A Strange Tribe of the Northern Californian Lowlands
Picture an anthropologist’s field report describing a tribe whose male members bind a strip of brightly colored silk around their throats each morning before entering their communal structure. The highest-ranking individuals carry a handheld device pressed to their ear, communing with distant invisible spirits. Below them, workers wear a small box clipped to the waist; when it vibrates, they abandon whatever they were doing to seek a separate device and perform the same ritual. A specialized caste conducts elaborate formalized contests on behalf of rival factions, contests lasting years or decades.
A few sentences in, the recognition arrives. The silk strip is a necktie. The handheld device is a cell phone. The box is a pager. The caste is corporate lawyers. The whole thing is a 1990s Silicon Valley office floor, described in deadpan ethnographic prose by Portland-based writer David D. Levine in “Notes From an Expedition to the Cellfoan People,” published in the September–October 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.
The Annals has occupied a specific niche since its founding in 1994: it looks precisely like a peer-reviewed journal, the format, the footnotes, the hedged conclusions, then publishes things that are deliberately absurd. The same organization also awards the Ig Nobel Prizes, for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think.
The Tribal Lexicon: Nektai, Bipa, Celfon
Phonetic renaming drives the satire. A necktie becomes Nektai. A pager becomes Bipa. A cell phone becomes Celfon. A briefcase becomes Brifæs. Lawyers are Aturni. Personal organizers, the Daytimer and Franklin Planner brands that filled 1990s desk drawers, are totem objects consulted before committing to any scheduled encounter with another tribe member.
These names sit close enough to the originals that you decode them after a beat, and that beat is the whole point. Reading “Bipa” instead of “pager” forces a small cognitive effort that breaks automatic recognition. Once you’re actually thinking about what a Bipa is, a box clipped to the waistband because a vibrating mechanism might command its wearer, at any moment, to locate a telephone, the practice starts to look genuinely strange.
Making the Familiar Strange on Purpose
What Levine is doing has a name in literary theory: defamiliarization. The instinct goes back centuries, Jonathan Swift used it in Gulliver’s Travels, describing English society through the bewildered eyes of imaginary outsiders. The method is simple: take something the reader knows so well they’ve stopped seeing it, and describe it as completely alien.
Levine’s version works because he doesn’t parody academic ethnography, he reproduces it. The hedged conclusions, the scholarly distance, the dry acknowledgments: all pitch-perfect. A winking narrator would let the reader off the hook; the clinical tone holds them inside the disorientation a beat longer.
Funded by the Tribe Being Mocked
At the foot of the piece, where a real paper would thank its funding bodies, Levine acknowledges Intel Corporation for financial assistance with the research. The gag needles the real convention of corporate-sponsored research, those acknowledgments appear in genuine papers and invite reasonable questions about whose interests shape conclusions. Levine had worked at Intel himself as a technical writer, software engineer, and user interface designer; the tribe listed as research sponsor is one he had actually belonged to.
So… Is It Actually a Ritual?
The piece never delivers a verdict on whether office culture is organized rationality or inherited performance, and that restraint is why the question lingers. Anthropologists who study modern workplaces in earnest have noted that dress codes, title hierarchies, and meeting protocols do function as social rituals: they signal group membership, enforce status, and create shared meaning well beyond any practical function. Ask what a managing director’s tailored suit is actually for, and the honest answer starts to sound a lot like the honest answer for why a shaman wears ceremonial regalia.
As for the significance of Nektai color, Levine’s field report notes that it remains undetermined. He’s probably not wrong.