Today, we worked through some of the language and cultural diversity of China as seen in the making and marketing of rap music. You all noticed some things that were new to many of you: the fact that rap—as a melodic/rhythmic form—is on the one hand universal and on the other tightly bound to local languages (in some cases) or offered through the lingua franca of Mandarin.
Its hard to know, unless you know Mandarin (or Cantonese or Yunnan-hoa, Yunnan "language" or dialect). . .but what about the content of the music? Are these rappers saying the same thing?
Ask in your team. Do you have someone who speaks Chinese on your team? Find out.
As for Agar, he's struggling with the culture concept. You'd think the anthropologists would have this all worked out. But they don't. This is because (Agar might say), culture is a relational concept.
We didn't get all the way through this article today, so we'll spend 15 minutes on it on Thursday. The big questions for me are still about convergence and divergence: when are cultures (behaviors? practices? meanings? shopping? what?) the same or different? What is universal?
We talked about what it means to be "polite," and wondered if people from New York are rude, or just in a hurry. We talked about the "rural howdy wave," and I found out that this is an Australian rural thing, not just an American rural thing. Check this out if you like:
http://thegreynomads.com.au/lifestyle/featured-articles/wave-of-approval-for-rural-roads-ritual/
This image (from the Australian website, below) was called the "phatic finger." The idea of "phatic communication" comes from asking what, exactly, is communicated when someone says "how are you?" and the answer is "fine." What's really communicated? Maybe the respondent had a horrid day. But the ritual greeting does communicate something. What? If it is "phatic" it signals "I'm a nice person, I care enough to ask, I've followed the ritual." This is purely social information. Lots of interaction is like this. Phatic.
Y'all suggested some interesting universals. Agar touches on universals, but doesn't go very far with the idea: that one way of looking at "culture" is to see it as those things that are uniquely human, shared by all humans. The culture stuff is part of what makes us different from our animal cousins. And its both those universals and the local peculiarities that become quite interesting for marketers. Some anthropologist once said that the key question for anyone interested in studying what humans do is this one: "Is it the same, or is it different?" That basic analytic task is shared by all sciences, in fact. And by careful marketers, IMHO.
Some Lexical Items
Watch out: there may be a sort of a quiz about these:
• Rich point
• Ethnography
• Empirical
• Ethnocentrism
• Methodological vs. Moral Relativism
• Culture
• Context
• Participant Observation
and our old friends, • Convergence vs. Divergence in marketing
That's going to wrap up the anthropological kick-start to our international experience.
Watch this space for instructions on how to complete your FIRST TEAM REPORT. Its coming up soon. If you have not met outside of class, you need to start thinking about how to do this. Do you have your team-members' email or mobile phone numbers? Think about it!
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