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Visual Communication

DOI: 10.1177/1470357207071463 2007; 6; 5 Visual Communication

Paul B. Bick and Sorina Chiper Swoosh identity: recontextualizations in Haiti and Romania

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V I S U A L E S S A Y

I

Accoc

v i s u a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n

Swoosh identity: recontextualizations inHaiti and Romania

N T R O D U C T I O N

ny critical analysis of signs must beginlimate in which those signs are ponsumed. Zygmunt Bauman (1988) hf late modern global capitalism isompetition with symbolic competit

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P A U L B . B I C KUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, USA

S O R I N A C H I P E R‘Al. I. Cuza’ University of Iasi, Romania

A B S T R A C T

Since its creation in 1971 in the USA, the Nike swoosh has rapidly becomea widely recognized and worshiped symbol of achievement, of theAmerican dream of success and mobility, and it has constantly been partof a process of commodity-mediated identity co-construction. In smallmarkets such as Haiti and Romania that are on the fringes of the widerglobal market, the swoosh symbol is freely appropriated and recon-textualized by the local ‘flawed consumers’, who lack the financial meansto participate in the identity-for-purchase ritual that the corporation thriveson. Instead, the swoosh – domesticated, through mechanical or manualreproductions – takes on a hybrid of local and global values. The avatars ofthe swoosh that we examine in this article are found at Romanian andHaitian cultural crossroads, and illustrate the dialectic of identity/community membership construction, and processes of geosemiotics. Theidentity of the sign undergoes metamorphoses and meaning cross-fertilizations, thus undermining corporate hegemony and allowing thesign’s local producers and users to symbolically transcend the localdimension and to join a u-topic community of affluent consumers.

K E Y W O R D S

brand identity • corporate iconography • geosemiotics • identityco-construction • recontextualization • status indexicality • swoosh •symbolic competition

with a discussion of the broad socialroduced, embedded, circulated, andas suggested that one of the hallmarks the ultimate replacement of real

ion (pp. 57–8); that is to say, with

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corporate power and personal wealth in the hands of fewer and fewercapitalists, the individual’s drive to self-assertion is no longer a meaningfulcomponent of material production. That once-defining American myth ofthe rugged individual pulling himself up to great heights of power andinfluence by his bootstraps has long ceased to meaningfully resonate as abroadly attainable economic paradigm in the American psyche. Feelingincreasingly powerless in a public sphere where corporations are perceived aslimitlessly powerful and governments are seen as ineffective and purchasable,the individual has turned inward, to willingly compete in a kind ofcorporate-sponsored tournament of signs in which disposable identities are acurrency inextricably linked to patterns of consumption. Within thisparadigm, social control is maintained by seduction rather than force.

Paraphrasing Manuel Castells, Bauman (2001b) states that ‘realpower, the extraterritorial global power, flows, but politics, confined now asin the past to the framework of nation states, stays as before, tied to theground’ (p. 149). In our frustration with this new framework, we tend tofocus inward, on the continuous and ultimately meaningless re-tooling ofpersonal identity through ever-changing forms of self-improvement,education and obsessive physical fitness – pastimes that Christopher Laschreferred to as ‘harmless in themselves’, but ‘elevated to a programme andwrapped in the rhetoric of authenticity and awareness’, thus signifying a‘retreat from politics’ (p. 150).

For virtually every imaginable self, there are purchasable signs to helpexpress and project this identity. Corporate iconography is carefully designedto promote certain meanings, perpetrated through repeated collocation ofbrands with images and personalities, thus sustaining an evolving narrativeof identity development and maintenance. These identities are co-constructed, in part, through the application of signs which are purchased,combined and, ultimately, discarded; at the same time, relative values areassigned and re-assigned to these signs within a fluid, volatile and unpre-dictable marketplace of signs. While effecting and affecting the constructionof social identities, brands are themselves affected in the process. The identityof a brand, as it originates in the issuing culture, can be challenged over thebroad territory where it comes into contact with local values, mentalities,taboos, symbols, historical experiences, or lebenswelt (life-worlds). A piece inone’s personal tapestry of social identity, brands become tapestries them-selves when their embedded underlying identity translates differently onforeign markets, or when it is critically or creatively appropriated by its users.

Over time, corporate iconography comes and goes. Most corporateimages die off anonymously after they have served their purpose, with only afew emerging as powerful, lasting icons and embodying the cumulative massof identities they have helped to construct. The Nike swoosh is certainly oneof the most widely known and embraced of these icons.

Corporations are opportunistic and play upon an innate humandesire to fill symbols with meaning in a tribal quest for identity and

V i s u a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n 6 ( 1 )6



community. But as Naomi Klein (1999) has suggested, corporate branding ispredicated on the co-construction of false communities (pp. 6–7). From thevery beginning, the goal of Nike’s promotional strategy was simply to infusethe brand with the meaning of greatness and achievement, and then torepackage and promote its iconography and products as the embodiment ofathletic success. Its advertisements resurrected the rugged Americanindividual, and continuously depicted this heroic character as rising aboveimpossible circumstances to overcome presumed human limits. The irony, ofcourse, is that inclusion in this corporate-sponsored community of ruggedAmericans amounts to a purchased brand conformity rather than anexpression of individual achievement. No actual achievement is required tojoin the new ‘cloakroom peg communities’, to use Bauman’s (2001a) term,nothing but the simple act of buying and displaying, and thus asserting one’spledge to a mystifying sign (p. 16).

The ascendancy of the swoosh as a global cultural icon has receivedmuch coverage in the media, and in non-fictional literature. In one of themost well-researched books on the history of the company, Just Do It,Donald Katz (1994) argues that Nike remains very actively engaged inbuilding its global power brand anywhere the middle class shows signs ofgrowth. Yet how does Nike perform in cultural contexts where there is littleevidence of a growing middle class, where Nike rarely, if ever, advertises, andwhere Nike products are not available, or not accessible, money-wise, forpurchase? What is the relationship of this brand to those not invited to jointhe community of genuine Nike wearers?

T H E S W O O S H I N R O M A N I A A N D H A I T I

Our research data from Iasi (Romania), and Port au Prince (Haiti), haverevealed that the swoosh is as ubiquitous on the fringes of global capitalismas it is in the American heartland. But the form and function of the swooshin these marginal places tend to be manifested differently than they are in theUnited States, and an analysis of these rogue recontextualizations may shedinteresting light on the role of the consumer in the projection of corporatepower through discourse.

This article is less concerned with how Nike uses the swoosh topromote its brand than in how people traditionally excluded from theidentity-for-purchase paradigm appropriate its iconography and map itsprior text onto unique cultural frames. Why does the Nike swoosh functionas a dominant symbol in the non-verbal, visual discursive creation ofidentities of people and places? What are its avatars in the process of weavingtapestries of identity and how is the swoosh identity constructed in theHaitian and Romanian context?

First, we should mention that there are several levels of recontex-tualization, each achieved at various degrees of modality, thereby enrichingthe meanings of the swoosh as a global corporate sign with values emerging

B i c k a n d C h i p e r : S w o o s h i d e n t i t y 7



from the local cultures. For example, we found the swoosh in a wide varietyof contexts, ranging from counterfeit bags, shoes, T-shirts, automobilestickers, motorcycles, lottery banks and stores, to emplacements as graffiti,and as a decorative element on tombs, in rural Haiti.

The most conspicuous of these recontextualizations is the phenom-enon of brand counterfeiting. Within the ‘contractual’ paradigm presentedby Nike, ‘purchase’ – the exchange of monetary value for identity – is thecrucial action at the nexus of co-construction, and those willing and capableof meeting this purchase requirement are granted community membership,with its pre-packaged identity and universally recognized signifying emblemsof greatness and achievement as their reward.

Through mechanical or manual reproduction, cracks emerge in thisparadigm of mediated actions which contradict Nike’s contractual implica-tions without destroying the ‘aura’ of the sign. The brisk exchange of counter-feit goods in both Haiti and Romania represents a form of ‘first-order’contradiction. The fact that fake goods sell so well suggests that the order ofexchange dictated by Nike is neither inviolable nor essential. The productitself, or rather the authenticity of its origin, is not necessarily an indispen-sable component of the sign, and in spite of a substitution by obviouslyinauthentic products, satisfactory identity co-construction can still take place.

Whereas in Haiti the common counterfeit Nike products are bags, inRomania they are mostly clothes, and the more conspicuous the swooshes,the better (see Figure 1). Via counterfeits, the swoosh becomes available toanyone, to the haves and the have nots, to connoisseurs and to people whototally ignore the corporate projected identity of the brand image. In placeslike Haiti and Romania, where there is hardly any above-the-line advertising,the swoosh resonates less with the fitness culture, as it does in the US, and ittakes on vague, discontinuous meanings. In Romania, people associate itwith a ‘V’ for victory, with a horizontal ‘J’ (Michael Jordan’s initial), with thetick with which teachers mark pupils’ notebooks to show that their home-work is good, with a reversed, rotated comma, or with a token of good luck.

We believe that the ubiquity and auratic nature of the swoosh derivesboth from the mythically seductive allure of the American success culture,and from the intrinsic visual appeal of the sign as such. Since 1971, when theswoosh was created by Caroline Davidson, it has evolved from a sharp, eventhreatening and aggressive tone towards a smooth, balanced, rounded andseductive shape. The salience of the sign comes from its simplicity andfluidity, from its vectoring from the realm of what Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996) have termed the given, the known, and the grounded to the ideal, thenew, and the possible (p. 208). Uncluttered, lowly modal, contrastive andimmediately recognizable, the swoosh is now promoted as a logo without ananchoring text, thus making it accessible and identifiable in illiterate or non-English-speaking cultures.

At a psychological level, what Nike has managed to achieve is to createa cultural artifact that impacts on the mind as a natural object, reshaped,




through recontextualizations, into a cultural symbol where the local symboliccapital weaves into the global sign-value of the swoosh.

The naturalness of the sign and its simple, organic appeal justify itsapplication as a thing of beauty, as a decorative element, a tattoo or a piece ofjewelry. The reproduction of the swoosh as a golden ear-ring, for example,supports the idea of its visual appeal, and turns it from a two-dimensionalimage into a three-dimensional object, as a step to a further recontextual-ization: the swoosh becomes embodied when someone actually wears it,physically blending its identity into that of the wearer.

At the opposite end of this materialization of the swoosh, as a signobject whose role of status indexicality is enhanced by the material that it ismade of, namely gold, lies the abstraction of random, hand-reproduction ofthe swoosh as graffiti.

The simplicity of the sign makes it easily inscribed without specialskills or tools. A form of transgressive discourse, graffiti appears in strikinglysimilar contexts in both Haiti and Romania. In Figure 2, the hand-reproduction of the swoosh on the outside wall of the Economics building ofthe ‘Al. I. Cuza’ University of Iasi is an interesting case of discourse in space,or geosemiosis (Scollon and Scollon, 2003: 2). The sign is on a side wall, at eyelevel, large enough to be spotted from a distance. On its left, we can read theword ‘boboc’ and the figure ‘2004[20004]’. In its syntagmatic relationshipwith the accompanying text, on the left, the swoosh functions as both anidentifying marker for the generation of freshmen in 2004, and as a self-assertive qualifier (‘we are the best’). A closer look at the graffiti reveals that it


Figure 1 Romanian man wearing a counterfeit Nike jacket.



is applied on top of an older layer of signs, thus making a metadiscursivestatement not only about the way in which no piece of discourse is ever atrace on a tabula rasa, but also about the changes in what count asfashionable and topical labels for people or places.

The swoosh in Figure 3, from the wall of a house in rural Haiti, standsalone, and ambiguous in terms of what it expresses, as discourse in place,encapsulating, nevertheless, the visual essence of the sign, reduced to a dis-bodied, dematerialized shape. In a ludic gesture, a waving tale attached to theoutlined swoosh further emphasizes the notion of movement and velocity.Framed by two windows, the tailed swoosh looks like a kite, fragile andrudimentary, yet heading for the sky, and symbolically evoking a wish to exitthe debilitating condition of poverty.


Figure 2 Graffiti swoosh on the outside wall of the University of Iasi, Romania.

Figure 3 Graffiti swoosh on the wall of a rural house in Haiti.



The fact that these two representations are so similar suggests thatthere is a minimal set of requirements necessary to recall the essence of theswoosh, and that these requirements will naturally emerge in similar wayswithin a given discursive genre. The curve, angles and vectoring of the shapeitself are conjured in a similar manner under the technical and socialconstraints of the graffiti genre. An even higher level of abstraction isachieved in the graffiti swoosh on the gate of a garage in Iasi (see Figure 4),where the swoosh is reduced to its most skeletal form, as a bare curved line,capturing the simplicity and the fluidity of the sign’s shape, whileimmediately evoking the icon and its entailments.

These various degrees of abstraction that the sign undergoes raise aninteresting question: if we think of prior text as being a whole entity, acomplete swoosh, how much prior text is required in a recontextualization inorder to evoke its essential essence? Clearly, vectoring, angle and the line ofmovement comprise its quintessential core.

In counterpoint to the ‘fleshless’ swoosh in the Romanian graffiti,Haiti indulges in very rich, highly modal visual reproductions. One of themost common sites of recontextualization in Haiti is the hand-reproductionand emplacement of the swoosh on privately owned pick-up trucks, used forpublic transportation. Tap-taps, as these trucks are called by the locals, aregenuine semiotic aggregates, unique discourse genres, offering a colorfuldisplay of local sacred images and global corporate logos. They are bright,whimsical, positive and cheerful, providing a psychological as well as aphysical counterpoint to gray, drab and often menacing surroundings. Thehigh-modality reproduction of the swoosh reveals the emotional involve-ment of the Haitians with this symbol. Swooshes float about, fly and dance ina compound rhythm of energy and freedom.


Figure 4 Graffiti swoosh on a garage gate in Iasi, Romania.



The basic components of the tap-tap genre fall within three sets ofcharacteristics: color, shape, and image collocations. Most tap-taps conveysunny optimism, hopefulness, levity and lightness through an array of bright,primary colors, soft geometric shapes, circles and curved lines, which tend tofunction as visual frames containing additional micro-discourses, such asprayers, brief personal statements, corporate and religious iconography,dollar signs, the American flag, and patriotic images (see Figure 5). Theswoosh is a natural fit in this environment, both aesthetically and in terms ofits denotations of forward movement and fluidity.

The simple juxtaposition of corporate logos and religious imageryachieves a cross-fertilization of meaning, a syncretism of sacred and profanemessages, of transcendental hope and mundane materiality. The divine,eternal and undivided ‘Logo-s’ (Λõγoς) translated into human prayer andiconic religious reproductions lives in syncretism with the relative, transientand ever multiplying corporate ‘logos’, sharing a space of fusion anddiffusion, thus partly trivializing the religious imagery and partly sanctifyingcorporate iconography. This unexpected co-occurrence reveals why inter-textual processes are so captivating: their salience springs less from reasonswhy various texts are combined in a given context than from how specificconfigurations of texts might alter the trajectory of future discursive actions.Thus, the intentionality of the originator of the recontextualization is lessimportant than what his or her work leads to.


Figure 5 Colourful tap-tap in Haiti.



Lighthearted collocations of the tap-taps, and their endless repetition,pave the way for less light-hearted emplacements which deepen the sacral-ization of the swoosh in more radically interdiscursive reappropriations.Their abundance suggests an emergent naturalization of the swoosh incontexts where it shares the same discursive space with religious iconog-raphy. Imbued with eschatological signifieds, it is no surprise therefore tofind the swoosh in places and artifacts conceived as belonging to the realm ofthe sacred, namely on graves (see Figure 6).

Bearing in mind our earlier comments regarding intentionality, howare we to look at and think about such a profoundly interdiscursive form?Critical theorists have long maintained that meaning emerges from visualtexts at three interrelated and overlapping sites: context of production, thetext itself, and context of consumption. As Gillian Rose and others haveshown, there are three modalities, or aspects of process, at each of these siteswhich, when unpacked and explored, illustrate the ways visual represen-tations both depend on and produce the social inclusions and exclusions thatdrive the co-construction of identity in discourse. These three modalities, thetechnological, the compositional and the social (Rose, 2002: 17), are not at allclearly delineated but in fact comprise a woven series of interactions andcontrasts, which we will attempt to unpack in the following section.

A grave in rural Haiti

As is often the case with ‘found’ discourses, we can only know very little ofthe specific context of production of the grave in Figure 6. We ignore, forexample, who built the grave, or why they made the specific material and


Figure 6 Grave outside Camp Perrin, in Haiti.



discourse choices that have shaped the grave in its current form. What we canknow beyond doubt is its special location, outside the southern Haitian townof Camp Perrin, approximately 180 km south of Port au Prince, and that itssize, placement and construction are typical of other graves in the area.

Haitian graves tend to be built above ground, usually of cinderblocksand cement, and covered in a textured aggregate veneer, as can be seen in thetomb in the picture. They are often, but not always, painted, usually in lightpastel colors, or white, and they are occasionally adorned with shapes,symbols or texts in addition to the expected linguistic information whichindicates who is buried inside. The images adorning graves range fromsimple decorative geometric shapes to ‘veve’ voodoo symbols, Christianimagery, corporate iconography or combinations of these forms. Graves areoften constructed in advance of their use, whenever possible, so it is quitecommon that the person who designed the grave will eventually be one of itsend-users. The graves are often modular, and supplementary crypts can beadded to them subsequently. Larger family graves, therefore, tend to becomposed of numerous crypts, stacked and arranged like shippingcontainers around a central marker or under a kind of unifying shelter.Occasionally, for wealthier families, graves will be assembled inside smallstructures, like mausoleums, with simple visual burial discourses adorningthe outside. Thus, graves, and some of their characteristics, such as thequality of their construction and the level of upkeep, serve as status markersin the community indicating wealth, property and family cohesion.

Graves are frequently located on or near family homesteads for bothpractical and psychological reasons. First, for many generations, the presenceof family graves tends to deepen a perception of land ownership in areaswhere deeded or legal ownership of property is rare. Second, this practice hasled to a psychological expectation and desire to have departed loved onesconspicuously nearby. Like the home itself, graves become key sites of familyidentity co-construction.

The nature of burial practice in Haiti, the social conventions andmaterial technologies used in these practices, tend to dictate and limit thetypes of discourses that can be found there, while they define these dis-courses as part of yet another unique genre. For example, because of thevarieties of materials used in grave construction and the social phenomenonof widespread illiteracy in Haiti, written memorials on gravestones are veryrare, while the form remains an ideal hosting site for visual iconography.

On the grave in Figure 6 we have two crypts, side by side, joinedunder a large headstone on which we might expect to find, and do find,burial discourse. On top of the headstone is a larger cross, which serves bothto identify the structure as a Christian burial site and to mark the site assacred. So, it is within this production context at the level of compositionalitythat this text appears, in a decidedly interdiscursive turn.




Text on the graveA close-up of the inscription on the tomb reveals that the swoosh and theword Nike are woven into the same compositional space with the usualidentifying linguistic data found on burial markers (see Figure 7). Thisdramatic recontextualization necessarily imparts sacred meanings, ordeepens the existing sacralization of the swoosh, while the presence of theswoosh simultaneously commodifies the sacred context. The swoosh isaccompanied by its corporate parent name but in this particular context itstands apart from any other co-textual imagery. The logo comprises a kind ofpure identifying center – a plaque of light and color on a sea of flat greystone. Rather than identifying the grave – serving as linguistic anchor – asone would expect from a marker of this size, shape and location, this one, byvirtue of its sharp modality, brightly contrasting color and texture, andunexpected content, reverses our expected salience patterns. The grave itselfbecomes simply a platform for the presentation of the logo.

This specific swoosh is a warm and comforting version of the icon –thick-bodied, gracefully curved, pale blue and lying at rest on its side, butconveying a sense of gentle rolling, like a Caribbean wave, with its long endopen and bleeding out into the new and the unknown. The naturallyseductive and appealingly hopeful shape is enhanced by these small details.This image itself is slightly off center to the right and its components all


Figure 7 Close-up of the grave outside Camp Perrin, Haiti.



vector gently yet steadily to the right as well. The cumulative compositionalmodality at the site of the text suggests a confident consciousness – a hopefuldesire to believe that what lies beyond the grave, and beyond theimmobilizing poverty of Haiti, is something beautiful, positive, attainableand worth imagining.

Joined as it is by the name of its corporate parent, the image is, to acertain degree, less ambiguous than it would be as just a swoosh alone. Thetext serves as a kind of linguistic anchor, narrowing the implications tosomething closer to the corporate message than the multiple and freefloating swooshes from the tap-taps. The image harkens to the ad-manufactured spirit of the corporation as painstakingly developed over yearsof Nike advertising.

If we look more closely at this image we see, first of all, that the wordNIKE is quite large and pronounced, set in bold, highly contrastive uppercaseblock lettering. What’s more, it is actually carved into the face of the grave-stone, as is the accompanying swoosh. In contrast, the deceased’s name hasbeen applied somewhat carelessly in the lower portion of the frame in a non-contrastive light blue and set in a combination of upper and lower case andcursive script. The man’s name actually runs off the frame in an illegiblescrawl. So while the corporate name and logo are permanent features in thiscontext, the name of the deceased is merely painted, a temporary feature. Theoverarching compositional modality, then, is one of contrast between thepermanence of the sign and the transience of the individual. People are bornand die . . . Nike is here to stay.

C O N C L U S I O N : C O N S U M P T I O N O F T H E S W O O S H

I D E N T I T Y

Taken together, Haitian and Romanian recontextualizations of the swooshsuggest a kind of reclamation of public space and an ownership of signs thatis rarely seen in the developed world.

If all interdiscursive re-contextualization amounts to a mythologizingof existing signs, as Barthes (1972) suggests (pp. 109–21), and if signs alwaysretain the power they have been invested with, then the sanctification of signsacross cultural frontiers is to be expected not as an aspect of the commoditytheology that Nike sells, but as a local re-imagining of personal identity in aglobal context. This is not to say that the Haitians fail to understand themeaning of Nike, but that they have added meaning to interdiscursiveimagery in ways appropriate to the specific socio-historical context in whichit is needed.

The swoosh’s multiple and idiosyncratic recontextualizations diminishits social status indexicality, while multiplying its array of symbolic meaningsand its iconic variations. They reference Barthes’ idea that the form in whicha sign is recontextualized does not completely suppress its source meaning, itonly ‘impoverishes it, puts it at a distance, holds it at one’s disposal’ (p. 118).




Everything that Nike is, or has been, remains within the swoosh, regardless ofhow many layers of recontextualization, how many orders of semiologicaldistance, separate a ‘use’ from its ‘source’. In other words, status indexicalitysurvives in palimpsest.

One way to look at how a thing means is to look at what it needs tomean in a given context. In order to understand desire we must firstcomprehend what is missing. Bauman (2004) has suggested that what thelosers in global capitalism suffer most is a crippling lack of mobility (p. 97).Abject poverty represents a complete and utter absence of movement, be itphysical, social or spiritual. The freedom to move and its various forms ofabsence sit at the center of the widening polarization between rich and poor.While poverty is stagnation in total, and at its worst entails a lack of hopethat freedom will ever be possible, mobility has become the stratifyinghallmark of ever-illusive prosperity and real freedom. The question is: doesthe swoosh bridge this gap or merely highlight it?

Within the context of this widening breech, the swoosh may beemployed here as a kind of living icon of that mobility and freedom, a sacredhomage to the reality-defying lightness of a soaring Michael Jordan, and aspiritual link, however fragile, to the hope and prosperity of the mythicalAmerican promised land, where everything moves with speed and grace, andeveryone wears real Nike shoes.

The form of orthodox totemism hegemonically re-enacted by Nike issubverted by the chaotic appropriations, inscriptions, embodiments oremplacements of the swoosh in countries where the sanctioned corporatepropaganda is not directly heard. In Haiti and Romania, the swoosh joinslocal cultural and symbolic capitals functioning as a sign and an object at thesame time, freely crossing boundaries between nature and culture, betweenthe sacred and the profane, between abstraction and materiality.

To place a swoosh on building walls, on tombs, or on one’s body, isdefinitely a form of totemic bricolage, a sort of primitive worship of new-capitalism idols which reached this status in the collective consciousness notthrough a consistent metaphysical ideology but through the insidiousseduction practices that support corporate hegemony.

Ironically, however, the consecration of the swoosh is paralleled by anunconscious protest against corporate hegemony which can be manifested insacred contexts. The decontextualized swoosh of Nike is turned from apotential totem of the liquid modern age into a convenience object, acollective symbol that anyone can feast on, and whose rhetoric is embeddedin the new context where the sign is reproduced.

The sacred swooshes of Haiti defy the social stratification that comeswith corporate totemism, and celebrate the freedom and joy of escaping thelocal dimension by joining a symbolic, u-topic community that relishes insign consumption and production.




18

R E F E R E N C E S

Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.Bauman, Zygmunt (1988) Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Bauman, Zygmunt (2001a) Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.

Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Zygmunt (2001b) The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity.Bauman, Zygmunt (2004) Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi.

Cambridge: Polity.Katz, Donald (1994) Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World. New

York: Random House.Klein, Naomi (1999) No Logo. New York: Picador.Kress, Gunther and Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996) Reading Images: The

Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.Rose, Gillian (2002) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the

Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage.Scollon, Ron and Scollon, Suzie Wong (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in

the Material World. London: Routledge.

B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E S

PAUL B. BICK is a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of Illinoisat Chicago. He has a BA in English from Loyola University and an MA inLinguistics from Northeastern University, Chicago, where he focused onsubvertizing and the nexus of language, power, ideology, identity andhegemony, using Adbusters magazine as his research data. Currently, hisresearch interest is in Haiti where he has been actively involved inenvironmental and agricultural projects.

Address: University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 1007West Harrison Street, BSB 2102 (M/C 027), IL 60607, USA. [email:[email protected]]

SORINA CHIPER is a PhD student of English and an Assistant Lecturer ofESP at ‘Al. I. Cuza’ University of Iasi. She has a BA in English and French, anMA in American Studies and an MA in International Business, from thesame institution. She has studied the colonialization of the discourse ofRomanian universities by the language of new capitalism, and her currentresearch interests are American autobiography, professional communication,social, cultural and visual anthropology, and the Roma minority in Romania.

©

Address: ‘Al. I. Cuza’ University of Iasi, Romania, Faculty of Economics andBusiness Administration, Department of Political Economy, 22 CarolAvenue, Iasi, 700505, Romania. [email: [email protected]]

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