Anthropologists adapt technology to world's cultures "They'd flip the cell phone over, take the battery out and actually read the bar code on it to see where the phone was built," Canavan says.

She and two colleagues were doing fieldwork for their employer, Motorola, investigating how the company could best enter the emerging markets of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

They found that people in the Caspian Sea area have learned to read the numbers on bar codes to see where products were manufactured. The buyers believe that products from American companies are better if they were built in America.