Americans May Have No Identity,
But They Do Have Wonderful Teeth. *
-Jean Baudrillard, paraphrased
Identity as Territorial Marker
Behind the concept of “identity”, hidden, lies a much more powerful human trait, namely the sense and extreme need for ownership, control, and territoriality. Through physical, social, and cultural territoriality, humanity is animated by nature to compete aggressively for emotional space, rewards, and attention. This activity is aggravated further by a continuous change in the population aggregate – shifting or increasing competition for all resources – and the consequential physical (as well as emotional) stress, with a continuous emancipation of citizens, distancing themselves from the control by others; embodied in the state, business, and church.
The concept of territoriality is part of the sociology of the “survival of the fittest”, as well as the foundation of capitalism and in fact, of all human competitive institutions – from commerce and education to sports and church. In this sense, even charitable Mother Theresa was a serious territorial contender and competitor. Very few persons could give away as much as she did, owning nothing and wanting little more than salvation. She emerges as one of the fittest in the contest for the supremacy over the field of benevolence, equally admired or despised as if she had been a political or sports figure in their respective realm.
Language as Identity
Claude Levi-Strauss, Belgian-French anthropologist and structuralist, a contributor to structural anthropology, argues that kinship and identity contain fundamental aspects of culture that are made up of specific kinds of structures, including the structures of myths of a clan or tribe. These highly structured myths facilitate understanding of cultural relations and relationships. He placed concepts of myth into opposite differentials of extremes, juxtaposing semantic concepts, and because the language structures of the narrative supplied the syntactic glue, he sees his anthropological research as part of the Language domain.
Myth, being everywhere, not bound by rules of accuracy or probability, never the less, follows the same language structures no matter where they are found. Levi-Strauss argues that myth is language, because in order to exist myths have to be placed into narratives and their structures belong to language. Social and cultural myths live in the paradox of timelessness and in time. He also argues that myths are not just subsets of Language, but are language themselves.
Language is also the holding tank for the valuation process. Without language metaphors it is difficult to establish norms, standards, and values.
The Loss of Language is the Loss of identity.
Linguists agree, when a language, the most important individual element identifying a culture and its people, dies, the unique and special knowledge of the culture, which is embedded in the language representation of customs, ceremonies, myth and lore, is lost. Of 7,202 languages its spoken worldwide today, 440 will be extinct within two decades, while the total aggregate will be cut in half within this century. At this point in time, fewer than 10.000 or 0.3 percent of the world population speaks one of the 3,340 rarest languages. (Example: The only 185 people who speak Karitiana live in a Brazilian village with not more than 191 inhabitants.) Today, 52 percent of the world population is speaking one of just twenty languages. The reasons that half of the languages presently still in use will be silenced within this century are mostly because of global/economical and plainly self-survival. Hundreds of aboriginal and native tribal languages will be forgotten, having the unfortunate fallout, that anthropologists will be unable to construct migration patterns or a more appropriate taxonomy and timeline of the evolution of languages.
In America, the concept of the “melting pot”, a gradual, often unconscious process of assimilation, tries through a mildly coercive process to assimilate minority groups into a national mainstream. The pressure to meld individual ethnic, cultural and social differences into a national standard is pernicious. It is in complete contradiction to the concepts of individuality, diversity, and choice. It favors the dominating cultures and subverts the minority cultures.
Seen from a single standard society, this sometimes light and heavy handed approach is necessary, because the more room given to individual identity, language or tradition of a minority, the greater the increase of separation and distance from the mainstream.
According to Professor James A. Hijiya, History Department, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Northerners think that American identity starts at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts; Southerners at Jamestown, Virginia. Even Westerners seem to agree that their national identity begins when English men and women alight from their boats and plant their boots along the seaboard of the East. Massachusetts and Virginia, according to the consensus, are gradually joined by eleven other colonies touching the Atlantic; and from there westward the course of history takes its way. The colonies pull apart from England, rush to the Mississippi, purchase Louisiana, annex Texas, steal California, and foil a plot to drag history southward through secession. As commonly thought and taught, early American history moves steadily across the map from right to left.
The defining event is either the Revolution or the Constitution: “colonial” history is limited almost exclusively to those people in those colonies, which in 1776 (or 1787) will create a new nation. Because the configuration of individual states provides the basic structure for American history, and therefore the American Identity, it is inevitable that people belonging to different states will be neglected. The Native Americans, the Spanish (and, later, the Mexicans), and the French are relegated to serving as backdrops, not actors. Thus, the typical schoolbook hurriedly introduces the Aztecs, Columbus, and Samuel de Chaplain, but then forgets them as it settles down to describe in chapter after chapter the minutiae of Anglo-American life, without reference to the rise and fall of a Native American empire. As now conceived identity occurs only in close proximity to Anglo-Americans.
Hijiya’s history includes the immigrants from Asia whose descendants will trek east as the true “pioneers,” the actual first “settlers,” of America. His history places the Spanish and the French not along the English border but in the centers of their own empires in America; a story not merely of “territorial expansion” but of expansion for some and contraction for others; of conquest and defeat. He proposes to show that “America” does not start as a colonial seedling along the Atlantic seaboard that naturally grows across the continent but is instead a land mass occupied in different places by different people with different identities, at different times.
It is a fact, in the Massachusetts land trials, as recently as a decade ago, that the collision between two language worlds, the written and oral, was not properly refereed, when claims of ownership by Native Americans were denied on the basis that they could not show archival proof of their identity and therefore of their existence.
Place as Part of Identity
Even if a geographical location has ramifications, “Place” is not just an intersection on a map, a point between two railroad destinations or where one resides or stops for the night. It is an amalgam of diverse physical, emotional, and perceptual elements – real and imagined. “Place” is football field, factory, neighborhood, garden, park and childhood hiding place, house and home, school, church and hospital.
The individuality of “Place” is forged by the people that inhabit it over time and the evolution of their sense of personal success, failure, alienation or belonging. They invent “Place” and in return, “Place” gives them certain identifiable characteristics. “Place” is the heartbeat of a community that offers over a lifetime security, fulfillment and contentment but also tragedy, pain, and despair. It is a valued refuge, home of origin, the center where things are discovered, ideas set in motion, relationships found, and plans developed.
“Place” is deeply imprinted on the soul. When removed from “Place” one’s memories activate and bring bittersweet longing for the personal, cherished quality of things, persons, and experiences connected with it. Acts of recall – activating all senses through mementos, keepsakes, and correspondence – generate deliberate, sentimental, and pleasurable nostalgia, comprised of fact and fiction. They also provide the plans for new futures.
Natural Corollaries
Bauer Birds build nests of amazing complexities from reeds and grasses and fill them with glittering assortments of objects just to attract their mates, as well as signal to other birds an identity marked through territorial boundaries. It seems that inherited natural identity, a combination of color arrangement and feather formation, posture, and agile motion, is not enough to signal to others the outstanding and singular qualities of an identity. In this case, to become distinguishable from the species, even the environment has to be incorporated and rearranged in considerable ways to achieve the goal.
Maybe humans are not much different. In their sphere, identity is also not natural and organic, but artificially constructed in relationship to a complex system of values that are permanent or in constant states of change, self-selected or selected and imposed by others. Ordered into a biological and ethnic taxonomy of language communities and placed in fecund or less fertile environments with a variety of geological and climactic conditions, each micro system, in addition to the characteristics of shared features, has its own variables – which is manifested in the construction of cheek bones, eye lids, eyebrows, hair, skin color, and other features.
Within each major ethnic segment of the human social culture there are shared proportions of the human skeleton, muscles, skin tone, and hair, spawning standards of perceived ideal proportions, which change over time and lead to judgements of too big, too small, not the norm or perfect.
There are good reasons why a person (who in relationship to the norm is too tiny or emaciated) would want to project characteristics of strength and power and offset reality to impress others. Samurai and most tribal warriors understand the necessity to project and intimidate through an illusion of larger or taller body size in form of broad-shouldered battle dress, larger headgear, and feathers that extend the dimensions and the volume of the figure.
The Social Construction of Identity
Social anthropologists suggest that the human species has evolved to such an extent that members are actually capable of creating individual biotopes – niches in which physical, social, and cultural environments become suitable for certain kinds of stereotypical personality projections – namely, the ideal business man or woman, the politician, the lawyer, or the clergyman.
From childhood on, the culture learns to deal with levels of integrity perceived in individuals or groups. Examples abound of hidden, masked, and changed identities in literature. In Gottfried Keller’s Kleider Machen Leute (Clothing Makes the Man), charlatans living by their slight of assumed identity become socially acceptable for a moment by merely changing their outer appearance.
Children are introduced to fables like “the wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Even in traditional mythology, embedded in the success-story of the 19th century German sea merchant Ballin, is the concept of a fake identity – Ballin, without any financial backing or social standing, worked from a tattered shack on the peer in Hamburg. But by corresponding with smartly engraved stationery, he worked himself up the social and financial ladder so that today one can find boulevards in Hamburg named after him. This mythology contextualizes the fact that one of the very first typography courses was not taught within an art or design school, but at the Harvard Business School. It helped to shape the identities of early corporations, at a time before the dawn of marketing.
Mythology fast forward: At some business schools applicants have to choose a metaphoric animal identity and describe themselves in terms of the characteristics of the animal of their choice they feel will represent all of the qualities and traits of their character. In the admissions process, carnivores like wolves, lions, cheetahs, and tigers, or animals of cunning like the fox and coyote usually win out over animal identities like stallions, gazelles, and zebras. In a competitive world of survival, the paper-scissors-stone game is real.
The Fear of Not Having a Specific Identity
In our own historical backyard, Lazar Lissitzky becomes El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies changes into Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret takes the name of Le Corbusier, and Marcel Villon turns into Marcel Duchamp. Do these changes represent dissatisfaction with family heritage and social and middle class standings? A wish to drop all former identifiers? (Thus immerging incognito while cutting bait from tradition and shedding former histories.) The name Mies, for example, translated from German is not very flattering. “Mies” is a term mostly used to describe conditions of weather and negative qualities of experiences, like “a miserable dinner party” or “the wretched weather”. By adding his mother’s maiden name with the specific prefix “van der”, which is very common in family names of landowning farmers and their offspring in the northern regions of Holland and Germany, he anoints himself aristocrat. In Germany the same prefix of “van der” is also attached to a lower rank but well recognized level of nobility. Through this name change, consciously or unconsciously, Mies van der Rohe is escaping the specter of middle class standing and the trauma of having his work called miese or wretched – even woeful architecture.
Designers and the Field of Language
When designers enter into the field of identity they are hardly equipped to deal with the obvious and hidden complexities of social language, its development and acquisition. They rarely step out off their one-way visual language platform, which is connected to formal image and icon making. They avoid the communications aspects that involve the meaning maker – namely the reader of images and icons – who has to make sense of a very stilted and abbreviated language. The interpreter is asked to traverse an enormously deep social and cultural crevasse, mostly through instinct, but without much guidance.
Internationalism, from which stem the doctrines of standardization, streamlining, and the military-like process of designing institutional and corporate images, believed that there is universality in the experience of all peoples. This may be true for the most basic survival needs, like provisions for food, shelter, procreation, and even for emotional security, freedom of thought, expression, and movement. But not for much more, because people from different cultures belong to different language communities and their language systems represent and encode completely different sensory worlds and value systems. Even the concept of death has multiple, positive and negative interpretations. From anthropological sources, one can ascertain that certain Native American tribes hold little vocabulary with none for ownership of objects and space or time. Their experiential filter would not translate to European or Asian sensibilities, and vice versa.
The Corporate Struggle with Marketing Identities
There are too many examples that epitomize the reality and conflicts with identities or what identities can or cannot deliver. Identity is critical in the hierarchical struggle for dominance of a market as in the “Cola Wars”. It separates and connects at the same time. One could question the reality of Generation X. Did it really exist or was it artificially concocted or contrived? Did individual youths find their identity in the value descriptions presented by the media or did the media clearly see a social phenomenon in action?
The late Jay Doblin, weaned on Raymond Lowe’s streamlined marketing methodologies, at one of the rare occasions that allowed him to let down his hair, mused about identity design and corporate images as the most lucrative aspect of design service. At the same time, he suggested that identities are without any kind of proven functional reality or proven communication benefits. “Identities may be good for clients, but they are great for design businesses.”
Maybe the most difficult task for an identity is to be more than what the whole of an entity can be. There are some negative after-effects when the book’s cover is more exciting than the contents or where negative behavioral attitudes of personnel belie the concepts of helpfulness, responsibility, openness or selfless service.
An identity can exude moral or ethical attitudes. But during a time in the last century, while the Container Corporation of America ran an outstanding adverting campaign of humanistic themes of duty, morality and ethics (Great Ideas of Western Man), its CEO was driven in a chauffeured limousine to prison – where he was interred nightly for unethical price fixing. No matter how wonderful the external image may have been, it could only rub off some (but not enough) of the tarnished truth.
There are corporate identities that function well. They are mostly bound to a single person or family who over long periods have delivered quality and dependable goods or services. However, in these times of runaway and rollover mergers, restructuring, and reengineering, there is no time to really assess the real characteristics that make up these newly emerging companies. What are they? Who is behind them, corporate wolves or sheep in Gucci clothing? Who knows? Time will tell and reveal their true identity. You are what you are, not what you want others to believe.
*
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist.
The Columbia World of Quotations.