Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Week 6 Screening Question

How/can can we read the Peruvians filming their Western as an example of the combination of Frazer's Law of Similarity ("that like produces like"..."the notion of the copy, in magical practice, affecting the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires properties of the represented" and Law of Contact or Contagion ("things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after physical contact has been severed") (Taussig 47)? How does the inclusion of Kansas in the Peruvian "film" and the fact that a lot of the "acting" is actually more real (consider the scene in which Kansas tries to teach the Peruvians the concept of faking a punch) than that which it imitates complicate this reading (or the Laws)? Also, how can we read the Peruvians' film as a parody "where mimicry exposes construction"? (Suggested consideration of the Josephine Baker anectode and its foreshadowing of a "new sort of anthropology...that defines its object of study not as Other but as the reflection of the West in the mimetic magic of its Others" (69).)

SS + SF

No comments:

Post a Comment