The Refrigerator and American Ideas of “Home”.

Thomas Maschio

The particular refrigerator that I am recalling in my mind now was literally plastered over with pictures of children, and with certificates and citations that marked their athletic and educational accomplishments. There were photos of family gatherings, of cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmother and grandfather. One could see that pictures considered most emotionally important to parents –the youngest son being hugged by a grandparent, a daughter riding the family dog –were placed at eye level, on the front of the fridge. Photos of distant relatives, business cards of the family insurance agent, plumber, painter and house re-modeler were placed either below eye level on the front of the fridge, or on its side in a more peripheral space. Also, the mom of the household explained to me, pictures were sometimes replaced as new and important family gatherings took place, or if children did something that merited that special “Kodak moment”. Thus a process of creating or recycling family history, of outlining degrees of familial affection, of intimacy, or of distance was spatially diagrammed on the refrigerator surface.

Other interesting items found on the refrigerator surface included a set of moral and religious maxims that, in this housewife’s words, kept her “spiritually focused”.

And, there was the all-important schedule of family events and, as well, the equally important list of tasks to be completed, such as shopping or picking up children from various school or sports activities.

The anthropologist (in this case me) who first sharpened his analytical eye observing the rituals and mores of a remote Papua New Guinean tribal group began to see the refrigerator in a new light. It was an object that had been ritually marked by this middle class, midwestern family. When one enters a ritual space, like that in which an initiation or a mortuary ritual is performed, this space is usually marked off from the surrounding area by objects that have a special “alerting” quality. The object can be something ordinary, even mundane, but some modification is done to it so that its nature is altered in a symbolic sense and it comes to convey a host of special meanings.

A ritual object is used during a ritual. What was the ritual in which this refrigerator was being included? And, what meanings did this ritual express about middle class American lives? This refrigerator, and millions like it that are put to similar symbolic uses, occupied central stage in a ritual performance that had as its aim the creation of domesticity, and a feeling of home. Increasingly the refrigerator has become a sort of billboard advertisement for many strongly held values about what a home should be, what sort of emotional and moral tone should distinguish it, and how it should run.

What is the American culture of domesticity? What values go in to making it up, and how can we see these values pictured on our refrigerators? Well, to begin lets consider the issue of American mothers being responsible for the flow of household tasks. That is, one of the ways that the middle class mom judges her success as a mom and housewife is by successfully coordinating or balancing a host of household activities. Running kids to soccer practice, or little league, shopping for and preparing family meals, picking up kids from band practice, etc… All these activities must be balanced and organized if the household is to function smoothly, indeed if it is to function at all. Keeping the family activities running smoothly is not only a mother’s key responsibility but often, as my interviews reveal, a significant source of feelings of satisfaction, competence and pride. The family master schedule enshrines the values of balance and organization—helping to put order into a potentially chaotic environment, and provide the home with its particular rhythm and tone. The master schedule, placed on the fridge, revealed the kitchen and the refrigerator surface to be family command and control centers, wherein certain notions of how a home should run were displayed.

In the present age domestic life consists in organizing and balancing, not only household tasks but, more and more often, children’s play activities, mother’s own professional work assignments, family activities and outings. Often simply keeping up the flow of these activities requires the skill of an organizational and planning genius. To the anthropologist’s eye (me again) the continual attempt to keep up this domestic flow of activity seems to have a repetitive, ritualistic quality.

The ritual of continually creating a domestic world also involves the evocation of sentiment. Many domestic acts and routines are specifically understood to be acts of emotional nurturing and caring. These accomplish what can be called an emotional “warming up of the home”. By placing photos of the household’s children on the front of the fridge the mom of the household was performing one of these acts of house warming. The photos were evidence of parental care, concern and affection. Other photos that I saw on the fridge, such as those of distant relatives, also had a certain teaching function.  The mom told me that she would often point out pictures of these kin to her young children as she told them who they were and how they were related to the children. Bits of family history were woven into these descriptions. The refrigerator had become a sort of memory board that functioned to evoke a feeling of family.

The children’s art taped at odd angles of the fridge, the certificates of their educational and athletic accomplishments----an A gotten on a spelling test, a certificate awarded for good sportsmanship on a little league team---were testament to the fact that domestic life for this family was also about the emotional nurturance and praise of children. Keeping up the flow of emotional nurturance as well as of domestic routine is an emotionally trying endeavor for many mothers that I have spoken with. And so the proliferation of homilies—pithy and uplifting sayings that express sympathy for the mother and home-maker’s lot, or that have a straightforward religious message---all usually plastered on the fridge so that the household’s mom can take a dose of daily comfort and counsel.

The objects placed on the fridge are expressing personal experience and sentiment, and a feeling of home. The refrigerator has ensnared traces of memory and of sentiment---memories and sentiments that define what a home is, and what domestic life consists of for many Americans.

This is not of course the whole of the story. Other American refrigerators I have seen in the course of my work reflect another definition of domesticity. In a number of more upscale homes I have been in the kitchen is not so much a place for celebrating family values and children’s achievements, as a stage where one displays a sense of mastery of domestic arts, such as cooking, knowledge of different cuisines etc., and where one can exhibit an overall social ease. Here refrigerators most often have a clean surface. Often the upscale household considers the adorned fridge to be busy and, what with all the pictures of dogs and children, and all the bracing maxims, perhaps a bit too sentimental. In this sort of household the refrigerator also serves as a ritual marker. What it marks, above all else, is its owner’s taste and aesthetic judgment. The gleaming stainless steel surface and sharpness and boldness of line of the Sub Zero for instance connote a kind of mastery of a developed aesthetic vocabulary, and as well it connotes a real assertion of self. Here sharp lines and gleaming surfaces are associated with the suppression of domesticity and sentiment.

 As any anthropologist worth his salt even a little bit will tell you, the seemingly most mundane material objects of a culture can tell you a good deal about what that culture is, what it values, and what some of its most central rituals and routines are all about.©

Metaphor, Anthropological Insight, and the Advertiser’s Art of Persuasion

Thomas Maschio

The advertiser’s art of persuasion demands the use of powerful metaphors—metaphors that express fresh insight into the relationship between the consumer and the product and product category.  However, persuasiveness has a more mundane aspect as well.  This is the necessity for incorporation.   The advertiser needs to lead the consumer to a desire to incorporate the metaphor he has made of a product into the consumer’s life-way.  The advertiser uses metaphor to persuade the consumer that the product meets the needs of some aspect of his life.  If the metaphoric advertising message succeeds in making its point, it sells the product while it builds an identity for the product or brand.  The advertiser is a maker, a manufacturer of meaning, as is an artist.  Both must be masters of metaphor before they can be considered successful. But, the advertiser should take his initial clue as to how to fashion a compelling metaphor from the consumer.

Aristotle said that to be a masterful maker of metaphor is one of the surest signs of genius, for it indicates an ability to see the similarities in seemingly dissimilar things.  What this means is that the metaphor maker perceives powerful systematic connections between phenomena that had not been perceived before.  A successful metaphor gives us that ah-ha feeling.  It strikes someone as expressing a novel way of looking at things; it seems a flash of insight.

Cultural anthropology can help advertisers become more powerful makers, and masters, of metaphor.  We say this because the most effective anthropology, and the most effective marketing anthropology, attempts to ferret out systematic connections between cultural phenomena, such as consumer products on the one hand, and aspects of the overall cultural system on the other.  In laying bare these connections for the advertiser, anthropology provides him or her with a host of possible analogies and metaphors to use in communications strategies.  More to the point, cultural anthropology is especially effective in illuminating how consumers themselves understand the nature of products through metaphors of the consumers’ own making.  Successful advertising often requires that the advertiser recognize how consumers metaphorically associate products with certain ideas and values.  By becoming aware of the consumer’s own metaphor, the advertiser is tapping into a rich set of meanings surrounding needs and emotions.  The advertiser can then build communications strategies around these metaphoric associations and in the process refine and dramatize them.

This sounds somewhat high-fallutin’.  Let’s put forward a concrete example of what we mean.

In one of my research projects my brief was to uncover the consumer’s relationship to car parts—spark plugs, engine valves, etc.  The advertiser was particularly interested in charting out the varying degrees of emotional investment that different market segments have in these products.  But, we were warned, the phrase “car parts” often evokes a wry smile in consumers.  The category seemed “low involvement”.  I often hear this phrase in preliminary meetings with clients who feel that the product category as a whole simply lacks emotional pizzazz and that consumers simply don’t engage with the category emotionally.

In cases such as this the client and advertiser inevitably begin searching for a hook, a way to associate the product line and brand with a compelling message.  They need to push the process of incorporation forward.  They need to have the consumer incorporate some compelling meaning about the brand into their own lives.  They need a powerful metaphor.

However, in the case of the car parts project and in most others I have done, we found that people were already creating their metaphors about the category.  The process of incorporation was already going forward in the culture at large.  The research found out precisely how.

We found our metaphor when we considered this product line’s relationship to male and female gender roles.  In our interviews we noticed that car parts played a rather important part in the life stories of many of our male respondents.   Working and middle class men frequently had a fascination with muscle cars and muscle car parts in their youth.  Though many had outgrown such interests long ago, they retained a feeling that car parts are part of the masculine domain of expertise.  Many continued to take pride in this expertise.  The knowledge of car parts had become one of many markers of male identity for them.

As men mature, they take on different social roles and develop different aspects of their gender identities.  This affects their relationship to products in rather dramatic ways.  As regards car parts, young men’s enthusiasm for muscle cars, and for parts that added speed and power to cars, reflected their need to display physical prowess and “cool”.  For many young male respondents car parts and cars themselves were but thinly veiled metaphors for, and advertisements of, sexuality.  Older, family men had by and large lost such concerns and no longer felt the need to advertise themselves sexually in this way.  They, in contrast, were interested in car parts being durable and dependable, rather than simply powerful.  We perceived how these respondents had begun to view the product category in terms of their own social role of family protector.  In fact, many of our more middle-aged male respondents took a good deal of emotional satisfaction from placing a mantle of protection over their family by overseeing the maintenance of the family car or fleet of cars.  The real emotional hook for this market segment was the idea of protection.  Men felt they were exercising the male role of protector through the overseeing of car repairs and the like.  The trick then was to associate the product with this aspect of the male role.

The advertising campaign was based on a metaphoric sentence:  “Brand X car parts equal male concern and protectiveness.” The advertising imagery flowed from this metaphoric sentence.  Further, the metaphor was already in the culture—it was already in the consumer’s mind.  The advertising sharpened the image, but did not create it out of thin air.  Consumers were already searching for a product benefit of “protection” when they purchased specific car part brands, and were associating preferred brands with this value.  The advertising took the further step of explicitly linking this product benefit to an image of the male as protector.  The product was thus portrayed as the consumer’s ally—helping him to realize the value of “protection”. 

It is of course the job of advertising creatives to come up with specific metaphoric scripts that condense a host of metaphoric meanings and messages within their compass and then covey these meanings to the consumer.  It is not an exaggeration to say that creatives are commercial image poets.  Some commercials have the quality of a haiku poem.  They condense meaning through sharp, economical metaphoric imagery.  Sometimes the most economical imagery results in the most effective advertising message.

Anthropological research can be useful to advertisers as they create their poetry because it lays bare a host of metaphoric possibilities for them.  It provides them with a variety of analogies to think with.  At the same time it can show them which metaphors make most sense culturally.  In short, it can help advertisers become “Masters of Metaphor”. ©