Proposing Fashion: The Discourse of Glossy Magazines

This essay discusses the production and discourse of fashion magazines, or glossies, which are an integral part of the ‘fashion system’. As intermediaries between producers and consuming public, the glossies’ main purpose is to propose: to make proposals about what in particular makes the latest clothes ‘fashion’; about what the latest trends are likely to be; about the importance of the names behind them; about reasons why fashion should be important in readers’ lives; and about where the clothes themselves may be purchased. Such proposals legitimize fashion and the fashion world in cultural — and commercial — terms.The glossies make meaningful connections between things that seem to be essentially independent; they give them social lives by creating an imaginary world about them; and they provide historical and aesthetic order in a world whose products, by their very seasonality and potentially chaotic quantity, are likely to go unnoticed. Fashion magazines represent the fashions shown in the catwalk collections. In so doing, they create ‘a discourse of fashion’ whose key evaluative terms are used by different people across time and space to mark out and contest semantic territory in which local cultural preferences engage with globalizing norms of fashion taste

Perspectives in Business Anthropology: Cultural Production, Creativity and Constraints

This paper draws on extensive fieldwork in a wide range of creative industries to argue that creativity itself is under-theorized, and should be considered as both enabled and inhibited by numerous constraints guiding the choices made by creative personnel during the course of their work. Six sets of constraints are outlined in the context of different forms of cultural production: material, temporal, spatial, social, representational and economic. It is argued that the performance of creative work is similar in part to Turner’s concept of “communitas,” when an aura of individual creativity is passed to other participants. This kind of liminal space is also found in creative industry ritual events, which enable participants to communicate on an equal footing and gain knowledge and connections that they can then use at work in their normal everyday lives. These in turn may have a long-term effect on cultural production, creativity and constraints

Trade fairs, markets and fields: framing imagined as real communities

"This article describes how trade fairs act as a framing mechanism that enables participants to come together for the exchange of goods and services and to perceive themselves as acting in a social field. This way, trade fairs make markets possible. Based an ongoing participant observation at book fairs in Frankfurt, Tokyo and London, the paper discusses central features of fairs in the light of theoretical categories like networks, institutions and cognitions that are commonly employed in economic sociology. In this context, it highlights that participants negotiate the technical/material, social, situational, content/appreciative, and the use value of goods, values which are then equated with a commodity exchange value in the form of price. Trade fairs frame order, but they are also events where the respective field might be re-configurated. The contingency of personal interaction, the lightness of 'talk' and the carnival-like setting of fairs make them a site where disorder might be created that in turn can lead to change of field and market." (author's abstract

Magical Capitalism

This essay looks at ways in which various branches of capitalist enterprise and their supporting mechanisms are often not as rational as they make themselves out to be, but operate instead according to magical premises. Magical thinking, as a mode of thought, creates or invokes extraordinary connections between things, people, organizations, and beliefs in order to understand, explain, influence, and occasionally predict, events. Magical practices involve magicians, magical rites, and magical representations ― almost invariably working together to perform the overcoming of uncertainty. And uncertainty, in the sense of unpredictability, is what underpins government, business, and the economy. The essay makes use of seven scenarios ― ranging from Davos and Brexit to GPS and Japanese manga ― to illustrate how politicians, media, education, and various forms of cultural production make use of language, technologies, and images to perform magic in contemporary societies

An Anthropological Approach

This working paper – written for inclusion as a chapter on Japanese society, to be published in Chinese by the Beijing University of Foreign Studies later in 2011 – looks at popular culture as a form of cultural production. It argues for the need to study popular cultural forms like advertisements, ceramics, fashion magazines and folk art as both products and as processes of design, manufacture, distribution, appreciation and use, which must all be taken into account. Precisely because popular cultural forms are both cultural products and commodities, they reveal the complementary nature of the two categories of culture and the economy. The paper outlines and analyses the different ways in which social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital are converted by those participating in advertising, ceramic, fashion magazine and folk art worlds, and suggests that popular culture may best be seen as a name economy

Evaluating Ceramic Art in Japan

This paper describes and analyses preparations for the holding of an anthropologist potter’s one-man show in a Japanese department store. Based on participant observation, it describes in detail the strategic planning of, and preparations for, the fieldworker’s own pottery exhibition in a department store located in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands and home to a long tradition of porcelain and stoneware production. The paper focuses on the main players in the ceramic art world; the social interaction underpinning an exhibition; the conflicting ideals of ‘aesthetics’, display and money (pricing); and the ways in which different sets of values, and evaluating processes, affected the reception of the author’s work. It concludes by developing a theory of values in the light of recent writings in the field of cultural economics