Journal articles on the topic 'Twelve tribes of Israel in art'

An important artistic element or symbolic text of ancient Jewish cemeteries are the tombstones - matsevi. The most commonly used motifs in decorative decoration of Galician matsevahs are zoomorphic, ornithological and vegetative motifs, which are often used in all other forms of Jewish art. The image of subject motifs and larger objects is just as original as the decorative adornment of facades of matsevahs of Eastern Galicia XVI - the first third of the XX century. and deserves a separate thorough study. The presentation of these motifs on the matsevahs' facades gives the viewer enough visual information about a particular person, even without translating and deciphering the very text of the epitaph, which, in the vast majority of cases, correlates and significantly supplements, interprets, informs, extends and clarifies the symbols of the carving of the upper part of the matsevahs. Sometimes the symbolic image was unrelated to the text, it was only decorative and contained traditional Jewish characters or symbols. One should note the desire of the authors, stone-cutters, for originality, artistic individuality, recognition of a particular object as a characteristic feature, of the use of substantive motifs for the decoration of the matsevahs, as well as the significant impact of family traditions with the provision of a peculiar author's decision to build a composition or property of the client with appropriate simplification or the complication of the carved decoration and the refinement of the composition. Very few monuments of stone-making art of the 16th-17th centuries have remained intact until now, which makes it impossible to give a full description of the artistic peculiarities of the memorial plastics; and, the vast majority of the preserved monuments were erected over burials at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries. and preserved until the first third of the XX century. The article is based on materials of field studies by the author of ancient Jewish cemeteries within Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk regions, in particular: Belza, Brody, Bolechova, Burshtyn, Busk, Dobromil, Drohobych, Zabolotova, Kosova, Kremenets, Kutov, Nikolaev, Leshnava, Stary Razdol, Skole, Snyatin, Solotvyn, Stanislavchik, Old Sambir, Ternopil, Turks, Shchyrets, Yabluniv, Yazlivets and others. In the article, individual examples of carved decor are studied, the features of compositional techniques and the specifics of their artistic and plastic expression on the facades of ancient matsevahs of the studied region are analyzed and described. Subject motifs like zoomorphic, ornithomorphic, and vegetative, formed on the basis of the texts of the Torah and the Talmud, biblical metaphors and allegories, which became the symbols of the Twelve tribes of Israel, the people and the land of Israel in the traditional Jewish art of Eastern Galicia from the XVIII - the first third of the XX century. are the dominant motives in stone carving and the matsevah's memorial plastics. The article deals with the most common substantive motifs found on preserved matsevahs of Eastern Galicia of the period under consideration. To systematize and describe the subject motifs are presented in alphabetical order in the following sequence: Building. Vase. Zban (jug) and tray (bowl) for washing hands of levites. Tools, objects and technical equipment. Interior. Chalice. Klepsidra. Book. Ship. Crown. Well. Lamp. Menorah. Subjects and objects of the second plan: Candle holder, candle, platform for Tora, Decalogue tablets. Treasure chest. Arrow. Urn. Cabinet. Poison. Further field investigations and thorough scientific research in accordance with the methodology of scientific study of Jewish cemeteries, which includes: architectural measurements, photo fixation, graphic documentation, writing, reading, decoding and elaboration of texts of epitaphs and documentation of information will help to discover, understand and popularize the traditional art of numerous Jewish communities, which were an integral part of the polyethnic Galician city of the studied period. After all, most of the monuments of stone masonry art are in an extremely poor condition, some of them are on the verge of extinction and require a number of urgent professional measures for their further preservation and research

Dale Allison is right to assert that ‘the twelve tribes in the Diaspora’ invokes Jewish ideas about the Ten Lost Tribes, but wrong to disassociate this thesis from the scholarly consensus that the pseudepigraphal author sees the church as Israel. For James, rather, the restored Israel consists of members of the Two Tribes of Judah and Benjamin (= Jewish Christians) plus members of the Ten Tribes. The latter, rather than being far away in some mythical, inaccessible realm, have been living since the Assyrian invasion in known Diaspora realms, where they lost their Israelite identity until it was reawakened by their recent encounter with the Gospel. Gentiles who respond positively to the Christian message, then,arefor James the Ten Lost Tribes.

Twenty-eight years ago, F.J. van Dijk published in the New West Indian Guide what remained for a long time the only scholarly paper on the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Undoubtedly the largest Rastafari organization both in terms of membership and international expansion, the Twelve Tribes of Israel remains little known in public and academic circles. This article fills two major but closely related gaps in Van Dijk’s seminal article. The first is information on the formation and history of the Twelve Tribes, and the second is how the organization mobilized the return of members to Africa, a cornerstone of Rastafari belief. This article argues that the issue of return to the continent determined the very genesis of the organization and subsequently the development of its eighteen international branches. In its turn, this focus on return to Africa offers another perspective on the internal dynamics of the Rastafari movement, namely the structuring role of Rastafari organizations, a role which challenges the common image of Rastafari as an “acephalous” movement. Exploring the tangible relationship of Rastafari with Ethiopia, through the return to Ethiopia of members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, offers new insight into the history of the Rastafari movement.

It is widely accepted that the two volumes of Luke-Acts are based on an inaugurated eschatological framework. The kingdom of Christ has already been established, but it is not yet present in its fullness. Given this framework of “already/not yet,” how do we understand Jesus' promise to the Twelve in Luke 22:28–30 that they would “sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel?” If that is the promise, what does the fulfillment entail? Here we will examine Jesus' promise in Luke's Gospel and its fulfillment in the Book of Acts. The central proposal of this study is that the twelve apostles began to judge the twelve tribes of Israel in their inaugurated co-regency in the series of events following the ascension of Jesus and culminating in Pentecost.

The Caucasus region has been called the “Mountain of Tongues”. History writers from Herodotus, 2,500 years ago, until present time have given different numbers of languages, e.g. the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (64 BCE- 21 CE) claimed more than 70 tribes speaking different languages, Pliny stated that the Romans used 130 interpreters when trading. At present more than 50 languages are spoken in the Caucasus (Catford 1977: 283). Hebrew is the ancient original language for all the twelve tribes of Israel, also after the division of the Land of Israel in 927 BCE into the Northern Kingdom, Israel, with ten of the tribes and the Southern Kingdom, Juda, with two tribes. The Israelites got exiled by the Assyrian Kings, e.g. Shalmaneser in 722 BCE. These ten tribes soon lost their language and identity. The southern tribes, Juda, got exiled by the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, between 606-586 BCE, who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem (586 BCE).

AbstractA careful analysis of the Qumran "sectarian" texts reveals a consistent preference for self-identification as "Israel" rather than "Judah." In fact, they contain no unambiguous identifications of the community as "Judah" or its members as "Judeans". Like most biblical texts and unlike Josephus and the authors of 1–2 Maccabees, the Qumran community does not equate Israelite with Judean. They regard themselves as the vanguard of the eschatological restoration of the twelve tribes; for them, the Judean state is not the sole heir of biblical Israel.

This paper claims the heraldry of the twelve tribes of Israel as a distinct iconographic invention in post-Reformation England. It is argued that the theme became popular during the reign of King James, a period usually regarded as iconophobic. Little-studied examples of church wall-painting are understood in relation to analogous bible illustrations and writings which have been ignored by historians of this period. The depictions of the twelve patriarchs themselves, part of a ‘Laudian’ beautification of Burton Latimer church in the 1630s, during the incumbency of Robert Sibthorpe allows exploration of the shifting meanings of this Reformation subject.

The natural starting point for any interpretation of the Epistle of James is its praescriptio, where the author defines for his readers their own communal identity by addressing them as ‘the twelve tribes in the diaspora’. Whatever intentions may have lurked behind the attributive expression , the peculiar designation of the authorial audience as ‘the twelve tribes’ casts the readership with surprising clarity in the role of the true Israel. Although the author does not make further comment upon the relationship of his intended readers to the dominant Judaism of his day, it is surely correct to assume that an organizational separation had occurred. The community which James elsewhere refers to as the ⋯κκλησ⋯α (5.14) and which boasts its own teachers (3.1) and elders (5.14) had most certainly set itself apart in some degree from the entity whose title it is said to possess.

Within Persian-period Yehud the boundaries of the collective entity Israel were a matter of dispute. The debate was triggered by the question of whether the population in the area of the former Northern Kingdom should be regarded as Israelite or not. But while there was no consensus regarding their status, the same underlying criterion for defining an Israelite is used either to include or exclude the Samarians in/from Israel—not the faith in YHWH or the adherence to the law but the social construction of a common descent which finds its expression in the system of the twelve tribes of Israel. Against the widespread view, post-exilic Israel is best described as an ethnos and not as a Kultgemeinde.

When in 1714 the artist Israel ben Mordecai Liśnicki from Jaryczów painted the interior of the wooden synagogue of Chodorów, today in the L'viv (Polish, Lwów) region of western Ukraine, he did not know that one of his paintings would be the subject of divergent interpretations by art historians some three hundred years later. The controversy centers around the depiction of an eagle grasping in its talons two hares trying to escape outward. The hares are grasped by the neck (fig. 1). This depiction, located in the center of the ceiling, is surrounded by a decorative medallion inscribed with the verse “Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings, gliding down to his young, so did He spread His wings and take him, bear him along on His talons” (Deuteronomy 32:11). In the background are the twelve signs of the zodiac.

The purpose of the study — to analyze the phenomenon of the author’s style “multiculturalism” in the painting of the Canadian-Ukrainian artist W. Kurelek, as well as to characterize the unique author’s artistic technique. The methodology. Symbolic-metaphysical and philosophical aspects of the artist’s work are studied on the basis of art analysis of individual paintings. The method of formal and stylistic analysis helped to identify the appearance of individual works, characterized the artistic processes that took place in the Canadian-Ukrainian environment, which had a significant impact on the work of W. Kurelek. This method effectively helped in the stylistic characterization of the canvas, in particular in identifying the formal organization of the work: space, time, color, light, rhythm, composition, perspective. The scientific topicality. The role of W. Kurelek in the formation of the multicultural process in Canada is proved, in particular the importance of his art — chronicles of the formation and development of Canadian emigrants (Frenchmen, Irishmen, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles), as well as the first comprehensive study of the author’s creative method “multiculturalism”. The practical significance. Theoretical material can be used in scientific art and cultural studies, as well as for teaching courses in: history of Ukrainian culture in the diaspora, art of the Ukrainian diaspora, the development of Ukrainian art in Canada, in the preparation of textbooks and manuals. The conclusions. The author’s creative method “multiculturalism” of the Canadian artist, the grandson of the first Ukrainian emigrants W. Ku-relek has been studied. The uniqueness of this creative method lies in the system of abilities of the artist. First of all, it is a comparative approach to the selection of ideas and thematic outlines of works, which was based on a long analysis of the historical context, socio-cultural environment and futuristic predictions, which the artist observed and tried not just narratively capture in his work. From childhood, from his first emigrant grandparents, and later from his own experience of “dual” identity, it was very important for the artist to record in painting the presence and contribution of each emigrant group that was a member of multicultural Canadian society. In order to properly crystallize the author’s style, W. Kurelek traveled to all twelve provinces of Canada, capturing the geopolitical, climatic, natural and social characteristics of each province. He studied the histories of the aboriginal tribes, the arrival of the first emigrants, and the stages of the “multiplication” and integration of the various waves of emigrants on Canadian land. The uniqueness of this style was that the artist did not generalize the standard image of “Frenchman”, “Irishman”, “Pole”, but went by inductive method, studying the history of a person, his life, as well as the history of a country, its art , traditions, music, literature, customs, even cooking. The unique artistic author’s “mixed” technique obtained by long-term experiments and the influence of Nikolaides’ artistic method on the compositional structure of W. Kurelek’s work are also analyzed.

Summary This article is a study of the nature of the twelve new tribes restored through the Messiah and his twelve apostles in Luke–Acts. The author lays the foundation for his conclusion by tracing four elements of Luke’s narrative: Jesus’ election of twelve apostles in Luke 6:12-16; his kingdom-promise of the twelve judging the twelve tribes in 22:29-30; the inquiry after Israel’s kingdom in Acts 1:6-8; and the subsequent re-constitution of the twelve-fold apostolate over the 120 believers in 1:15-26. The author argues that fulfilment of Luke 22:29-30 is the background for both the inquiry after the kingdom, the necessity of re-installing the twelfth apostle and the numerical detail of 120 believers in Acts 1. The author then examines Luke’s broader ecclesiology and restoration programme as it pertains to the nature of the eschatological twelve tribes, before he summarises his research. In sum, the article argues on exegetical and biblical-theological grounds that the re-constitution of the twelve tribes is Christocentric in nature and that Luke’s messianic vision of the twelve-tribe restoration includes even Gentiles as full-fledged members of the eschatological twelve-tribe Israel.

The group of the Twelve is mentioned 28 times in the Synoptic Gospels. However, the Evangelists were not familiar with the historical role of the Twelve. Even the pre-Easter origin of Matthew 19:28/Luke 22:30 is debatable. On the other hand 1 Corinth 15:3b-5 provides a solid basis for the assumption of a pre-Easter origin of the Twelve. They functioned as a group representing the twelve tribes of Israel as the eschatological people of God. Reaffirmed in this role by the risen Lord they had for a short time a leading role in the early Christian community in Jerusalem. But their importance soon declined because after a short time the twelve former disciples from Galilee could no longer be representative of a rapidly expanding community. In the last decades of the first century the Twelve got a new importance on the literary level of the Gospels.

Attribution License. The current article considers two intertexts of Q 22:28, 30, namely the Psalms of Solomon and the Community Rule found in the first Qumran cave. Each of these documents is examined to understand its view of the restoration of Israel, the messianic age, the apocalyptic end and the final judgement. Additional attention is paid to the way in which these documents draw boundaries around their respective in-groups. By illustrating that these texts foresaw a process of judgement at the apocalyptic end that would entail both the liberation and the condemnation of greater Israel, the current article argues against the popular claim that a wholesale liberation of everyone in Israel was expected during the Second-Temple period. The broader context of this investigation is the attempted refutation of Horsley�s influential claim that, in Q 22:28�30, the verb κρίνω actually means �liberate� and not �judge�.Intradisciplinary and/or�interdisciplinary�implications: By illustrating that these texts foresaw a process of judgement at the apocalyptic end that would entail both the liberation and the condemnation of greater Israel, the current article argues against the popular claim that a wholesale liberation of everyone in Israel was expected during the Second-Temple period.

The aricle consists ofive argumentaive sections. The first deals with the textual evidence with regard to the expressions "disciples", "the Twelve" and "apostles". In the second section it is argued that Jesus did not create the idea of "the Twelve". Firstly, the argument focuses on a discussion of the differences and similarities in the lists of twelve names found in the synopic gospels, Acts and the Sayings Gospel Q and, secondly, of the so-called "minor agreement" between Mathew (19:28) and Luke (22:30) with regard to the expressions the "twelve thrones" and the "twelve tribes of Israel". The investigation concludes that all roads lead to Jerusalem with regard to the historicity of the circle of the Twelve. Section three discusses the situaion in pre-70 CE Jerusalem where the earliest Jesus faction linked the idea of "the Twelve" with there surrection of Jesus and the appearances tradition. It is argued that the appearances tradition coincides negaively with an endeavour among leaders of the Jesus movement to seek positions of power and, positively, with the spread of the gospel to people who were previously considered to be excludedfrom being children of God.

Hendel (2004) states that “the remembered past is the material with which biblical Israel constructed its identity as a people, a religion, and a culture. It is a mixture of history, collective memory, folklore, and literary brilliance. In Israel’s formative years, these memories circulated orally in the context of family and tribe. Over time they came to be crystallized [mainly] in various written texts” (my insertion). The experiential dimension of religion of ancient Israel and that of the Lemba (the so-called ‘Black “Jews” of Southern Africa’ and other African tribes) is expressed orally and textually, but also in art. It is in no small part also created by them, as they formulate new or altered conceptions of the sacred past. Guidance by stars, the ancestors and the ngoma lungundu (sacred drum of the ancestors) play a major role in the expression of Lemba and early Israelite religion, culture and art.

At the turn of the second millennium AD, Tuckett dubbed Q 22:28�30 an �exegetical stepchild�,given that it has traditionally and commonly received very little attention in Q research. Thisarticle addresses this shortcoming. Specific attention is devoted to the refutation of Horsley�sinfluential claim that, in Q 22:28�30, the verb κρίνοντες actually means �liberate� and not�judge�. The discoveries made along the way have significant implications not only for ourunderstanding of this specific Q text, but also for our understanding of the Sayings GospelQ and its people in general. The latter pertains especially to their particular view of the finaljudgement, as well as their relationship to greater Israel.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article refutes the popularclaim that κρίνοντες in Q 22:28�30 actually means �liberate� and not �judge�. The latter hasimplications not only for the interpretation of Q 22:28�30, but also for our understanding ofthe Sayings Gospel Q, its people, the historical Jesus, and the ancient concept of �judgement�.

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>