AANK13502U Anthropology of Marketing; Performance and Tricksters

This course is only for master students. Please note that there are special admission criteria’s for this course for students not enrolled at the master in anthropology.

The course will approach marketing and promotion (PR) as ethnographic fields. We will address the contemporary business concept of marketing as a social and cultural phenomenon, relevant to anthropological study. In business studies, marketing is regarded as the process of facilitating the sale of products or services to individuals and organisations. Over the past few decennia, the business field of marketing has become increasingly interested in ethnographic methods and anthropological theory as inspirational sources for producing strategically relevant knowledge. There has been a focus on sensemaking, cultural narratives, “user needs” and “co-creation”. In this light, marketing may also be regarded as a modus of convincing or persuading other human beings by communicative and performative means in specific cultural and social contexts. Marketing thus is a social phenomenon worthy of classical anthropological analysis, as much as it may be a professional pursuit of ethnographically informed PR professionals. 

In this course, we will apply classical anthropological theory and newer performance theory in anthropology to selected core issues in marketing. We will discuss the social formation of persuation in light of anthropological performance theory, drawing on ritual theory and studies in rituality and the liminoid. We will be working from a constructivist approach, inspired by philosophically informed configurations of reality and its construction, as well as the significance of temporary modes. In this light the course will address how something is socially conjured and becomes real and convincing as a particular social form. 

Our discussion will be driven by the well known mythological Trickster figure of multiple meanings. Setting out from a concern with better understanding the role of this figure in social life as both a dynamic force and a marker related to limits and bordercrossings as well as to significance and interpretation, the course will aim to understand phenomena related to marketing, in which performance and particular forms of sociality inform perceptions and decisions.

Amongst the topics to be addressed will be the West African trickster figure of Legba and its relation to the concept of the fetish, historical and contemporary elaborations of Trickster, fate as “god at play” and the interrelation between market, performance and joker. 

The course is thus not an instrumental guide to the functional use of ethnography as part of   a contemporary marketing tool box. This is thus not the course to choose if you are mainly interested in a prescriptive, applied approach to the use of ethnography in modern, Euro-American marketing systems, their history or practical functions in business.