V. Conclusion

People live in a global marketplace that is supersaturated with digital media going 24/7, and nothing is sacred or secret. Companies literally cannot count on any asset to sustain their competitive advantage these days except for one – knowledge, and the innovation it delivers.

Human knowledge, and the social process that creates it, is the most significant source of new wealth on earth today. Three quarters of the value of all manufactured goods now derives from knowledge. Knowledge is an inexhaustible resource and its frontier is truly endless. Business has discovered that ethnography is the technology best suited to extracting knowledge from human beings, and, like a newborn infant, this reality cannot be stuffed back into its anthropological womb. The third generation speaks with a voice that is distinctive because it stands in a relation to the capitalist machine that is different from the stance of the two generations past.

These anthropologists are not naive handmaidens to the machine, either in the intellectual or technical sense. Nor are they searching desperately for legitimacy inside a brave new world. Rather, these voices are full of self-consciousness, as well as self-confidence. They know who they are, where they are, and why they are there. They practice inside business, but they do not hide their identity as anthropologists, nor do they forget that identity. Instead, they perform a feat of double practice in which they ply their craft while simultaneously observing themselves doing it.

This is a very difficult form of art, but one that provides all of us with a never-before-available vantage point from which to gaze upon the inner workings of capitalism’s advertising engine. By straddling two worlds, they give us something of great value. But the dangers and discomforts of this difficult performance are not lost on us.

V. References

1. Myerhoff, Barbara and Jay Ruby 1982 ‘Introduction,’ in J. Ruby (ed.) A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, pp. 1–35, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2. Ortner, Sherry B. 1999 ‘Introduction,’ in S. Ortner (ed.) The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, pp. 1–13, Berkeley: University of California Press.

3. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990 The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Shweder, Richard A. and Robert A. Levine (eds) 1984 Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Sunderland, Patricia L. 1985 ‘The Psychologization of Everyday Life,’ Master’s thesis, University of Vermont. —— and Rita M. Denny (in prep.) ‘The rhetoric of computing metaphors in everyday life.’

6. Terrio, Swan 2000 Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate, Berkeley: University of California Press.

7. Turkle, Sherry 1984 The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, New York: Simon & Schuster. ——1997 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster.

8. Vladimirova, Ekaterina and Kyrill Petrin 2001 ‘Russia: “pyramid” on the table,’ The Business Value of Emotional Intelligence, pp. 289–96, Amsterdam: ESOMAR.

9. Wellner, Alison Stein 2000 ‘The end of leisure?,’ American Demographics, July, pp. 51–6.

10. Wenger, Etienne 1998 Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.