Two noteworthy blog contributions from our Anthropology of Media class are Jeff H.’s “Constructing Identities with Graffiti,” which examines the repeated defacement of the UBC engineers’ cairn, and Katrina S.’s “The Insurrection of Signs? Graffiti, Marc Emery and The Culture of the (Non-) Deviant,” which questions the subversive nature of a “Free Marc Emery” graffiti stencil. Both explore the implications of the graffiti from various critical perspectives and engage with larger issues of cultural identity and ideology.

Jeff traces the cairn’s historical legacy and contextualizes its significance through informal interviews with students representing different subject positions. He takes the position that the ritualized repainting of the cairn is ultimately a positive act that facilitates identity formation, “creating a systematically and almost mutually supported channeled output for the betterment of campus life.” I would take this a step further and suggest that the act of painting their colours or symbols on the cairn is an interpellative and performative act: the engineers’ identity is called into question, and they repeatedly assert and reinforce it, thereby calling students from other faculties into affiliation. Although it is tangential, I would be interested to extend the discussion to something I have always been curious about: why UBC engineering students are commonly referred to as “engineers,” but students in other faculties are called “pre-med” or “1Ls,” rather than “doctors” or “lawyers.” It might be useful to consider the cairn as representing an ideological state apparatus (ISA), a term Louis Althusser used to describe a society’s system for producing obedient citizens who practice and reproduce its dominant values (Althusser 1969). (I am of course being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here.) Althusser states that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (1504). The cairn, depending on what colour it has been painted, encourages us to align ourselves with a specific group (engineers or anthropology students), mutually recognize ourselves as interpellated subjects, and fulfill these identities in the real world. By defacing the cairn, we are not resisting our defined roles, but simply reproducing ideology. Jeff points out that there are no legal repercussions for those who deface the cairn; it is worthwhile to further consider the ideological implications.

In her blog, Katrina uses Baudrilliard’s theories of the empty signifier to examine whether stencil graffiti—the strategy employed by the “Free Marc Emery” tag campaign—is truly as subversive as its medium would imply. The tag leads one to a website that provides guidelines for effective protest, which Katrina argues ultimately encourages conformity. However, I would offer that by providing suggestions for activism along with an assessment of their relative costs, the group is not letting itself be “guided by economic considerations,” but rather providing multiple access points to mobilize people from different socioeconomic groups, promoting inclusivity and diversity. Katrina suggests that the stencil graffiti might be considered part of a “marketing campaign” that has received the “public’s general acceptance” and become domesticated because it is “almost aesthetically pleasing.” She argues that this dampens the message’s subversive possibilities. A possible counterbalance is the concept of “culture jamming,” a tactic used to disrupt the signification of mainstream media to disseminate counterideological messages, such as reworking advertising billboards to espouse messages of anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, and anti-globalization. Culture jamming has been the subject of work by Mark Dery, Naomi Wolf, Noam Chomsky, and Kalle Lasn (founder of AdBusters magazine), among others. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque is also applicable here. Katrina’s blog is a valuable contribution to the dialogue surrounding the role of the individual as a part of larger activist movements.

Both Jeff’s and Katrina’s blog postings present interesting, well-contextualized arguments that invite the reader to undertake further critical inquiry.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis
2001 [1920]  Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [excerpts]. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. Pp. 1483–1509. New York: W. W. Norton.

H., Jeff
2011  Constructing Identities with Graffiti. Jeff Hart’s Blog, Feb. 8. http://jeffalexanderhart.blogspot.com/2011/02/graffiti.html

S., Katrina
2011  The Insurrection of Signs? Graffiti, Marc Emery and The Culture of the (Non-) Deviant My-Diation Blogspot, Feb. 28. http://my-diation.blogspot.com/2011/02/insurrection-of-signs-graffiti-marc.html

The protagonist of the French film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (“The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain”), is a shy, quirky Parisian with a fantastical imagination. She is depicted as content with her interior life and self-reliance, but a series of events lead her to seek out greater human connection and eventually pursue a male companion. Throughout the film, Amélie, frequently looks directly into the lens: either that of the film camera (at the viewing audience) or into the lens of a photo booth camera (an important setpiece). This narrative frame-breaking is not out of place in a film is populated by elements of magical realism (for example, people in photographs are able to talk), but it also provides a feminist reversal of the male gaze, the workings of which Laura Mulvey describes in her influential article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). I argue that Amélie is a feminist film that subverts conventions that would find the woman hemmed in as object of male conquest and pleasure.

The film provides several visual cues that undercut the effect of scopophilia, a Freudian instinct toward “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 1975:835). Early on, the film’s male omniscient narrator intones, “In 48 hours, her life will change forever, but she doesn’t know it yet,” over a shot of Amélie looking defiantly into the lens as if to challenge the notion of destiny, particularly that scripted by a male narrator, a male director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) and male screenwriters (Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant). We later see Amélie in her bathroom, wearing her nightgown, as she dabs on perfume while watching a news report. She eventually switches the television off, but aims the remote at the lens/audience to do so, ending the scene and disrupting this intrusion into her private feminine ritual.

Following Freud, Mulvey notes that scopophilia taken to the extreme “can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (1975:835). The diegesis of Amélie contains its share of would-be voyeurs. Joseph, the rejected lover of Gina, is a permanent fixture at the diner where Amélie and Gina work. He dictates into a tape recorder his paranoid perceptions of Gina’s interactions with male customers and his surveillance of the woman-run diner (“4:05. Blatant female conspiracy”).

But Amélie, too, is a Peeping Tom: she observes Dufayel, a frail, reclusive man in her building, at first through the window and then through binoculars. However, her surveillance is used to illustrate her stirrings for deeper human connection, rather than for sexual possession. She reserves this desire for Nino, in whom she senses a kindred spirit. He is an employee at a sex shop/peep show theatre and also works as a skeleton at a local carnival’s house of horrors attraction. As a hobby, he collects discarded identification photographs, appropriating the product of the camera’s gaze for his own fetishistic pleasure. Upon discovering this, Amélie is intrigued and sets out to ensnare him by presenting herself as the object of his gaze: she visits the carnival where in his role as skeleton, he stares at her and clearly yearns to touch her, yet she does not return his gaze at this point. She sets the terms of her pursuit, leaving clues Nino must assemble in order to meet her, including a direction to view her through observation binoculars. When he is within her grasp, she reverses the gaze, watching him from behind a glass at the diner. Her introversion keeps her from speaking to him, but he remains an object of desire.

Meanwhile, Duyafel watches Amélie through binoculars and a camera he has trained outside his window, monitoring her slow progress toward love and using the camera to communicate his advice to her to follow her heart. Inspired by Dufayel’s words, Amélie opens her door to Nino, and Dufayel turns off the camera. While Dufayel clearly recognizes the impropriety of his continued surveillance, it could also be argued that this merely validates the power of the male gaze to advance the narrative and “mak[e] things happen” (Grey 2010:838). However, that the film ends with a shot of Amélie looking first into the lens and then with her eyes blissfully closed as she and Nino ride on a motorcycle, suggests otherwise: she has succeeded in her sexual pursuit and by seizing control of her own destiny and desire, she has no further need to engage with those who would try to objectify her.

Works Cited

Film: Amélie (2001: directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Gray, Gordon
2010  Film Theory. In Cinema: A Visual Anthropology, Pp. 35–73. Oxford, New York: Berg.

Mulvey, Laura
1999 [1975]  Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. Pp. 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press.

Image from "CBQM" documentary (NFB blog)

With the advent of MP3 players, podcasts, subscription satellite radio, and customizable Internet radio stations, options abound for individuals to craft a highly personalized, solitary listening experience. But two recent case studies—the CBQM documentary and Danny Kaplan’s exploration of Israeli radio—illustrate that traditional radio performs important cultural work for their respective communities: more than simply articulating a static community, radio actively shapes the identity of the community it serves. Radio hails into being an interpretive community of listeners, who infuse its content with contextual meaning.

For the citizens of Fort McPherson, CBQM creates a shared sense of belonging while responding to the needs and interests of a small, remote community. The station engages in an ongoing dialogue with its listeners, assuming the role of trusted friend and constant companion through the town’s dark months: recommending a cookie recipe, calling bingo numbers, offering assistance to those whose windows have been egged. Radio is used to relay seemingly private messages between individuals: to invite a neighbour over for tea, or to ask someone to hang up the phone so a call can get through. Though this system serves a practical purpose, the messages are perfectly at home in the public sphere: knowing where community members are contributes to collective sense of well-being and cohesiveness. As one of the hosts says, “There’s something nice about this time of year when we know people aren’t travelling as much, and we’re all here until the ferries go in” (Allen 2010). Furthermore, when citizens are urged to call in to voice their opinions about local issues (such as the uranium mines) and encouraged to host their own programming (the preference for country music is notable), they are actively defining and asserting their modern identity as a community, both for themselves and— now that the station can be streamed online—for the rest of the world.

Similar to CBQM, in Israeli radio stations “provide companionship and comfort”—here, during times of crisis through the use of commemorative mode (Kaplan 2009:322). However, Kaplan describes a seemingly more unidirectional relationship between the radio programmer and the audience, suggesting that broadcasters’ self-imposed sense of duty to moderate the tone of the musical programming by performing a mood shift as they deem it necessary actually guides listeners’ perception of the severity of a national emergency and mobilizes a sense of “selfless unisonance” (Kaplan 2008:326). I read this as emotional conditioning, and question if in times of crisis or commemoration, the goal should be cultivating a uniform response, and furthermore question the financial motivations and political background of the stations described. But it is key that programmers attribute their strategy to a “gut feeling” (Kaplan 2008:331), a “common habitus [that] is cultivated in the programmers’ professional training, their social networks as indeed in their general socialization to Israeli–Zionist values” (Kaplan 2008:320). This would imply that their influence is more reflective of a shared national imaginary made manifest than a regulatory agenda. Kaplan likens the mood shift to ritual, that which deepens an individual’s sense of connection to the community (2008:334)

In these disparate case studies, radio and community are mutually constituitive: interpretive communities are formed as radio audiences legitimize the content within their lived experience; conversely, radio serves to make the community’s ethos audible.

Works Cited

Allen, Dennis
2010   CBQM. National Film Board of Canada

Kaplan, Danny
2009   The Song of the Siren: Engineering National Time on Israeli Radio. Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 313–345.

“How much time, and how much space, is required to separate an object from its reiteration; an echo from the source of the sound?”–David Novak, “Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood” (2010)

In a fascinating sequence in the 2008 documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, director Brett Gaylor traces the evolution of a work song from the cotton fields to Muddy Waters (“You Need Love”) to the Rolling Stones (“The Last Time”) to  The Verve (“Bittersweet Symphony”), and finally to mashup artist GirlTalk. With a credo of “Culture always builds on the past,” Gaylor presents a compelling argument that the creative act of media reuse is undermined by attempts to regulate its dissemination.

(I wanted to use this as a lead in to my discussion for my Blog #5 assignment, but it exceeded the two-page limit–so the bonus material appears on the blog!)

David Novak argues that “appropriation is a creative act” (2010:42) and suggests that remediation, the “repurposing [of] media for new contexts of use” (2010:41), resonates with the cosmopolitan subject’s capitalism-fuelled sense of alienation. While he notes that the Heavenly Ten Stems’ live performance of the Indian song “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” triggered accusations of cultural imperialism, Novak seemingly sanctions the outcome, valorizing the incident as a watershed moment for “revealing the fantastic aspects of global popular music as a multidirectional social imaginary” (2010:60). Can a similar defense be made of two other examples of media reuse: the Bollywood-inspired ice-dancing performance by Americans at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and Man Ray’s photographs of African art? While the former example was generally embraced for its expression of multiculturalism, the latter is problematic when viewed through a postcolonial, postmodernist lens.

Meryl Davis and Charlie White’s Olympic ice dance performance for the “folk music” round of the competition used music from the 2002 Bollywood film Devdras to complement Bollywood-inspired choreography and costuming (Armour 2010). I was in attendance at this event; the Americans’ performance was well received, both by the judges and the audience, particularly in light of the fact that they followed Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, the Russian team whose Aboriginal-inspired routine, which did not use traditional music, was almost universally deemed culturally insensitive (suggesting that media reuse would have been less problematic). The Indian response (both in India and in the U.S.) to the Americans’ routine, as characterized in the media, was cultural pride (Armour 2010)—this, despite the fact that Bollywood film music would not generally be characterized as traditional “folk music.” The skaters worked with a former Bollywood dancer and purchased clothing from an Indian store (Associated Press 2010). The knowledge that competitors were required to perform a type of “cultural drag” in a non-traditional setting (the skating rink) leaves one less inclined to fault the performers themselves; that the American duo consulted a cultural “authority” and used elements of “authentic” dress as inspiration helped them to evade the criticism their Russian counterparts faced. Gawker columnist Maureen O’Connor offered an additional explanation: “India, like America, is in the cultural export business, so imitation comes across as flattery instead of mockery.” Bollywood film is already a highly lucrative cultural industry for India; Davis and White are as much the intended consumers as anyone else watching, and the circulation of the film’s music in this internationally televised arena, did not, for many viewers, constitute a commodification of power or transfer of ownership.

Man Ray's Noire et Blanche (1926)

By contrast, the photographs of African art by modernist artist Man Ray, featured recently in an exhibit at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, involve a more complex relation of power. The exhibit explored the influence of Man Ray’s photos—such as “Noire et Blanche,” which depicts a white woman holding a dark-coloured African mask—on elevating African artifacts from ethnographic curiosities to works of art. As part of the avant-garde, artists such as Man Ray sought to expand post-WWI Western conceptions of art and beauty by presenting “primitive” culture in an aesthetically palatable contrast. Today, our postmodern and postcolonial perspectives have us question the commodification of culture inherent in the photographs, as well as the fetishistic nature of their portrayal: dramatic lighting and the use of white female models that reinforced an self/other dichotomy. The decontextualization of the African art is undoubtedly problematic given the power dynamics of colonial history. For its part, the MOA exhibit invited dialogue by allowing visitors to examine the photographs alongside the three-dimensional objects depicted in them.

Having examined these two disparate examples of media reuse that differ in historical context, target audience, medium of expression, and circulation in popular culture vs. high culture, I would suggest that it is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to develop guidelines for assessing what constitutes cultural reappropriation. I will say that I find Novak’s neutralization of the phenomena as a consumer critique or as a celebration of “new subjects within ‘alternative modernities’” (2010:42) to be too pat. If I can draw any lines, it would be these: reuse that attempts to reassign meaning, as in the case of Man Ray, should open discourse rather than sever its connection with the original; reuse that is more tributary in nature should strive for a sense of responsibility to the original to avoid a flattening out of cultural difference.

Works Cited

Armour, Nancy
2010  Davis-White’s Bollywood-style OD a hit in India. Associated Press website, Jan. 5. http://wintergames.ap.org/story.aspx?st=id&id=pf751416f0dc6429ca83c35e6368eb399

Associated Press
2010  Davis, White Set for Upset. ESPN.com, Jan. 23. http://sports.espn.go.com/olympics/winter/2010/figureskating/news/story?id=4851092

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

O’Connor, Maureen
2010  More Adventures in Olympic Racial Drag. Gawker.com, Feb. 22. http://gawker.com/#!5476940/more-adventures-in-olympic-racial-drag

In the early hours of November 12, 2009, a fire engulfed several buildings at the corner of Main and Broadway, a few blocks away from my apartment. On my way to work, I stopped to survey the scene. A number of the storefronts, including a popular diner, had collapsed. The night before, I’d noticed that Lugz, an independent coffee shop in the vicinity, was beginning renovations; post-fire, its structure remained intact but was ravaged by smoke. Firefighters trained a hose on the charred wreckage. I overheard one of the restaurant owners being interviewed by a camera crew: “I can start over, but it will never be quite the same,” he said. It was a sad day for the neighbourhood.

A couple of months later, I read that a Tim Hortons was planned to open in the old bank at the southwest corner of Main and Broadway, adjacent to the site of the fire. Word that these plans were in motion before the fire didn’t quell the sense of outrage palpable in online communities, and once the “Coming Soon: Tim Hortons” sign was posted on the storefront, it wasn’t long before the following graffiti appeared:

Photo: flickr user eych-you-bee-eee-aht-tee

(More recently, the same “branding” was sprayed onto the front of the Ginger condo development in Chinatown. A photograph can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/entheos_fog/4918004231.)

Shortly thereafter, the Tim Hortons sign was moved out of the line of aerosol, inside the shop’s windows, and the graffiti painted over—just another layer in the palimpsest that is a city. But this visible mark of dissent seemed to strike a chord with an angry subset of Mount Pleasant residents (who, it should be noted, love their coffee: by my count, there are at a dozen coffee shops within a four-block radius, including three Starbucks). The singling-out of Tim Hortons as a “gentrifier” gave me reason for pause. The term “gentrification” has been used—and some would argue, misused—in many ways, both pejorative and optimistic. Here, I understand it to mean “the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment” (Ley 2003:2527). The term generally encompasses a large-scale shift that happens over an extended period of time, and cannot be localized to a specific agent. I note that the demarcation of space and related politics of resistance implied by the graffiti have specific resonance with Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on tensions between cultural and economic capital, as interpreted by David Ley in the context of gentrification, and also with Jürgen Habermas’s theories on the public sphere.

The Mount Pleasant neighbourhood (or “SoMa,” short for “South Main,” as it has been designated by some condo marketers, much to my chagrin) is known for its bohemian sensibility and artist population. The charge of “gentrifier,” leveled by an artist of some sort, addresses the looming presence of a national chain threatens the urban neighbourhood’s character and individuality: urbanity imagines itself cloaked in a dull coat of suburban homogeneity and despairs.

In “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,” David Ley, a member of the UBC Geography Department, observes that “gentrification has become not a sideshow in the city, but a major component of the urban imaginary” (2003:2527). Following Bourdieu, he examines the artists’ role in processes of gentrification within the field of cultural production: they have high cultural capital but low economic capital, the latter of which becomes a point of pride and prestige (Ley 2003). Artists seek low-cost rental housing in older neighbourhoods, often with dense immigrant populations; eventually, their accrued cultural capital entices “spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist” (Ley 2003:2527)—individuals who bring high economic capital in hopes of exchanging it for some of this symbolic capital.

One of the sculptors Ley interviews provides this explanation of the artistic community’s need to preserve what they consider the space’s authenticity:

Artists need authentic locations. You know artists hate the suburbs. They’re too confining. Every artist is an anthropologist, unveiling culture. It helps to get some distance on that culture in an environment that does not share all of its presuppositions, an old area, socially diverse, including poverty groups. (qtd .in Ley, 2003:2534).

After mapping Bourdieu’s field of cultural production onto the dynamics of space involved in gentrification, Ley points out that we cannot blame the artists for instigating these shifts, for “it is the societal valorisation of the cultural competencies of the artist that brings followers richer in economic capital” (2003:2541).

Going back to our Mount Pleasant graffiti artist with this knowledge in mind, it seems there is indeed an obligation to wage these kinds of public battles on the very landscape being contested in order to sustain the tension between cultural and economic capital that areas like Mount Pleasant were built on. The fact that the artist produced a stencil that was used in more than one location suggests it is part of a larger project—gesturing toward the soulless reproduction of mass culture while performing a uniform judgment at, presumably, a number of locations. It resists consumerism in the name of aesthetic legitimacy; the fact that a Tim Hortons coffee might be the cheapest coffee option available in an putatively less affluent neighbourhood is beside the point. But to my nose, there is a whiff of elitism about it—why not let the free market determine which businesses will succeed? Why is Tim Hortons, with its working class Canadian connotations, worse than (three) Starbucks? And in a neighbourhood reputed for its proliferation of “hipsters,” self-appointed arbiters of “cool”—another form of symbolic capital—could it be that the graffiti is really speaking out for taste rather than class?

Still, perhaps another factor worth considering is the nature of the targeted business. In “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Jürgen Habermas theorized coffee houses, along with salons, as important sites of public discourse—particularly in the literary domain—as well as “seedbeds of political unrest” (1991:59) that exist between the private realm of civil society and the authority of the state (1991:30). Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz has spoken of positioning his stores as a “third space”: a communal space between home and work (Goldin 2006). Perhaps the graffiti accusation was meant to criticize the fact that unlike Starbucks, Tim Hortons makes no pretension to being a public space. Tim Hortons locations often post time limits on how long one can sit at their tables, and to my knowledge don’t offer free WiFi or sell CDs, as Starbucks does. Perhaps the graffiti was an attempt to reclaim this space as part of the public sphere.

The Tim Hortons at Main and Broadway opened nearly a year after the fire without much fanfare or protest. (There was even a moment of levity when someone created an animated GIF that riffed on the “Deal With It” internet meme to suggest that people move on with their lives.) The Lugz coffee shop also reopened under new ownership, with a new name: Kafka’s Coffee and Tea. Franz Kafka, of course, was known to hold court in Prague’s bohemian coffee houses. Meanwhile, I consider my $800/month rent a steal, and live in constant fear of the day it goes up.

Works Cited

Goldin, Daniel
2006    Starbucks and the White Whale. The Huffington Post, Oct. 3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-goldin/starbucks-and-the-white-w_b_32889.html, accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

Habermas, Jürgen
1991[1962]    The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, trans. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ley, David
2003    Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification. Urban Studies 40(12): 2527–2544.

Last week in my ANTH 300 class, we watched “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” a talk given by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who heads up Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography program.

I found the section on the “Numa Numa” video phenomenon, in which Wesch calls the original video’s star, Gary Brolsma, “the first guy on the dance floor of this global mixer,” to be the most interesting. The latter half, heavy on the talking head confessionals about what a mind-blowing concept it is to be able to connect with others through a webcam, was too much navel-gazing for my tastes. Still, I recommend watching this to ANTH 378 folks.

Wesch is something of a YouTube celebrity himself, having created a video on the evolution of Web 2.0 that went viral back in 2007.

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai examines “the complex nesting of imaginative appropriations that are involved in the construction of agency in a deterritorialized world” (1996:61). Following Appadurai, I argue that in analyzing The Pussycat Dolls’ reworking of “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire,” it is too simplistic to write it off as a bastardization of authentic Indian culture (or as reeking of decayed aura, as Walter Benjamin might suggest, if he were given to such parlance), as we cannot trace what it is represented back toward some “local, cultural bedrock, made up of a closed set of reproductive practices and untouched by rumors of the world at large” (Appadurai 1996:63). I instead view the video as a cultural pastiche in a deterritorialized space made possible by transnational flows. But as Appadurai cautions, that “fantasy is now a social practice” (1996:54) is not necessarily cause for celebration, for there still exists for many a gap between what is imagined and what is lived.

In the video, the group’s lead (and only) singer, Nicole Scherzinger, is being pursued, first through a streetcar, and then through a global marketplace of sorts, by a man whose face the viewer never sees (though The Pussycat Dolls attempt to photograph him using a product-placed Nokia cellphone). Interspersed with shots of the marketplace pursuit and The Pussycat Dolls dancing in the empty streetcar station (actually the Tramway Museum in Vienna, Austria, according to Wikipedia) are shots of A. R. Rahman, the composer of the original “Jai Ho” song. He sings the chorus’s refrain, but does not interact with the Pussycat Dolls or the rest of the cast throughout the course of the video. Rahman appears to exist in a liminal space where he can be transported to various locations as required, through the use of digital effects. Taiko drums, not audible in the original song, are also given prominent placement. The video culminates with a large group of dancers of different ethnicities doing the “Jai Ho” dance as they raise their fists and red scarves in unison.

I would suggest that the video presents a world in a state of “postblurring,” as Appadurai calls it (1996:51). Perhaps as Scherzinger implores the object of her song (ostensibly the mystery man) to “catch” her and “save” her, she imagines herself as “Slumdog Millionaire”’s Latika? Operating under this assumption, it is interesting to parse out the different layers of transnational flows and imaginaries: a wealthy American singer imagines herself in the role of an impoverished Indian woman, as portrayed in a film set in India that revolves around an American game show, was directed by an English director, and released by American distributors, while she does Bollywood-inspired dance moves and wears Indian-style clothing in an Austrian museum, starring in a video remake of a song that originally featured Spanish lyrics, written by an Indian composer who teleports into this video’s world via green screen. And don’t forget the Japanese drums.

Analyzing characters in Mira Nair’s film Indian Cabaret, Appadurai says, “What we have is a sense that they are putting lives together, fabricating their own characters, using the cinematic and social materials at their disposal” (1996:63). The Pussycat Dolls’ video does appear to be a carnivalesque free-for-all—an example of the kind of improvisation that Appadurai observes occurring outside the lines of habitus. But what implications does this representation of global flows have for the “specific life trajectories” (1996:55) of its viewers? Are so-called “slumdogs” just as free to pick and choose from the cosmopolitan marketplace as The Pussycat Dolls? These questions are not easily answered, but what Appadurai stresses, and what the cultural flows present in The Pussycat Dolls’ video problematize, is the notion that all cultural reproduction emanates from an inalienable source, and that we can easily isolate a Bollywood-tinged dance move or donning of a jeweled bindi as examples of Orientalism without also considering other global imaginings in play: “there is no easy way to begin at the beginning” (Appadurai 1996:64).

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun
1996    Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Pp. 48–65. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Pussycat Dolls: Jai Ho (You Are My Destiny). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5OyXmHD0w

Wikipedia
Jai Ho. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_Ho. Accessed Jan. 26, 2011.

Image: National Film Board of Canada

In “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” William Mazzarella traces the effects of globalization on anthropology to a shift in the 1990s that initially placed the onus of representing locality back on the informant. This later prompted a greater need for reflexivity, both on the part of the informant and—significantly for Mazzarella—the ethnographer (Mazzarella 2004). Mazzarella aligns this change in perspective with shifting processes of mediation that allow us to view ourselves as a “close distance” (2004:348): viewed at a remove, we can begin to imagine ourselves in new ways, and the world imagines alongside us.

Thus processes of globalization have inspired a “revalorization of the local” (2004:352), a sentiment Mazzarella observes companies and institutions have seized on in a bid to “recuperate the aura of authenticity” (2004:347). This search for authenticity extends to digital media, and as Mazzarella points out, we prefer to imagine this arena as an unfiltered, democratic mode of self-representation rather than acknowledging a mediating presence that “undercuts the romance of authentic, intuitive identification” (2004:348). What happens, then, when a local culture is mediated, by way of the internet, to a global audience—but the locality being represented ceases to exist, except in the minds of its mediators?

I recently encountered Welcome to Pine Point (www.pinepoint.nfb.ca), an interactive website produced by Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, two Vancouver-based creative directors, in association with the National Film Board of Canada. Pine Point was a planned mining town located in the Northwest Territories and at its peak, had a population of 1,200 (Wikipedia). After the mine’s resources were depleted and the site shut down in 1987, the government decided to raze the town completely. The website—part scrapbook, part documentary—is dedicated to remembrances of a place that “was left standing just long enough for a single generation to run through it” (Simons and Shoebridge). The result is a thoroughly engaging, emotionally arresting experience, unlike anything one would expect to have in an online environment. It is the story of a specific time and place, told through a digital interface that incorporates the voices of a handful of the town’s former citizens, photographs, animation, and video. What is striking about these testimonies (a term my boyfriend suggested after watching it, and one which I think is apt) is that in the absence of a physical location to house their memories, the community’s shared remembrances have come to stand in for that which is signified. One of the interview subjects articulates this phenomenon:

You create this fictional community in your head over the course of the years and what it tends to do is erases [sic] a lot of the negative stuff. And then, as you create this over the years, you do end up with a utopia. You think, there was nothing wrong, nothing bad ever happened. But in reality, it was a normal community—bad stuff happened all the time. What we’ve created for our hometown may be the better choice: an online community and the memories I have. I can go back there anytime I want and it hasn’t changed. (Simons and Shoebridge)

Viewed at a distance through this website, Pine Point becomes an exercise in the co-constituitive model of culture and media to which Mazzarella subscribes. The resulting mediation is a “relation of simultaneous self-distancing and self-recognition” (2004:357) where Pine Point is reconstructed and reimagined in a new global medium. In light of globalizing forces that threaten to erase difference, Mazzarella stresses the need to be more reflexive and examine “the places at which we come to be who we are through the detour of something alien to ourselves, the places at which we recognize that difference is at once constitutive of social reproduction and its most intimate enemy” (2004:356). The Pine Point website project celebrates the ephemerality of a specific community’s ethos, but its haunting, intangible qualities are a reminder that processes of globalization were partly responsible for the closure of the Pine Point mines. The localized website circulates as part of a larger discourse on transnational mining corporations and their impact on the surrounding communities. By congregating at a physical and temporal distance to mediate the culture of Pine Point, the documentary’s creators and participants attempt to reproduce a culture that ceases to exist—and in fact, may have never existed the way it does in their minds—and paradoxically achieve a cultural specificity that resonates on a transnational level. Their insistence that this is how it happened—“And who are you to judge?”, the narrative asks—reminds us that we remediate the story they are telling about themselves. As Clifford Geertz says, “We see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and […] they look back on ours through ones of their own” (2000:65).

Taken with the evocative storytelling of Pine Point, I posted a link to the site on my Facebook page, adding my own commentary: “Imagined communities, indeed.” Half an hour later (about the amount of time needed to interact with the site), a friend who lives in Victoria, Australia, posted a comment: “That was wonderful.”

Works Cited

Geertz, Clifford
2000    Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Mazzarella, William
2004    Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:345–367.

Simons, Michael and Paul Shoebridge
2011    Welcome to Pine Point. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada. http://www.pinepoint.nfb.ca, accessed Jan. 20, 2011.

Wikipedia
Pine Point, Northwest Territories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Point,_Northwest_Territories, accessed Jan. 20, 2011.

Cholera treatment at Borgne hospital. (Photo: flickr user mediahacker)

In “Alms Dealers,” which exposes the potential of humanitarian aid to cater conflict, Philip Gourevitch asks, “Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress?” (2010:105) When reflecting on the media’s coverage of the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti, we must similarly consider whether the end result is straight reportage, altruism, or something more unseemly. I argue that while the media is not overtly complicit in the conditions that have fomented the crisis, their steady supply of a barrage of images of human suffering in overwhelming proportion to explorations of the underlying causes—as has been the approach of several television news outlets—has the effect of relegating Haitians to the role of the noble savage, there to exact the viewer’s catharsis by stirring emotion for emotion’s sake.

In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Maura R. O’Connor discusses the cholera epidemic’s starring role in “disaster porn,” which she describes as the television news media’s (in particular CNN’s) reliance on a “B-roll of tragedy and disaster” that is intended to draw in an audience, but “without a moral component of responsibility towards Haitians themselves over the long-term” (2010). Gourevitch remarks on the precedent set by the televised coverage of the Biafra crisis that “the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience” (2010:102). Certainly the vivid images spurred some of the billions of dollars in donations to international agencies such as the Red Cross, World Vision, and Oxfam (Hildebrandt 2011). But after continued exposure to these images, we are no closer to understanding Haiti’s underlying infrastructural problems and their government’s own agency in managing the epidemic.

In this video from CNN, we see the same eight images of suffering on a loop as the anchor conducts her interview with a U.N. representative. The clip resonates with the words of Linda Polman, whose book describing how “reporters are exploited by aid agencies […] to present stories of suffering without political or historical context” is cited in Gourevitch’s article (2004:107). The images fulfill the medium’s practical need for visuals, but their repetition begins to feel gratuitous and as a viewer, I question whether the building sense of helplessness it engenders is meant to excuse the lack of a more probing explanation—as if to say, “We’re sorry we couldn’t do better, but if you feel terrible, maybe you won’t notice.”

That’s a cynical outlook, to be sure. And of course, the visual medium of television does not readily lend itself to conveying the complexity of such issues. Television’s strength is in its ability to let the images speak for themselves; however, the voices of the people depicted are needed to add dimension. An account by American-born journalist Ansel Herz details how, in the wake of the earthquake, he was approached for an interview by the CBC. Herz offered to put the crew in contact with an English-speaking Haitian professional instead, but the producer insisted on Herz, stating that they were only “comfortable” with him. (Herz used the opportunity to remark, on camera, about the absurdity of journalists interviewing journalists.) As a result, an opportunity to depict Haitian agency was lost.

Print media offers the chance for more in-depth analysis and greater reflexivity, though it is not immune to accusations of sensationalism. Though there are many balanced examinations of the political affairs in Haiti, such as this piece from The Montreal Gazette that investigates the failure of the country’s civil service, there also exist accounts such as this one from Newsweek, which essentializes the Haitians as a “resilient people” from the perspective of a frightened reporter who observes the scene from inside his SUV. Vancouver-based journalist Crawford Kilian, who has written extensively on the cholera epidemic for The Tyee and own his own public health blog, responded to O’Connor’s questioning of the line between unflinching depictions of human suffering and “disaster porn” as follows:

In most cases, I leave it to your intelligence and perception to distinguish between information and porn, though sometimes I have to editorialize (and moralize) about what I’m posting. Again, I leave my views to your judgment.

And to moralize about disaster porn, I think we all need to reflect carefully on why disasters like Haiti engage us, and about our own responses. (Kilian)

When it comes to neutrality, I believe this level of self-reflexivity should be the standard of all media outlets. Speaking of humanitarian aid, Gourevitch observes that “impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity” (2010:107). In the case of the cholera epidemic, I would characterize a subsection of the media—and in particular television media—as catering to voyeurism rather than conflict. I would not go so far as to suggest that voyeurism is the equivalent to complicity, but that it does little to disseminate a more grounded, contextualized understanding of an area of the world many of us know little about.

Works Cited

Bruemmer, Rene
2010   Haiti Civil Service in Ruins. The Gazette, Oct. 23. http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Haiti+civil+service+ruins/3714823/story.html, accessed Jan. 9, 2011.

CNN
2010   Sick desperate to get help as Haiti cholera outbreak kills 138 [Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C7v4cAcAZQ, accessed Jan. 9, 2011.

Gourevitch, Philip
2010   Alms Dealers. New Yorker, Oct. 11: 102–109.

Herz, Ansel
2011   Yesterday Afternoon, For Whatever It’s Worth. Mediahacker, Jan. 13. http://www.mediahacker.org/2011/01/yesterday, accessed Jan. 15, 2011.

Hildebrandt, Amber
2011   Donations to Haiti 1 Year After Quake. CBC News, Jan. 5. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2011/01/05/f-haiti-earthquake-anniversary-aid-agencies.html, accessed Jan. 9, 2011.

Kilian, Crawford
2010   Haiti Coverage as Disaster Porn. H5N1 Blog, Nov. 19. http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2010/11/haiti-coverage-as-disaster-       porn.html, accessed Jan. 15, 2011.

O’Connor, Maura R.
2010   Haiti Coverage and “Disaster Porn.” Columbia Journalism Review, Nov. 19. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/haiti_coverage_and_disaster_po.php, accessed Jan. 9, 2011.

Tuttle, Steve
2010   Haiti in the Time of Cholera. Newsweek, Nov. 11. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/11/haiti-in-the-time-of-cholera.html, accessed Jan. 15, 2011.