Month: March 2011

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.

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.

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