Blog Reviews

When one considers the scope of all these blog assignments, from the beginning with an analysis of the media’s role in the Haitian cholera outbreak to the application of film theory to a foreign piece of cinema, the overall goal would appear to be a synthesis of anthropological media theories and an application to specific cases, contemporary and otherwise. Thus, the end result should be a collection of analytical articles on specific media issues using new scholarly knowledge from course materials and our own creative/critical skills. Looking at two blogs from my peers, Riaz Makan’s and Eric Fontaine’s, we can assess their final contributions to the field of media anthropology through the writing of their respective case studies.

Eric Fontaine’s class blog (http://ericfontainemediameditation.blogspot.com), takes a rather personal slant on most the assignments as he seeks to color the scholarly theories and contemporary issues with some of his own, more anecdotal experiences. Such an approach, while not strictly scholarly, makes a valuable contribution to the field, nonetheless, as it provides a distinct, personal take on issues that are usually addressed in more academic means. He does a good job in all his articles of summarizing the key points made by other scholars on the topic at hand. For example, interacting with writers such as Walter Benjamin (in the “Jai Ho” post) and Jaques Lacan (in the film theory post ) in order to provide an academic/critical framework within which he may further discuss the specific cases. Unfortunately, many of these did not go far enough to draw his own opinions together with the academic views on the issues at hand. They are often merely paralleled without an enough critical linkages being made between the scholars’ theories and his own anecdotes. His best developed posts, such as the graffiti based assignment (“Graffiti: you are what you write?”) do develop such interplay and, indeed, perform a strong analysis. Specifically he draws upon academic articles which assert that graffiti is often the ‘true’ voice of a community based on its ability to be expressed anonymously. Then he effectively applies such theories to the chicken-scratched scribblings on the UBC libraries’ desks to do exactly what our blogs are set out to do: provide critical case studies that color the more theoretical discussions gleaned from the class materials.

Riaz Makan’s blog (http://rmakan.blogspot.com/) makes a consistent and concerted effort to provide anecdotal, theoretical, and contemporary examples that both illustrate his own take on media functions and lend specific illustrative cases to the theoretical work done by other scholars. Principally, after reading the whole of the blog, Makan seems to be interested in cultural flows and subsequent remediation of foreign and local cultural capital through our own personal media creations. These discussions would appear to be informed largely by the writings of Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art....”) and Arjun Appadurai (“Global Ethnoscapes...”). For example, in his post on the aboriginal use of radio to create community he is careful to delineate the difference in flow of mass culture and mass radio (i.e. one way, from station to listeners around the world) versus the interplay and truncated, regional flow of community radio stations such as CBQM. Furthermore, in his discussion of the “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” he traces levels of cultural “equivalence” between appropriate and inappropriate recreations of foreign media products (i.e. the songs and dances of Bollywood). His concerns are also traced through the “Jai Ho” post where he makes it clear that ‘why’ something is being remade is critical to its acceptance as well. In the modern age of global cultural flow we must take care not to simply remake things because they are popular or ‘fun’ but because we want to express some sort of deeper connection to the original medium.

[We are] the Devil

Gordon Gray’s discussion of structuralist film theory, described in his book Cinema: A Visual Anthropology, asserts that the essential basis of structuralism is that we, as humans, look at our world through established sets of oppositional binaries (good/bad, left/right, land/water, etc.). The cinematic example he provides to better illustrate the relationships of such binaries to the world of film, is Star Wars; where Darth Vader is ‘bad’ and Luke Skywalker is ‘good.’ The simplicity of such a dichotomy (what structuralists define as a work’s ‘master antimony’ or central opposition), Gray suggests, is part of what made the film such a universal success.

South Korean director Kim Ji-Woon’s 2010 horror/thriller picture I Saw the Devil utilizes the same master antimony to drive the plot forward, good versus evil, but does so in a much more nuanced, complex, and, ultimately, disturbing way than we see in Lucas’s Star Wars. Whereas in a film such as Star Wars the action is driven by the fundamental opposition and battles between good and evil embodied by two specific forces (in Star Wars this is quite literally expressed), I Saw the Devil is more concerned with what Gray describes as ‘transitional zones’ where people, or characters, demonstrate both good and evil behaviors or attitudes and thus express the true complexity of human nature.

I Saw the Devil begins much like any other horror film, with a quiet road at night, where an unsuspecting, defenseless, and utterly innocent victim (in this case a young pregnant woman) is met by a ruthless, remorseless killer, Kyung-chul. Thus, we have, early on, the violation of what appears good by that which appears evil, and we, as the audience know where we stand: on the side of good and united against a vicious murderer. Thus, we identify with our film’s protagonist and the victim’s fiancé, special agent Soo-Hyun, who vows to bring the killer to justice.

At the moment of Soo-Hyun’s first encounter with Kyung-chul—who we, the audience, now know to be an utterly sadistic serial murder and rapist—we are ready to see the triumph of good over evil and watch an inhuman criminal be brought to a merciless justice. Much unlike the abhorrence felt during film’s previous gruesome murder scenes, we now feel a vengeful satisfaction as we watch Soo-Hyun brutally attack Kyung-chul and beat him within a hair’s breadth of his life. Then, Soo-Hyun stops. He breaks Kyung-chul’s arm, plants a tracking device on him and lets him go. Only to track him down again, beat him nearly to death again, cut his Achilles tendon, and, once again, release him. So the pattern continues, each time pushing the audience and the protagonist further away from their original position of moral authority. Yet, there is some level of viewing pleasure derived by the audience as we watch our protagonist slip into the role of a sadistic hunter and away from his earlier heroic position. We, much like Soo-Hyun, do not know where to draw the line between just punishment and sadistic, self-serving revenge.

At the end of the film, the audience’s position can best be described as one of ambivalence, even guilt, as we watch Soo-Hyun defy the police to exact revenge upon Kyung-chul. We are unsure whether we would prefer the violence to stop to watch Kyung-chul turn himself in (as he now plans to do) or if he should ‘get what he deserves’, a slow, painful death at the hands of Soo-Hyun. So our original, morally authoritative stance has now been completely destabilized by the blurring lines between vengeance and justice. It is no longer good versus bad, but, instead, it is the perpetuation of violence or the beginning of a vaguely unsatisfactory peace through lawful justice.

Source:

Gray, Gordon
         2010     Film Theory. Cinema: A Visual Anthropology. 35-72.

Ab"original" Radio

In the modern era of mass media interconnectivity (as defined by interactive online publishing and social media tools like Facebook and Twiiter), the once prevalent media form of interactive, call-in radio has become a lesser part of how we create, imagine, and keep in touch with our communities. This is not the case, however, with aboriginal peoples of Canada and Northern Australia where radio stations and their shows (specifically “request-line” or “call-in” style shows) are integral to these groups’ ability to express and create their own communities and collective identities.

In the case of Fort McPherson, an Aboriginal-Canadian town well inside the Arctic Circle, the organic radio programming of their station, CBQM, provides a lens through which one might understand the principle values or characteristic of their community and, also, how they are using radio to extend and further shape such communal qualities. After viewing the NFB documentary on the station, the first apparent quality is its dedication to inclusivity. It is, very much so, listener created radio, from the local, bi-lingual DJs to the constant call-ins with dedications, requests, and direct messages to other members of the community. This latter characteristic, causes the station to operate more like a public switch-board than a traditional radio station. While they do play music and even have their own sort of political talk radio, most of the time they are using CBQM as a mouthpiece to invite friends over for tea, do some well-wishing to those they cannot get in touch with otherwise, and to advise other community members of things such as wolves in the area or ice thaws. This non-traditional form (at least from a modern North American perspective) is indicative of some of the communication difficulties inherent in living in such a remote locale. From what one can glean from the documentary, people in Fort McPherson do not use cell-phones and are not always in their homes either (whether they are out in trapping lodges, community centers, etc.). Thus—what one might imagine to be their only radio station—CBQM becomes the perfect way to reach someone or to post a mass bulletin. Much how modern communities of North America may share a person-to-person message with their entire community through something like a Facebook wall-post, so too the listeners of CBQM share similar messages in a similar fashion. This act of sharing messages is an integral reflection upon the inclusivity of the Fort McPherson community, while also being a practical solution to the communication difficulties present in the remote region.

The Aboriginal communities half-way around the world in Northern Australia are, interestingly enough, using radio in a similar manner to their counter-parts in Canada. Utilizing radio to connect with “rellies” (relatives) and to share with their communities. The major difference here, however, is the establishment of more comprehensive network not to simply to support connections within the community but to create links to other remote aboriginal groups across Australia. This makes their radio stations not only integral to their preservation of a self-defined community but also to their survival as a recognized political and ethnic group.

While neither of these stations seem overtly engaged in presenting traditional aboriginal programming (both, actually, seem to have a distinct affinity for country music of all kinds), they are still the mouthpieces of their distinctive groups and are capable of putting forth a new, more modern and perhaps more subtle aboriginal identity based on inclusivity.

Sources:




Allen, Dennis
           2010 CBQM. National Film Board of Canada.

Fisher, Daniel
           2009    Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia. Cultural
                    Anthropology 24(2):280-312

Imitation is flattery but when is it a mockery?

Prior to my reading of David Novak’s essay, “Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood,” my own personal conceptions of appropriate versus inappropriate recreation or imitation of an original work—especially when crossing cultural lines—was based upon that slippery notion of authorial intent. A concept that one should consider through the lens of the work’s original artist, the lens of the person remediating the work, and through an analysis of the intended audiences of such performances of the final recreation. In other words, any amount of self-aware irony, devoted delicacy when dealing with foreign cultures, and an understanding on the part of the audience of such self-reflexive ironies, the transmutation of the foreign, and a semi-culturally-sensitive sense of humor could render a reification important and sufficiently ‘aware’ enough to be presented. The largely anecdotal argument presented by Novak’s article, however, asserts that the acceptability of certain recreations of the foreign through alternative cultural lenses are also heavily informed by cultural power relations.

Throughout the early segment of the article I found myself wondering, how is it that North American renditions of a Bollywood performance can easily be considered racist or ignorant while an Elvis impersonator in India is, so often, perfectly acceptable? According to Windy Chien (a protestor of a San Francisco group’s recreation of the Bollywood song/dance Jaan Pehechaan Ho, in Cantonese of all languages) it is the global cultural power difference between American media/culture and that of what must be considered a marginalized culture of Chinese-American and Indian. In other words, the majority of hegemonic cultural power may not engage in recreations or imitations of minority cultural forms no matter how self-aware or ironic the performers’ intentions may have been. The same way that our popular North American culture deems it acceptable for an African-American comedian to make fun of white people while the opposite (i.e. a white comedian making stereotypical claims about African-Americans for comedic effect) is inappropriate and racist.

Such black and white delineations (no pun intended) are obviously set up for failure, however, because they deny any concept of the individual’s right to express their own identity through irony or a self-aware assumption of what could be considered ‘foreign’ culture. By saying that no member of the majority may imitate any member or group of members from the minority for any reason is to implicate that majority member as 1) part of the majority based on ethnic lines (which could be labeled a form of racism unto itself) and 2) implicating them in any perceived wrongs perpetrated by the majority (i.e. white Americans may never imitate African-Americans due to a past discrimination of the part of their perceived ethnic group).

Thankfully, Novak’s article deals with the delicate nuances present in the arguments over appropriate versus inappropriate recreations of foreign cultural materials through his discussion of the film Ghost World in contrast to the San Francisco group’s performance. Here he discusses at length the importance of understanding people as individuals ensconced in a globalized/cosmopolitan culture where identity should not merely be understood as member of majority/minority groups but on a personal basis that often lies through consumption, assessment, performance, acceptance, and rejection of foreign and local cultural capital through different media channels.

Source:

Novak, David
       2010       Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of
                      Bollywood. Cultural Anthropology 25(1): 40-72.

Do You "Love" It?

The ‘i love you’ (ILY) message would appear to be unstoppable, all in the same sloppy cursive hand; new ones seem to appear daily. In its anonymity and simplicity it has become a force free of authorship: easily repeatable, and existing solely in the public domain. While the abundant scribblings have only begun to make waves here in Vancouver, we are merely the newest city to become part of what is a global campaign, the I Love You World Graffiti Project. Its design is largely informed by accessibility with the goal of perfect outreach; thus no one may be exempt from the writing's sentiment. Its form, as street art, certainly reinforces this message of universality. Displayed prominently on bus stops, on fences, on sidewalks, on bathroom stalls, on the sides of buildings many stories up, and even on the bark of trees, the ILY is deliberately placed to contact every urban denizen or visitor. Thus, the message becomes one of universal love as dictated by medium and because there is sure more than one “I,” the source further extends this theme of non-exclusion. Part of the ILY World Graffiti Project’s mission is to contact and interview some of the movement's most prolific taggers, which, in my opinion, detracts from the beautifully universal nature of the tags. With the artists left nameless and unparticularized, the writer becomes an omnipresent, unconditioned presence and thus reinforces the sentiment of universal love.

Just as in cities before Vancouver (Paris, Toronto, New York) the ILY message has taken on a life of its own, far beyond the flesh and blood of the original tagger. Here, in our city, it has performed a kind of evolution, becoming, in many places, “we love you” (WLY) instead. The WLY message as a response or reification of the ILY generates a kind of mini-narrative between the two tags and the connotations of each. “We” seeming to accept “I” with the word of “love” and the other way around in a perfect loop of anonymous self and group affection; again further communicating the message of universal love.

Shepard Fairey

Considering other major achievements in repeatable street art (like the infamous Andre the Giant tags by Shepard Fairey or the globally proliferated characters from the street artist Space Invader) the ILY message lacks a refined aesthetic appeal and comes in the permanent form of spray paint. In the case of Shepard Fairey and Space Invader, their tags (made of poster paper and stuck on tiles, respectively) could be easily removed without damaging the applied surface. ‘I love you’ is, unfortunately, left as an indelible mark upon private and municipal property around the city and the world. Leading some to despise the scrawled statements. Perhaps this permanence is tied to its artistic meaning, as one’s love leaves a permanent mark upon the receiver. Furthermore its simple, crude form could be aimed at similar artistic goals, i.e. conveying the mundane yet magical nature of love. But does that lessen the effects of the vandalism in any way? It’s hard to say. According to an article in the Georgia Straight, business owners, public officials, and the police seem less than pleased with its increasing presence. They endeavor to demonstrate that graffiti is not a victimless crime and that local businesses have run up tabs in the thousands in the name of graffiti removal. If you turn your attention to the comments below, however, this sample of the Vancouver public would not appear to be bothered by the tags, many even come out boldly in favor of them. Regardless of reception, the Vancouver edition of the ‘I love you’ artist(s) has presented the city with a kind of unresolvable issue. Buffing, painting commissioned murals, and increasing police presence in tagged areas (rather expensive countermeasures for a crime deemed merely ‘mischief’) will have little effect on the anonymously created art form. This allows for a kind of ironic, connotative self-preservation of the omnipresent script. Graffiti can be readily labeled as form of resistance, which, in this case, has become irresistible, both in sentiment and physicality. One can imagine an army of anonymous juggernauts armed with a paint-cans and the message of unconditional, universal love. How could you not love it?

Sources:

I Love You World Graffiti Project
   2011 Website. ILoveYouWorldGraffitiProject.com. http://www.iloveyougraffiti.com/index.html

Lupick, Travis
   2010 Around Vancouver, graffiti appears in waves. The Georgia Straight, Sept. 29, 2010.
       http://www.straight.com/article-350511/vancouver/graffiti-appears-waves

Slumdog Million'where'?

The international cinematic success of 2008, was, without a doubt, the academy award winner for best picture that year, Slumdog Millionaire. Without any consideration of the plot, it is clear, simply from the credits, that this film is firmly situated in the age of globalized media and entertainment. The films two directors, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, live on opposite sides of the globe, the writers are from different continents, and this is merely the beginning of the internationally sourced cast and crew responsible for the critically acclaimed film. This theme of globalized entertainment extends further into the premise of Slumdog Millionaire, in that a teen from Mumbai appears on an Indian adaptation of the popular North American game show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” The layers of globalization or what one might call international cultural flow almost become dizzying at points, between the worldwide success of the film, its combination of western cinematic tropes and those of Bollywood, the globally sourced cast, crew, and investors, and the global context in which the storyline situates itself. Honestly, untangling the complicated flows of culture involved in the conception, production, and subsequent consumption of Slumdog Millionaire would be more tedious than building a precise scale version of the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks and marshmallows. Luckily, Walter Benjamin’s and Arjun Appadurai’s articles (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Global Ethnoscapes,” respectively) provide interesting theoretical lenses through which we may view and analyze such items of international creation and global cultural significance.

In his article “Global Ethnoscapes,” Appadurai is keen to examine precisely these sorts of complex intersections of the local and global and the international cultural flows that produce phenomenon such as Slumdog Millionaire. At one point, Appaduari relates an experience he had while in India with his family that illustrates the complicated cultural webs present in our increasingly globalized societies. In his story international borders are conflated and a religion is delocalized in a single moment of revelation whereupon he and his wife discover that the man they flew all the way to India from Philadelphia to visit is, in fact, conducting ceremonies in Houston, Texas. This moment of “transnational irony” is exactly what we see in a YouTube video of a Tamil group’s reproduction of “Jai-Ho” in Tampa, Florida. The many threads of international culture that are interwoven to create such a globalized product are too complex to undo in this brief context. We are able to conclude, however, that such a recreation of what was already a multinational project is evidence of our fully globalized modern condition. Our virtual communities have fully transcended national boundaries through the creation and dissemination of public and private media.


Walter Benjamin’s article argues rather successfully against the reproduction and repetition of art in modern culture. Specifically, he directs a good portion of his argument at the modern mediums of film and photography, where he asserts that the “aura” of traditional art forms is blatantly absent. While it is relatively hard to swallow this aspect of his argument as he strips film and photography of any traditional artistic merit, his adjoining allegation that repetition and reproduction of an art-piece results in a kind of cheapening is quite agreeable. In regards to Slumdog Millionaire, this latter claim can be understood through an examination of the plethora of reproductions of the film’s concluding song and dance number, “Jai-Ho.” While some of these border on being localized tributes (for example, the performance by the Tamil group) to a pop-culture phenomenon, others—especially the hyper-sexualized Pussycat Dolls rendition—are prime examples of Benjamin’s assertions. To call the pop-stars’ cover of Slumdog’s “Jai-Ho” cheap, is to make quite the understatement. Not only is a traditional Bollywood group song and dance turned into an overtly erotic visual feast for the overexposed masses, its function as a vehicle for profit is shamelessly blatant. Close-up shots of the crowd that surrounds the picture-perfect pop-stars prominently displays brand name items, including cell phones and headphones. This clearly seeks to take advantage of the kind of “distracted reception” induced by cinema and which Benjamin rails against in his essay. The audience, while assuming the role of critic, does so passively and thus cheapens the potential art form of film, or so Benjamin argues. So the cheapening is two-fold; not only is this an example of Benjamin’s assertion that simple reproduction results in a reduction in significance or “aura” we also see the exploitation of what some would consider art for the sake of the entertainment industry’s bottom line.

Benjamin’s article also speaks to the blurring lines between author and audience in this modern age where the creation or recreation of visual content (I would hardly call it art) is so simple. While his essay predates the advent of YouTube, this statement seems to be a kind of premonition of its ability to make anyone a content maker. While Benjamin might hesitate to call Slumdog Millionaire art, for the sake of argument, let us assume it is of artistic merit. Do the YouTube recreations lose the orignial “aura” of the motion picture version? Most certainly. I would even go as far to argue that such rampant reinvention and re-disemmination of inferior or derivative versions subtracts from the aura of film’s original song and dance. Just as the film influenced the production of the YouTube versions, so have the YouTube renditions caused a kind of negative correlation with the original. Perhaps Benjamin is right in this case; maybe we all are not meant to be content creators or re-creators even though the simple combination of a video camera and a laptop provides us with the means.

Sources:

Appadurai, Arjun
    1996 Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. Modernity at 
        Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

Benjamin, Walter
    2005 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Marxist Literary Criticism.

Khokar, Karan
    2009 Karan Khokar and Divya Ikara- Jai Ho Dance - Tamil Sneham - Tampa, Florida
       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqWkFMoLocM

Lego Montage Films.
   2009 Slumdog Millionaire- Official Jai Ho Music Video (HD).
       http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=vRC4QrUwo9o

Rahmen, A.R. & Pussycat Dolls
   2009 Jai Ho (You Are My Destiny). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5OyXmHD0w

Mediation: A Focus for Modern Anthropology

William Mazzarella’s 2004 article “Culture, Globalization, Mediation” analyzes, broadly, how we engage in productions of the local in an increasingly global culture. More minutely, he is interested in how such productions are shaped and influenced by mediation, i.e. how media influences the productions and reproductions and subsequent understandings of certain social practices. He argues that these processes of mediation are especially fertile ground for anthropological study when considered within the context of increasing globalization. As Mazzarella outlines in his essay, the study of “culture” (i.e. anthropology) has been problematized in recent decades by widespread globalization and the subsequent blurring of cross-cultural boundaries. Gone is the plethora of niche cultures clearly defined by formerly insurmountable geo-political boundaries to be replaced by a kind of constantly repeated and greatly more homogenous planetary culture. This left the respected tradition of ethnography based anthropological study like a house floating without its foundations, searching for a base of research and methodology to fill in the rapidly expanding abyss created by globalization.Mazzarella argues in his essay that this gap can be and should be filled with the study of mediation processes around the world, in other words, anthropologists should shift their gaze from understanding specific cultures to attempting to understand how it is that we are creating, constituting, demonstrating, and defining culture on a global scale. In this way, he sees globalization not as the slow death of anthropology but as a kind of rejuvenation of the discipline. 

While Mazzarella’s interest in mediation is wide-ranging, he constantly harps on the importance and arguable existence of what one might call baseline mediations, those that get at the very beginnings of how we understand culture. He points out that the argument put forth by many others, that mediation is a representation of cultural premise is assuming culture is defined prior to being expressed by media. This, he says, is not the case and mediation, in fact has a constant role in creating, defining, and recreating our understandings of culture; in a way, it is as much part of “culture” as the shared social assumptions that supposedly constitute it.

Further fueling his argument that globalization and media are ample bases for anthropological study, he is keen to examine how certain global forms of culture are localized (for example, MTV around the world and localized reiterations of entertainment such as soap operas). Examples such as these directly relate processes of mediation to the changing cultural world through increased globalization, as do forms of media tied to the modern, decentralized ‘wired-world’, i.e. the internet and all its processes of mediation.

Source:

Mazzarella, William.
   2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33.1: 345-67.