for example (and sporting can mean several things, here).

The Yodora example, if nothing else, is just one more reminder that what we may want to call consumption is not consumption at all, but a re-invention, or maybe just an instrumentality, a tool to do something social: have sex, hang out with friends and feel that you don't smell bad. Or a discursive instrumentality: Yodora as a tool for after-dinner charla in Colombia.

Might it be useful to stop using the term consumption unless things are really used up or destroyed in their use? The idea of conservation of matter argues against using consumption incautiously because stuff that we buy is usually transformed through use and not destroyed at all. The Yodora cream runs out because it goes onto your skin and then is sweated off, or washed off, and it goes somewhere else, where someone or something else may have to deal with it. So following a product through its recycling and re-use, following Desjeux's (2001) product itinerary, is often enlightening for this very reason. We aren't consumers. We are transformers.

A lot of what Daniel Miller (1998) and others, like Appadurai (1986) and Desjeux have done, and we should be glad of this, is to point out how what we uncritically call consumption is rarely what it seems to be. It is almost never about buying into what the product's makers have in mind, and it is very often something rather creative, something conditioned by individual understandings, individual re-writings onto the meaning-board of a manufactured product. What else was Roland Barthes (1988) writing about when when he pointed out that authors don't simply communicate meaning to readers?

Readers write their own meanings onto what they read. Simple enough. People make new meanings of the stuff they buy. This is a venerable idea, one that Nancy Munn (1986) writes about: value transformation through exchange, a helpful way way of looking at goods in exchange systems which does not, as far as I know, show up in Miller's work. But it fits.

It seems anthropology is stuck in consumption mode. We are using up an idea that marketers handed to us. Anthropologists too often use words like consumption or commodity when those words really don't fit what people actually do. People don't consume, they transform.

Maybe we should be done with the word consumption when we are talking about economics, exchange, or products. What passes as consumption from the perspective of marketers is not really consumption at all. Consumption is about using up things, or destroying, potlatch-like, the goods that you have accumulated. David Graeber is right: a soccer match on a neighborhood playground in Bolivia is not consumption. Neither is watching television, nor is having sex. We use things that we have purchased to do these things. But does this mean people who buy stuff are co-opted, through their purchase, into in an ideology that descends from some corporate boardroom in some wealthy city? Are these people less human? Is their participation in a single and harmful kind of social system thus insured? Maybe, but if so, just how does this work, exactly?

Certainly a lot of products which people buy aren't worth a shit, many of them are down right harmful in the short and long run. Sometimes people find out about this and stop buying whatever they bought. Sometimes, the harm in buying and using something is not obvious, and sometimes it is obvious enough but people keep buying it anyway, often for rather complex reasons. Some of those reasons may include clever advertising. Other reasons may include our greedy stomachs or our faulty folk-sociology (enhanced by amoral advertising) about health and safety. Think of some fast foods, most Sports Utility Vehicles, and nearly (but maybe not all hand guns, which are often very bad for people in the long and long run.

But some things that people make, sell, buy and use are a great deal of fun and don't do too much damage. The point is that each instance (or context) in which a product is bought, taken home, used, re-used, interpreted, argued about, and passed on (to the next user or to the garbage can) can have rather different consequences from another product in another context.

What different sorts of products have in common in the patterned ways in which they are used and re-interpreted has not been much explored, except by archaeologists.These patterns are worth looking at.

I have a hunch that things we eat are are used and shared in rather peculiar ways that may not match the way lawn mowers or carpeting are bought and used. Some things are displayed. Some things are served at a table. Some things, like some kinds of underwear, are hidden. We need a vigorous contemporary archaeology and another look at material culture, here, as much as we need a theory of economic value. If we can get a handle on these things we may not need a theory of consumption at all.

So I don't think Daniel Miller has it right by using the term consumption all the time. Perhaps it is time to try replacing the term with transformation.

Our understanding of ourselves and our human relatives elsewhere in the world who also buy and sell and use stuff that they did not make with their own hands is just beginning. Taking an archaeological view, in which money can be seen as a very recent innovation and mass-manufactured and globally marketed goods as something even newer, we can forgive ourselves for not having adequate models for understanding what is going on when we buy and use stuff. Stuff like Yodora.

It isn't enough to say, as some anti-consumption straw-woman might, "ah, that Yodora. There goes the commodification of human life, again!" But it doesn't make sense to simply say "there is again the creative power of consumption! See how people resist the corporate world by consuming Yodora to have sex!" Too many of us who study 'consumers' tend to do one or the other.

Using Yodora as a discursive tool, as an element in an informal, after-dinner salon, however, doesn't have anything to do with consumption at all, and everything to do with sharing a few laughs and getting to know the comfort levels of host, hostess, and guest with topics and behaviors that only show up among close friends, and after some good food and a little white wine.

The empirical question of what else Yodora is about requires some field data, and, among other things, some pharmacological data about what happens when Yodora use strays from the use indicated on the product's label and, for example, onto the feet (or other parts) of people in Colombia.

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Works Cited
Appadurai, A. 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1988. Image, Music, Text. New York: MacMillan

D. Desjeux, 2001. La méthode des itinéraires comme méthode comparative appliquée à la comparaison intercutlturelle. (http://www.argonautes.fr downloaded 04/2009).

Graeber, David. n.d. Consumption. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.

Miller, Daniel. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Munn, Nancy. 1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pulchritude, Sex, and Transforming Consumption (II)

(This is a re-post of something that should have been included in a three-part sketch about Yodora, but somehow got unpublished. So here it is, again.)

I really like the image at left, of Monica Bursztyn and some Bolivian model, in Simple, an art gallery where I spent three lovely days giving a workshop in ethnography and design.

But this photo is about sex (and, about gay sexuality) so it belongs here with I learned about Yodora deodorant in Colombia. Moni and I were in Bolivia before I flew off on TACA airlines for Colombia, where the following images was taken and where I learned about Yodora. So this seems a good introductory image, here. Now, on with the story.

There are several things to say about Yodora, here. I'll pick one: its about what people in the trades (both anthropological and business) call consumer products, and how people use them and what this might say about our notion of "consumption."

I was invited to dinner by a fellow researcher, an economist and business guy who runs a small research shop in Colombia. I ended up cooking. This happens, sometimes when people feel comfortable, informal, and perhaps a bit insecure in their own culinary skills (at least that was one of the more interesting reasons given for the immediate acceptance of my half-kidding offer to cook dinner the afternoon before). So I cooked. Pasta; with a sauce of pleasant Mendoza Savignon Blanc and tomato and garlic and this and that of whatever seemed fresh.

In this Bogotá condominium, I was especially aware that what we were doing was far beyond the reach of most Colombians, most people in China, indeed, most people on the planet. But we did not enjoy the meal any less for this awareness. One tends not to feel too guilty about eating well when a good Savingnon Blanc is involved in more than the pasta sauce. That accounts for some of the levity in the kitchen and at the dining table. The rest I leave to the altitude of Bogotá.

After dinner, the conversation turned to consumer products, especially consumer products as they come to be understood and used by people who are not consumer product makers and who don't live in fancy condominiums. Poor people, in a word. (I mean poor in dollar terms, in fiscal capital, nothing else; I don't mean poor in cultural capital because wealth and cultural capital are not always found together). Anyhow, we were talking about the folks that consumer product makers call "C class" consumers, lower income or moderate income consumers.

We agreed, my host and hostess and I, that people who make consumer products are usually not very much aware of how the products they make are actually used. This is especially the case when consumers are poor people: Campesiños. Jente del campo. 农民 (nóngmín, peasants or farmers). This is because middle class people, managers, and corporate leaders don't often spend time hanging around in lower-income people's homes. Perhaps a few of them do, and certainly some of the people who make consumer products understand what life in that sort of home used to be like because they come from that sort of home. But it is usually the case that corporate execs don't live in favelas. You get the idea.

(This by the way, suggests a rather interesting line of inquiry: how is it that some companies seem to know what is going on with the people who buy their stuff and may even care a great deal about such goings-on, while others don't seem to give a shit. How many corporate executives come from a lower-class background, and what difference might that make, I wonder?)

After dinner came coffee, panelitas de arequipa y coco (a Colombian treat, and yummy), and the following exchange.

"Look here," my host said. (Actually, he said, "Mira, Ken!" but I'm translating, here).

"There was a time, maybe twenty years ago, when the borders were closed in Colombia and you couldn't import any perfumes at all. I worked, then, with a guy who created imitations of famous American perfumes. That's another story. But this deodorant was used in those days by poor people and other people too."

He pulled his foot into his lap, removed his shoe, and to my delight and the mild revulsion of his lovely wife, off came his shoe and sock, and he rested his foot on the table.

"People would put the stuff on their feet. Other people would use it as a deodorant. See: it smells fresh. There wasn't much else in the market. But farmers used it for their feet. Let me show you."

My host (Juan Felipe R.) got up from the table, and exclaimed,

"Paga muy bien attención porque voy a enseñarle algo importante." Pay attention; I"m going to teach you something important.

He came back with this little tube of toothpaste, and started dabbing it on his feet. "Like this, they used it!" he said.

His wife covered her face with her hands. "Diós. Por favor, Leo. . . " she said (but she was laughing as hard as I was, by this time).

"Okay okay, then wait," Leo said, and he got up and rumaged around until he found this old jar of Yodora.

"So they'd use this." (The foot was on the table again) and not only for feet. Gay guys, they'd use it on their behinds. You know. When they wanted to screw."

I asked, "What? They did what?"

This conversation was moving in a delightfully silly and unabashedly frank direction. I'm thinking, 'These Colombians are not uptight like Angelinos, or Chileans. . . maybe this is that Latin openness to sexuality or something.' Or maybe it was just the Savignon Blanc.

"They used it for lubricant, that's what! What else?" he said.

By now we were all cracking up. So the questions might be, how is Yodora used now? How is it that products come to be used as they are intended by their manufacturers (as they almost never are). Is there no universally available and inexpensive lubricant, condom safe, that one can buy to use when having sex in rural Colombia? Is there? What? Or is it simply the case that people got along fine without such stuff for years but now that condoms are in the sex-picture, things are different?

Below: the researcher, economist, entrepreneur, and table-manners violator who brought this all to our collective gustatory attention—Juan Felipe R.

A ton of human sexuality questions, not to mention table-manners questions, come to the surface, here.

Table manners aside, it strikes me that there hasn't been much anthropological attention paid to the commercial stuff, the artifacts you have to buy, that go along with sex. That might be an interesting, and even an important, field of inquiry. Too often, people who care about HIV or human sexuality in general don't ask specific enough questions about what people actually do, and I don't know of much research relating human sexual behavior to the products people use when they are having sex. It would be interesting work, right? The book would sell, at least. And that would be a great topic for another post (which really belongs as an extended article for American Ethnography, which likes such racy things.

The more general learning, however, is one that applies to all consumer products. Things change their meaning through exchange systems, and meaning, as we know from linguistics, is best understood by actually watching and listening to people. You can guess the meaning of a word from a dictionary, but hearing it used, and watching as people use it, will give you a better picture of the ways words come to mean. The same is true for consumer products. Reading the directions or watching some commercial may give you a clue, but the reality of a product's meaning may be quite different from what the manufacturer has in mind. That's the case with Yodora. And it should be a reminder to any anthropologist who studies goods and the people who buy and use (and make) them.

Yodora is designed for one thing, but it can be used for at least two other things. So, when you encounter a consumer product, how has its meaning changed when it actually gets used? Ethnography—and a bit of Savignon Blanc—may help you find out.