(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

I have been showing the "Going Tribal" episodes in both of my classes. The "mature audiences" warning at the beginning of the program says: contains indigenous nudity. And that is pretty much my dissertation, summed up in three words. Or, as a guy who once tried to pick me up at Irene's in Greenpoint, slurred drunkenly (upon finding out I was studying anthropology): "uhh, so what I wanna know [hiccup] is...how come if it's a white woman's breasts it's pornography, but it it's a native woman's breasts it's anthropology?"



Seriously, I can't deal with "Going Tribal," I can't deal with the metacolonial humor of the hapless viewer-proxy Brtishman who is so earnest and makes faces when he realizes that he has to drink an entire pitcher of cow blood. "It's like a nutricious shake...it's not pleasant, but it's not disgusting...oh, you want me to drink the whole thing? Oh-ho-ho. [sotto voice] When I said it wasn't disgusting that was because I had only had a little bit." I also can't deal with the Discovery Channel screen captions that say "how far would you go to unleash your inner native? Bruce Parry is Going Tribal."


Bruce Parry, the specter of colonialism.

The thing about this show, is it is "ethnographic" in the same way that the World Fairs were, and (in a more "subtle") fashion, National Geographic. They all create spaces for the Western viewer/consumer to alleviate his colonial/postcolonial anxiety about other cultures/races/ethnicities. And they all provide the same re-iterated model of The West relating to The Rest through the lens of its own fantasy. The specifics of the fantasy vary with the time period. So, at the beginning of the 20th century you had natives imported for World Fairs and into the semiotic discourse of "descent of man" evolutionary diagrams, where white = upright. In 1960s National Geographic quietly did away with the images of white travellers in colonial territories being serviced by the native people because such images in the real world were becoming metonymic with struggles for independence and the volatile tensions as colonialism was imploding and ushered in quotas for Brown People vs. Bronze People vs. White People images (28%, 60% and 12%, respectively, in case you are curious). And now you've got the retro-colonial fantasy looping in on itself as the demand for "the primitive" produces a supply of "the primitive," which provides building blocks and narrative elements for the syncretic, confused mess that is the cosmology of that person next to you in your yoga class, with a "tribal" tattoo, who likes to say things like "in South America* there is a tribe** where [insert Western fantasy about the pastoral Eden lost to industrialization and capitalism]." Not to mention about how the idea of a "tribe" is itself more-or-less a colonial institution.

***
In totally unrelated news, I finally saw Brokeback Mountain and something about the dynamic between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and the minimalist affect up until the very end where there is mortality/emotion baroque apex reminded me of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. I guess it depends on how you read Giovanni's Room: do you read it as a novel about the alienation of modernism, told through the narrative of a gay love affair conducted in a social context that alienated the lover from his love...or do you read it as a tragedy of sub-articulated, repressed love that is structured as a modernist tale of alienation? Which side do you want to be a Lucacs for, what's the real base and what's the allegory? Like, Giovanni's Room was about people who couldn't love, not in a Bret Easton Ellis sociopathy, sort of way, but in a modernist alienation sort of way. And since I don't understand love as an abstract, and believe in it only as it is enacted through the syntax and lexicon of shared meaningful symbols, I kept thinking that the characters in the movie were alienated from love, without the language and social space to articulate it and enact it. This is not forbidden love. This is something that I identify as love because I am afforded the vocabulary to do so, but at the time the semiotic units available through their shared community only arranged themselves to spell "pathology" or "nasty."


*Sometimes it's Africa
**the "tribe" is never named

Comments

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

1. Nice entry.
2. When I first read this I thought you had written/that the titles said "ingenious nudity." Sorry, but that would have been so much more interesting! (Not for you to write about, but a warning for ingenious nudity?!)
3. Have you listened to the TAL episode in which the guy proposes "philanthropy tourism"? We might have actually discussed it, I'm not sure. But if you haven't, I think you'd be into it in one way or another.

http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/05/302.html

[mycrust.livejournal.com]

contains indigenous nudity

Un-fucking-real. How can anyone write that in the 21st century without benefit of a megadose of irony?

how come if it's a white woman's breasts it's pornography, but it it's a native woman's breasts it's anthropology?

My answer is still the same as the one I gave over coffee: presumably the white women get paid.

[chitinous.livejournal.com]

On my morning commutes, I frequently find myself driving past a furniture store on Melrose with a banner reading "Anglochine." (the store is called something else.) The banner has a black-and-white line drawing of a man with his entire head covered by one of those slightly cone-shaped hats frequently worn (perhaps in fantasy only) by rice paddy workers. He appears to be trying to pull it off his head...or maybe to pull it further on. I am fascinated and slightly sickened.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

"Unleash your inner native"? Presumably I do that every time I put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

Love your comment on Brokeback Mountain. There was a call for papers recently for a book about the film (already!) and I am vaguely thinking about writing something about the difference between queer films and gay films for it, but they want full articles rather than abstracts in about a month's time, so I probably don't have time.

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

I'd like to second this. As far as I know, the concept of tribes goes back to roman times and refers to the various people making up the roman empire (latin: tribus).

I can see how equating 100 people in an individual village with, for example, the Gauls, would be misleading though. Is this what you had in mind?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

right, see my reply to tropical_rat re: the export of that concept outside of European history in ways that enabled colonial rule.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I was talking about the postcolonial critiques of "tribes" as organizational categories for non-Western people. schrodingersgnu is right, you did have tribes back in the old European day, but as far as colonized territories go, some argue that "tribe" is an exported concept there, a figment of imperial imagings and designs. Martin Chanock wrote a book on British policies in colonial India and talked about the way in which this exported model of "tribalism" enabled “indirect rule,” whereby headsmen and chiefs were designated, through whom control over members of their “tribes” was maintained.

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

So the thesis would be that the indigenous people of the americas lived as part of a continuum, merely physically divided into villages?

Or is it the social structure of the tribes you argue against, not the presence of tribes par se? I really don't see quite what you mean.

Besides, I thought the british colonial method was to find a minority, put them in charge, and then let their continued survival be dependent on british guns. Worked quite well while the brits were still around, IIUIC, although it left quite a mess when they left.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

no, of course there were group divisions, but the Western heuristic behind tribes, as distinguished from each other by an ethnicity/language combination didn't often translate naturally onto colonized territories. Take Rwanda as an example. As far as ethnic/language groups go, there was just the one. Tutsi and Hutu were more like clans/kinships groups and eventually castes. There were power inequalities and economic inequalities, but until the colonial era there was never this ideology of "different" tribes. The application of European racist theories and their construction of "tribes" in light of that created the national imaginary where Tutsis were considered "foreign" and not truly Rwandan and invaders from Ethiopia, who had subjugated the Hutus, and that "foreignness" (completely ficticious) was the basis for all the racist ingroup/outgroup rhetoric that belied the genocide.

Like, when the colonial administrators did census counts they marked people as Tutsi or Hutu, which had been a largely class distinction, and they recreated that division as a "different tribes" discourse, using their own social Darwinist theories to reify the superiority of the Tutsis over the Hutus (b/c they considered Tutsis to be Hamites, i.e. closer in descent to white Europeans). After the independence this led to the now-empowered Hutus considering the Tutsis as a tribe of infiltrators and foreign invaders (historically) and this was eventually turned into the propaganda that fueled the genocide.

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

Hmm, admittedly, my knowledge of Rwanda isn't comprehensive, but I thought the Tutsis only entered Rwanda in the 14'th or 15'th century, migrating from the north and eventually establishing a feudal system with the hutus as vassals. The main evidence for this was the importance of cattle, which the Hutus didn't really care about until the advent of the Tutsis. Although the two people intermingled quite substantially, the feudal system remained until the arrival of the germans.

I guess this is compatible with an argument that the colonialists re-established tribal distinctions that were more or less defunct, but they didn't invent them out of thin air. Seemingly, the tutsi/hutu distinction was significantly more pronounced in 1900 than, say, normands/saxons were in 1500.

Rwanda aside, how does this translate to south america? Neither the portugese or the spanish seemed particularly interested in establishing local rulerships, so why would they invent tribal distinctions?

[all-or-nothing3.livejournal.com]

great entry! When I saw ads for this show it was my first thought as well.....more neo colonial crap a la Survivor.I was about to suggest the Lutz & Collins' paper but after re reading the entry im pretty sure you've read it....A few other good ones are (and forgive me if any of this is remedial to you) Shohat & Stam - "The Imperial Imaginary", Emile De Brigard- "The history of Ethnographic Film" and there is some interesting stuff on the spectacle of the other In Stuart Hall's Book; "Representation, Cultural representations and signifying practises"

[apropos.livejournal.com]

Have you ever worked your way through "Exotics at Home" by DiLeonardo? I read it in, like, second year, and at the time I thought it was great--but everything was new and great to me back then. It's basically a frustrated rant, probably not the best dissertation reading.

[apropos.livejournal.com]

Oh and remind me to tell you the funny story about the conversation I sat in on, between two of OUR classmates, about white men in south america.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

tell me! (over email, natch)

[wilhemina.livejournal.com]

i want to read Giovanni's Room.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend it! (Same for Another Country)

[chelvis.livejournal.com]

So should Bruce Parry never visit (or vist and film in) developing countries?