Tag Archives: postmodernism

Cultural Symbols: 121 Years After Wounded Knee

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121 years ago yesterday the massacre at Wounded Knee took place.  December 29, 1890.  By the time it was over, at least 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed and 51 wounded, though some estimates placed the number of dead at 300. And this anniversary got me thinking, for a number of reasons that go well beyond the lack of recognitions at the national level of one of the greatest atrocities in American History. It made me recall the comment someone I knew made many years ago after watching Dances With Wolves – the person in question, understandably moved by the realization of what had happened to native populations in the US, decided that she was metaphorically Sioux.  “I’ve decided I’m Indian. Maybe not by blood, but I am by how I feel.” This blond-haired, blue-eyed person began buying dream catchers, adorning herself with an array of turquoise and listening on occasion to Gabriel Ayala – consumption was the expression of her new-found respect and she saw the repurposing of another population’s material culture as an expression of solidarity. However, her first visit to the Kickapoo reservation was, shall we say, a bit of a shock and led quickly to disillusionment. The realities of the “Noble Savage” in the modern world were a shock, as was the fact that her announcement of Indian-hood wasn’t met with the enthusiasm she expected. Understand, I don’t write this as a condemnation of her or her motives. I mention it because it reminded me that representations of culture are more than objects to be consumed by the dominant population, they have meaning, particularly if the population having its culture appropriated has been beaten, exploited and mythologized. I got to thinking about the nature of cultural appropriation, globalization and how we make money.

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It often denotes acculturation and assimilation, but it often connotes a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture as well. It can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. Once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, they take on meanings that are significantly divergent from those they originally held. More often, they are simply stripped of any real meaning.

George Lipsitz developed the notion of strategic anti-essentialism to address the phenomenon. It is defined as the calculated use of a cultural form, outside of your own, to define yourself or your group. Increasingly, in a hyper-branded, postmodern world where people are in a near-perpetual state of self-reinvention, adopting material and symbolic elements of another culture is the norm. Their symbolism and significance is retooled and they become something new. Granted, this is a normal aspect of cross-cultural interaction, but there are issues of power at play here that can’t be overlooked.

I remember a colleague getting terribly upset of the number of people in Hong Kong wearing crosses back in 2005 – the use of the cross as a fashion statement had become common, even amongst non-Christians. When I pointed out that he had a yin/yang tattoo but wasn’t a Taoist, he had no difficulty justifying the appropriation of that symbol. While he continued to struggle with the idea of his religious symbol being used in a largely non-Christian context as a fashion piece, he did recognize that it was bound to happen in a changing global milieu. But the difference between the context of Western/Eastern cultural appropriation is shaped by scale and wealth. Unlike China, native populations in the US (or the world over, for that matter) aren’t seeing the equality gap change. There is no semblance of equal power. “When the majority culture [or elements of it] attempts to strategically anti-essentialize themselves by appropriating a minority culture, they must take great care to recognize the specific socio-historical circumstances and significance of these cultural forms so as not the perpetuate the already existing, majority vs. minority, unequal power relations.” So what does nay of this have to do with businesses and brands? Quite a bit, actually.

Depending on the brand and the product, it is often difficult to puzzle out whether a company is attempting to make a comment about the oppression and condescending observation of the “other” by the dominant culture, or simply reflecting a stereotyped feeling of the exotic in a way that was insensitive and ultimately diminishing to the people from whom they have taken cultural expression. And that’s a problem. Not only is it morally suspect, it can lead to a backlash against the brand. What this means is that companies need to do more than have a superficial understanding of the symbols they use and the products they sell. They need to understand the people behind them, what is off limits and how the use of those symbols and objects will be interpreted both by the minority culture and the population as a whole.

Brand As A Personal Adjective

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In the minds of many running businesses, particularly those related to luxury and fashion goods, brand choices are driven by what we make.  Wealth equates to capital. And there is some truth in that, but there is more to capital than Dollars, Euros and Yen.  There is social capital, cultural capital, psychic capital. The general presumption is that the increasing shift towards brands, as opposed to a focus purely on goods, reflects our culture’s assumed obsession with displays of wealth and status.  The bigger the name brand, the more you can afford and the more you want to show that wealth off.  Indeed, there is some truth to that notion, but it’s not a simple as it seems.  First, a little history.

The rapid rise in importance of brands in the 80’s coincided with a social and political landscape at odds with the counter-culture movements defined, in large part, by a questioning of wealth for its own sake.  Punks carried this over starting in the 1970s.  Antiestablishment rhetoric and symbolism became ingrained in pop culture, but there was a response to it.  Amongst what would come to be termed “Yuppies” brands had the capacity to signal power and economic clout.  So began a reversal of the previous two decades.

The catch was that in a postmodern world where brands could be used to signal identity and affiliation with a host of cultural sub-groups, brands began to be associated with lifestyles as much as wealth.  Doc Marten’s were symbolically repurposed by punks and took on a meaning unrelated to the display of wealth. As another example, Benetton began a series of advertising campaign that demonstrated an understanding a growing number of their consumers were gravitating toward brands which aligned with their social and political beliefs.  While Doc Martens were appropriated by several subcultures, Benetton redirected their brand image and message to reflect a specific worldview.

The rise of the lifestyle parallels the rise of social fragmentation and communication breakdown which lies at the heart of our postmodern condition. While only a generation or two ago one’s identity was prescribed according to traditional groupings of class, religion, nationality, region, race, etc., the world has today rapidly become one enormous, undefined and unstructured mass where identity is more problematic. Brands have become badges, controlled as much by the buyers we don’t understand as the ones we do.

What brand today do is signal systems that reflect personal values and objectives. A brand’s strength is semiotic in nature.  It provides a messaging tactic for an individual as much as a product, retail setting, service, etc. A shopper isn’t just buying a hammer or a pair of shoes.  He is buying an adjective, a sense of self, a membership pass into one of several “tribes” to which he belongs.

That means thinking beyond economic clusters and age cohorts.  It means learning what a brand says in a range of contexts and thinking about its value to the consumer on a cultural and social level that is often fluid. It means thinking about what current and potential consumers wish to say about themselves in a given cultural context, rather than reducing them to a pile of statistics.