Banter 80: Culture Codes

Date: Friday, April 11th, 6pm

Host: Annette's house (directions were emailed)

Topic: Culture Codes

Plan on: Saving room for dinner! Annette is making a main dish related to our topic, and will also have coffee, tea, sparkling water, possibly "some weird variety of snacks."

Bring: "If you're feeling like going with the theme, you could bring something you personally, or culturally, associate with the word "dinner" from childhood or some cut veggies or fruit or a drink of any kind."

A little topic preview:

Annette had read a book recently about culture codes (see book cover below), and then she and I just free-formed related tangents over a yummy Himalayan dinner on this topic. The examples Annette shared from the book were really cool and got my wheels turning. The main one she shared (which I may butcher but Annette will clarify night of banter) had to do with some coffee company from the US thinking they’d make a bunch of easy money in Japan by tapping into an untapped coffee market there a while back, but then when they tried it went over like a lead balloon because it turned out the Japanese did not have the cozy associations with coffee drinking, coffee socializing, coffee smells, family coffee related  nostalgic experiences, etc.that much of the rest of the world has in their family/friend/work systems. So then they had to take a more long-game plan for their business model and kind of manufacture those experiences in for their target Japanese audience; that part was kind of gross and capitalistic manipulative, but still interesting to mull over, especially related to any of the ways any of us become parts of who we are in relation to products or economic cultural coding.

Prep materials:

1. Listen to the epigraph, intro, and chapter 1 of Rapaille's book via this version here (kind of robotic narrator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvbzMOHJZHg

OR if you dislike that narrator as much as I do, you can access the full text for free here when you click on Epub (it's a safe download), and then can read the epigraph, intro, Chapter 1 (and beyond, as you like): https://archive.org/details/TheCultureCodeAnIngeniousWayToUndeClotaireRapaille?ref=ol&view=theater

2. Annette will fill us in on the rest, so you don't have to overly prep for this one, other than maybe mull over ideas about your own cultural coding that you are aware of!