anthromusicology

welcome home

I’m now a professional anthropologist, working for a design studio. This means that I do research; generally user research, usually for the purpose of product development. There are many things about my job that I’d love to blog about, but sadly for me, most of our projects are confidential until they’re over—at which point I’m usually at least waist-deep in another project. 

However, I continue to be an anthropologist by nature in my private life as well. My private-and-professional obsession with community has only been exacerbated by moving to a city/state/climate zone for work where I have no social network, and I have spent much of my time over the past several months looking into ways to cultivate some community of my own. My first real success in my new city came about by getting involved in our local CouchSurfing chapter, although with time I’ve found trouble pushing that community to be more for me than a group of people who like to party together. I have also pursued community through the local infoshop/radical community, but it is sorely lacking in participation and timeliness, and my truly incredible busy-ness precludes me from trying to get the organization to be the sort of thing I could participate in, so for now I’ve let that one go. 

There is one other thing that continues to feel like home to me, and that is burns—ie, Burning Man events. My first burn was just two years ago, and when, at the entrance, someone told me, “Welcome home,” I felt ridiculous. This party was not my home, nor did I want it to be—but at the same time I wanted to accept the good will of their gesture. It was not dissimilar from the feeling I kept having when people who got excited about my presence would ask me about my sign: an almost queasy feeling of realizing that to allow both of us to keep face I had to participate in the exchange with them, as though I bought in to what they were saying.

Obviously, I was wrong to feel that way. The constant experimentation in creating community, as well as the overarching feeling that life is wonderful, that we deserve happiness, that humans can be wonderful and ought to be built up—that feels more right to me, more a foundation of “home,” than anything I’ve found in the “self-respecting” world. I have made such deep and lasting and caring connections at burns that I cannot imagine a world in which I’d be disallowed, somehow, from continuing to go to them. They knew, better than I did, that I’d find a home there. 

Avatar

It’s much easier, I think, to criticize something than to savor it these days. But I think this betrays a real problem with our generation, which is another topic altogether. That said… I think that there are a number of good things out there which my first intent is to criticize for those things that cause them to fall short of greatness. But the great should not be the enemy of the good. Good things ought to be appreciated as the projects of imperfect people, and this thought has driven many of my actions lately, including a renewed interest in local art and in my own creative drive, so I think that whether or not it is true for everyone it is a good thing for me. With that strangely-apologetic excuse out of the way, what follows is more or less a defense of Avatar: not to the masses, who evidently agree that it’s worth seeing, but to people like me… people whose first instinct is to criticize, and who have to think harder about allowing themselves to become associated with appreciation of a thing.

Avatar, like most of the big box-office movies, can easily be read as a critique of capitalism. But unlike its friends & neighbors at the top of the charts, Avatar barely bothers to make this a secret, and somehow pulls it off while still being the awesome roller-coaster that most people evidently go to the box office to see. With any luck, some of these people will internalize the critiques of America, of economic imperialism, of the military, and of capitalism itself along the way.

The real antagonist in Avatar is clearly the cold heartless invisible hand of capitalism. This force is embodied in two people: the wormy yuppie administrator, Parker Selfridge, who is in charge of the operation on Pandora, and the bullheaded Colonel Quaritch, who is in charge of the “hired guns” and runs this “security force”—actually a private military—in a manner suspiciously similar to the American military operation in Iraq. The problem is not that anyone necessarily wants to destroy or change the native culture, but rather, there are valuable (to the capitalists) resources that the natives essentially don’t want to give up. This is less obvious than it perhaps should be in the movie, which if one is not paying close attention can be read as a simple military conquest, especially as the Colonel becomes the main apparent threat; and in fact the militaristic dogma does become its own self-perpetuating antagonist once unleashed. But the man initially in charge, Administrator Selfridge, is torn—he doesn’t want to harm the natives, but as his primary responsibility is to his stockholders, he is forced to alienate himself from his emotions and ethics. There is an element of anti-colonialist critique, to be sure, but the most applicable comparison is not white colonization as such, but rather First World plundering of marginalized peoples’ lands, in the vein of, for instance, the Mexican government allowing the rape of the Oaxacan indigenous’ land by rich capitalists, which would have left the indigenous with a splintered culture—not because of religious or ethnic colonization for its own sake, but as an unfortunate by-product of capitalism’s insatiable need for more. It is almost certainly not merely a coincidence that the two future wars mentioned in Avatar—one having taken place in Venezuela, the other in Nigeria—were in countries that are currently major oil producers. This is only mentioned once, but any politically-aware viewer will recognize the implication: in the future Cameron is drawing, most of the wars are about economic imperialism, the effect of an economy that cannot cut back. Little surprise that it would leave the protagonist with a spinal injury and without the money to fix his paralysis. He is the perfect child of the dying world: it cannot support even those that return from war but by sending them to another war on another world in search of even more buried treasure. Even more than that, it is obvious that he is alienated from his body, which is clearly a commodity being used over and over by capitalism: first in such an injurious way that he must dream his freedom; next because his brain and DNA are identical to his brother’s.

Another facet of interest in Avatar is that there is an impressive amount of linguistic “othering” going on in the rhetoric of the head of security, causing the Blackwater forces—er, the private military—to view the natives as hostile, backwards savages who are nonetheless extremely strong and dangerous. This linguistic footwork is not unlike that described by discourse analysis of situations in which a particular group is villified by another (cf: Wagner-Pacifici, for one). This sort of distancing/alienating rhetoric, associated with the militaristic “security force” and required by the need of capital to make good on its investment, is opposed to the rhetoric of the scientists, which is more or less a rhetoric of cultural relativism in which the natives are to be respected, even protected. (The incompatibility of these two discourses is not unfamiliar to any academic or bleedingheartedliberal who has ever tried to argue with a republican.)

The scientists are in many ways essentialized academics: they are at once anthropologists and botanists, using ridiculously advanced and expensive participant-observation methods (growing themselves nativelike bodies to inhabit) seemingly mostly to study plants (what?). But perhaps this can be chalked up to the need to make a huge operation into something digestible enough to be put into a movie. Either way, the tiny number of scientists as compared to the ridiculous number of mercenaries reads like a sick joke made specifically to academics and Marxists: capitalism does not call for the production of knowledge except as a kind of afterthought; as such, those involved with the production of knowledge about capitalist enterprises are destined to experience a Cassandra complex. And in fact these scientists do. The administrator listens to Grace’s findings, only to laugh in her face what is very much a cliche about academics: “What have you people been smoking?” and soon after, agrees to let the private military’s perspective rather than the scientists’ perspective be the one that frames the operation.

Interestingly, though, the movie does not exalt the scientists above their station. For one thing, the Na’Vi have evidently tired of trying to teach the scientists (“It is hard to fill a cup that is already full”). For another thing, it is made very clear to the scientists that their work is not only incidental to the “real” work of extracting the resources of Pandora, but that it can in fact be taken and used for what they had hoped to avoid: a justification for violent plunder. The tragedy, of course, is that the anthropological need to explain has led Jake to say too much, admitting on tape that the Na’Vi would never give up their home willingly. Evidently these scientists were working to save the Na’Vi on grounds very similar to the way scientists are currently using things like the Endangered Species act to hold on to small bits of habitat—by knowingly leading on the capitalists into thinking they can have everything; happy seaturtles and happy metroplex resort communities. Once the capitalists realize that the sea turtles are going to keep dying even if they leave some areas untouched, they stop caring and develop every last square inch. Jake didn’t mean to do the Na’Vi in; he honestly didn’t know how much science is subjugated to capitalistic enterprises, and is therefore about upholding certain untruths in order to buy itself more time. In terms of the movie’s meaning for students of the social sciences, it is a chilling reminder that even well-intentioned work has been co-opted throughout history.

The ubiquitous character changeover of the protagonist is, in this case, actually something quite radical: Jake rejects the militaristic discourse about the aliens, and even the scientific discourse that would seek to name and explain the alien race and habitat; he in fact comes to feel that it is in the human world that things feel unreal; in which he feels truly alienated. This is symbolized in two ways: his wholeness of body in his Avatar body and his connection to the Na’Vi in his need to complete their coming-of-age rites and concommitant acceptance as a member of their society. In the human realm, by contrast, he is constantly between worlds: he is supposed to report to representatives of two incompatible discourses; even within a single discourse, he must go against his own will (alienation from self) in order to attain literal wholeness of body. The radical one-ness of the Na’Vi with the world around them—and of that world with itself—is partially what was to love about them, partially just really fun from a psychedelic perspective, and partially what made them the opposite of the alienated capitalists. In the end, it was the forest that saved itself (and the Na’Vi with it) because of that radical one-ness.

Now this is not to say that the movie was not problematic. First of all, the movie follows the same racist, sexist plot as every other Hollywood movie: the white man saves the day. I’m tired of making that argument, though, so CF: everything ever for more on that topic. When I first walked out of the theatre, the first thing I wanted to talk about was how problematic I found the representation of the natives to be. When you first meet Neytiri, she is wearing her hair in black braids with beads at the end, a traditionally black style, and she has what sounded to me like a West African accent as well as speech pattern—the actress is in fact Dominican, so with West African roots, but she’s clearly affecting this West African-sounding broken English. Next you meet her parents. Her mother is also African, but her father is decidedly Native American, which really crosses a line for me. You can’t just mix a bunch of different cultures together to get one massive heterodoxic exoticized other. And of course the movie played to that other great cliche, the Noble Savage. Such anthropological cliches are, more than anything, reflective of the culture from which they arise: which is the problem when you’re trying to see another culture for what it is, rather than for what it has been made to represent. In the past, the Noble Savage cliche has caused westerners to overlook complicated problems in other societies or to use the prevalence of problems like sexism in “noble” cultures to justify the sexism of their own culture. In this case, though, the cliche is being applied to a race that does not exist, so it’s not as though it’s going to cause a people to be viewed through a lens that is limiting. What is so offensive about the Noble Savage cliche being applied to an alien race? I honestly cannot think of anything, other than that it’s a cliche and we’re tired of it. In fact, in terms of sexism, although the movie itself is sexist in predictable ways, the Na’Vi are presented as a very balanced race in which neither men or women are subjugated to each other.

Along the lines of things the movie really should have done better: I’ve heard a couple of people describe what they saw as plotholes. The one that stands out to me is that for Jake to continue to function as a person, his Avatar must sleep a -lot,- and probably at some really inconvenient times. I agree that this ought to have been handled differently. Why couldn’t Jake have been fitted with the Avatar link-up in a chip in both their brains, with the ability to change which body to inhabit at will or at-call? Another I heard is that Jake Sully should not have been able to come back to the Na’Vi after they realized that he knew all along—and maybe was even a part of—the Skypeople’s plan to take their land, so his great plan is to get The Biggest Dragon, and that will impress them all so much that they’ll accept him back — and then — it WORKS. But the answer to that one, in my opinion, is that the fact that he is able to sync up with the biggest dragon at all means that he is in some sense the reincarnation of the one who leads the people through their great time of need. When he comes to them on the back of the great dragon, they do not call him Jake anymore, they call him by the name of the last person who rode him, Neytiri’s great-grandfather. They’re not impressed with his white-man skillz, they’re literally seeing the reincarnation of their great ancestors, the will of their deity, and the archetype of their savior. He’s like Neo, or Joan of Arc. However, what I think was quite unfortunate was that his great plan for saving the people was to do exactly the opposite of what he had told them to do previously: to fight. So, that’s dumb. (Although when he called the other tribes it definitely channeled Lessa of Pern, taking the “other five” Weyrs forward in time, which I thought was great.) What Cameron ought to have done in addition was to have Jake use the same type of knowledge that had allowed Hometree to be destroyed by the humans to help the Na’Vi fight back: his knowledge of the way their shit works. He could have explained how they normally use instruments like radar, and where the flight vehicles’ engines and weak points were. Instead, he does it all himself. Did they really need him to be a warleader? How annoying. At the same time, without Jake’s betrayal of the humans, which he did know how to fight, the battle would have been lost, and without his messages about the extent of the alienation of the humans, the forest would not have defended itself. The fact that Jake does completely abandon capitalism, in this movie that is made to appeal to a mass audience, not just an educated or progressive section, is really quite amazing.

The animation really was fantastic—on more levels than I’ve heard anyone discuss. Yes, the CGI was done very well. There’s more to it than that, though. The details were all accounted for, and that is so rare. The technology was well-handled; the helicopter design made sense; the computers were both beautiful and sensible; and I appreciated that humans had to wear masks on Pandora. In most movies people can just walk around breathing fine and that is unrealistic. Biologically, too, it was quite impressive. Most alien lifeforms look either utterly unrealistic, or exactly like an earthly being only green. Although there were clear dogs, horses, and trees, there were enough changes in their biology to at least make it interesting; and all of the flora and fauna appeared to me to be biologically plausible and to move in a naturalistic manner, which is more than I can say for the animated reconstuctions of dinosaurs in most documentaries. And the bioluminescence was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

TL/DR: I appreciated that the movie appealed to so many, and with such a direct indictment of capitalism and economic imperialism. Granted, it let the good guys win, and with its underdog white dude as a kind of savior for a kind of exoticized other. But it was a Hollywood movie after all —and how else would it appeal to such a wide audience but to participate in these cliches? If almost everything good had been destroyed and the rest had been put in a museum or a reservation, that would have been more historically accurate, but Republicans wouldn’t be inviting their friends and families to see it, and hopefully absorbing a rather shocking set of messages at the same time. It’s not a ‘film,’ it’s a Hollywood movie. But for what it is, I say kudos to Avatar.

OKAY?

At the Free Market yesterday I picked up some zines, including a lot of uninteresting feminist stuff and some really bad Marxist stuff. But I also got some free zine-editions of books, including Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English; Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber, and Derrick Jensen’s As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial. Score! After reading it, I went to find this last one online to send the .pdf to a friend, and would you believe, he didn’t make it available online? It is a comic book about deep ecology, and it is only available in book form, for $10 - 15, not including shipping. What’s up with stuff?

Exposure to the far more extensive Atlanta Craigslist has warped my mind. I want a dSLR, cheaply, right now.