Get Real: People Will Want to Connect in 2008

Posted by: Robbie Blinkoff

We are convinced that the new year will find more people responding to the problems affecting the USA…by setting out on a soul-searching mission that eventually will lead them to..arrive at a place of “radical acceptance”…says Context Principal Anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff in the USA Today.

Take a look at the following article to hear more about what Robbie and others predict for 2008.

www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2007-12-30-getting-real_N.htm

Natural Setting

Posted by: Robbie Blinkoff

Ethnography is all about observing and interacting with people where they live, work and play. If you are not in the “natural setting” where the behavior you want to understand happens, then you can’t see, touch, taste and feel what people do as they would naturally do it.

re-Freshing Fresh in the Marketplace

Posted by: Robbie Blinkoff

The not so new word that is totally the rage is of course “fresh”. But fresh is overused, or is it?

I finally had my Fresh moment.

I love eggs, always have. Especially a good over-easy at those great diners in New Jersey where we ate eggs, toast, drank coffee and whiled away hours talking esoterica. But then somebody decided the microwave was a good idea. Ugh. Nothing delivers less to me, actually less than less, than eggs from a microwave. It’s just wrong. Nuking takes the potential for pure joy and creates pure rubber.

Now with fewer diner moments in my life, I’ll occasionally go for a good fried egg sandwich.

The other Saturday I’m with the kids at Panera. I get that feeling for eggs and I might just try a nuked egg sandwich. Maybe by chance it’ll make the cut and satisfy my desire. Or maybe the Panera bread will make it edible? Resigned to a rubber egg, I step over to pick up my sandwich. Then my Fresh moment happens. I see not one but a dozen raw eggs nestled in little cups in a frying machine. The eggs are popping, bubbling and they’re streaming rays of sun from their sunny side up. Am I dreaming? No microwave in sight. I get my sandwich and sit down. My moment of Fresh lingering. I set the kids up and pull out the sandwich. Fresh bread too, ooh and a nice chunk of white, yes white not yellow, cheddar. A little butter, and the nice hot egg. My Fresh moment continues as I bite into the sandwich and it delivers. Nice, not diner, but pretty nice.

Fresh is popping up everywhere. Doing fresh right however is not so easy, especially at convenience restaurants and in the grocery store. But apparently it is possible to deliver Fresh in in all kinds of marketplaces.

Santa’s Real

Posted by: Robbie Blinkoff

Santa exists.

The other day we took the kids to our mall where we usually visit Santa. We even do the Breakfast with Santa – pancake breakfast as Santa walks around and a magician closes the show – all before the mall opens up. You need to know it’s an old school mall and makes the whole setting kind of simple and special. You also need to know that I am Jewish and am into Buddhism, my wife is Methodist and we belong to a Presbyterian church. Our son Max Abraham just got the idea last night that it would be awesome to celebrate Hanukah and Christmas. He is 3. Max also asked Santa for gun the other day. A real gun – meaning, you know, not stick, something with plastic and makes sounds.

All these interactions with Santa got me to thinking about the role of Santa in our lives. So I decided to do some calls. I figured that Santa must have a unique insight into our human condition and how we are doing today. Santa probably knows our problems real well and our hopes and dreams and all else. What I found was actually not the font of insider information I was looking for, but actually something better. I found out that Santa’s real.

Santa’s real because Santa acts as a reflection a sponge a mirror for all of our hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations. I put poor Santa Larry from Towson, MD through the anthropological interview mill. But Santa Larry’s clear that given his Santa schedule he does not have the time to get into big conversations. Santa Larry consciously does not take mall gigs because he only gets 1-2 minutes with each child and then on to the next. But even in the private events and school gigs he really doesn’t go deep with kids. At schools for example, he’ll hit 15 classrooms in two hours.

But he did light up about just being out and about as Santa and how people honk their horns, wave, want to get their picture taken with him and he just laughed. Then I found out he gives all the money he makes to Santa Claus Anonymous – an organization that provides Santa Claus gift certificates to children in need. The organization started in 1934 in Baltimore, Maryland.

I figured I should talk to more Santas, some Santa must have that psychotherapist angle I am so enamoured by. But all I got was more of the same. Santa Pat (he said just call him Santa Claus everyone does) just got back from a Disney gig and said “I had so much fun I should have paid them!” The only difference with the Santa Pat interview as opposed to Santa Larry, is he did touch on the reality that people do ask him, often in whispers, some very serious requests. Like, “can you bring my dad back?” When he gets these requests he does the best he can to make people feel comfortable. He said to me that “you’d be amazed at what you can come up with when you are put in that position.” And Santa Pat meant that in the best way possible – he feels he helps people in tough situations.

To be a Santa, “you just got to have compassion,” Santa Pat says.

And it’s this comment and the others which makes you realize that Santa’s role is to put up a compassionate and understanding mirror for us to reflect on during this season. The irony is not lost on this newly minted Christmas celebrator. The other major player’s role this season is to do the same for those who wish to follow in his shoes.

So I went out to get this deep introspection from Santas this year and got a different gift. Santa’s real. Santa continues to reflect our hopes and dreams and fears and wishes. If we want him to.

The Production of Culture

Posted by: Robbie Blinkoff

Culture is Produced: It’s liberating to think that we have a hand in producing our culture. After you figure this out, it’s hard to believe you didn’t think of it before. What it means to an ethnographer is that you can observe behavior and see how people thread together their senses of who they are, what they do, how they live, what they use – into the shape of their “culture.” Most of the time we do not see ourselves as active producers of culture. This is because much of who we are is already encoded in our system. But disrupt that system (e.g. insert a new technology like cell phones) and see how we re-produce parts of our culture to fit the new norm.

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Get Real: People Will Want to Connect in 2008

Natural Setting

re-Freshing Fresh in the Marketplace

Santa’s Real

The Production of Culture