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.
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 youto judge?”, the narrative asks—reminds us that we remediate the story they are telling about themselves. As Clifford Geertz says, “Wesee 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.
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.
