MAKE UP RESPONSE FOR AGABEN

Agaben is a very dense reading in that the chapters deal with many different issues and animals alike. The main concept Agaben addresses is the cognitive experience we have between man and animal. My question is, has the relationship between man and animal changed or has animal taught something about man verses what scientists haven't already answered?

MAKE UP RESPONSE FOR JOHN BERGER

There are many ways to describe how animals symbolize our society today. Zodiac signs, domesticated animals, symbolism, learning purposes (the zoo), transportation are just a few examples as to how we see animals. But why do we really look at animals in different ways? Are we fascinated by them, as they are by us?

John Berger explains, “What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet, the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them” (Berger 9).

I will agree with Berger in this sense that animals can teach us many knew things. As the old cliché, “a dog is a man’s best friend”, suits well. We should look at animals and what they have done for us and in turn have domesticated them to help us as well. Berger also explains that animals lack human language, which in turn is ethnocentric. I could see where Berger would draw this conclusion in that animals can not physically speak to us; they use sound.

My question to Berger is how does communicating and understanding animals become second nature as if we treat them as our own? Does our communication help us as human communicate and understand them better?

FASSIN response.

First of all, I would like to thank all of you for a wonderful class experience.  I learned a lot from all of you.  Merci beaucoup.

For my last post I would like to focus on Didier Fassin’s article “Humanitarianism and the Politics of Life”.  As we discussed in class last Wednesday, Fassin brings up issues that seem to run counter to the common conception of humanitarian aid.  Briefly, I’ll list the “triple problematic of the humanitarian politic of life” discussed by Fassin:  First, it segregates lives that have the convenience of being risked (aid worker) from those that are to be sacrificed (civilian populations in battle zones).  Second, it separates lives within the organizations into lives deserving high protection (expatriates) and those whose lives are treated with limited protection (host country national staff). Third, it separates between “lives that can be narrated in the first person (expatriate) and lives that are recounted only in the third person (those who are being ‘helped)”.  

It is the third point that I want to focus on.  Part of the humanitarian mission is to witness and recount the atrocities of violence and catastrophe.  This practice brings an interesting problem to light as Fassin has explained.  The intervening individual is the one who tells the story to those who will listen.  This always leaves the victim, whose story it is, to remain voiceless. Third person testimonies are what the populations of ‘developed’ nations hear.  Here’s what Fassin has to say about that:  “[R]equirements of defending cause and the logic of their (the aid worker) intervention lead them to what might be termed a humanitarian reduction of the victim.”

This is something I have experienced first hand, and may have been guilty of doing as well (however, my experiences are not as "life or death" as many of the MSF volunteers) In aid organizations there is an occasional smothering pressure for results (number of women and children participating in a training, number of individuals effected by a certain project).  All needs to be documented and submitted to the HQ who in turn send the documentation to Washington, who then decide whether the mission is successful or not, whether there needs to be more or less people involved (affecting the staff – both expats and national), whether budgets need to be cut, etc.  Upper management is constantly encouraging people to do more, yet it often comes across as an emphasis on results on paper, rather than true results.  Those who do well are rewarded, those you have low numbers are reprimanded.  The result is skewed numbers, exaggerated stories and a “humanitarian reduction of the victim”.

Response to Mary Ann Doane and Henry Giroux

In this reading, Doane presents multiple illustrations about the word "catastrophe". The reading may me think that it is the way each separate news station presents the event to the world. For example do the new stations present the event to inform the viewer about what happened and ways that they could help or do they just repeat the same thing over and over again. Looking at the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the news stations presented ways to help and sayings such as "all proceeds will go to the victims of Hurricane Katrina".

The news segment in class showed that the news station was talk about housing and insurance, when in reality people just wanted to find families and places to live. They only emphasized pictures of what the hurricanes' damage was, instead of listing relief aid and information to viewers as to how they could help Katrina victims. I vote for finiding family first, then work back up from there in finding out the damage of the home. You can always rebulid a home and in the end the rebuilding of a family is stronger.

Looking at the Giroux reading, he presents the article in an odd way. I do not understand all of his argument fully, which should there be about a Hurricane that took many lives.

Overall, what happened to Hurricane Katrina and any disaster (most recently September 11th and after) should never have to approach it as an argument or present a theory, what happened, happened and the damge is done. Now the news stations should be focusing on helping the victims get back on their feet, if anything the news station may present the event as a "catastrophe" and turn it into something bigger. I vote on helping rebuild families, not rebuild a reputation of a news station that is already known for broadcasting the event every day.

Mary Ann Doane version with 9/11 postscript

Dear all,

Some of you asked to see the copy of Doane's article with the postscript about 9/11. I can't find a file copy of the article, but you can find it in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Old-History-Theory/dp/0415942233/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280342377&sr=8-2

-Pooja

Time is television's basis

Mary Ann Doane argues persuasively in her essay "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe that "Time is television's basis, its principle of structuration as well as its persistent reference. The insistence of the temporal attribute may indeed be a characteristic of all systems of imaging enabled by mechanical or electronic reproduction." (pg.222). How would you interpret this statement?

When she wrote this things were quite different than they are today. Television indeed is constructed around time or constructs time itself. Our lives used to go around tv shows or news hours. There was something called appointment television and that is to be in front of the tv at a certain hour to see the news or anything that is going on. Today I think time has change in television. They are not able to schedule our time anymore, we decide what kind of information and at what time we want to consume it. Not only that, also time is constructed by social networks and everyday events of people we know. We crave twitter updates and facebook feeds as much as important events, or probably more. What does it mean that today we are helping to construct the history of tomorrow? That we are part of the history? We are not only spectators any more. Would anyone be able to organize this mess and make sense of it? To analyze it. I feel more and more we turn to citizen journalisms in crisis and catastrophe we are checking updates of the people in the place. Is a technological revolution and everyone is collaborating, the tv is only a part of it!
dani

note on crisis ... or catastrophe?

The conversation today reminded me of the series of essays 'The Spirit of Terrorism' by Jean Baudrillard. They have been bound into a slim volume and I would recommend it if you ever want to explore the intersections of 9/11, globalization, terrorism, and mass media through the eyes of a French philosopher.

Tying into Doane's argument is his observation on the fall of the twin towers:

"Among the other weapons of the system which they turned round against it, the terrorists exploited 'real time' of images, their instantaneous worldwide transmission, just they exploited stock-mark speculation, electronic information and air traffic. ... The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and offers it for consumption." (27)

He also states, "Terrorism invents nothing, inaugurates nothing. It simply carries things to the extreme, to the point of paroxysm. ... Terrorism is unreal and unrealistic? But our virtual reality, our systems of information and communication, have themselves too, and for a long time, been beyond the reality principle. As for terror, we know it is already present everywhere, in institutional violence, both mental and physical, in homeopathic doses. Terrorism merely crystallizes all the ingredients in suspension. It puts the finishing touches on the orgy of power, liberation, flows and calculation which the Twin Towers embodied, while being the violent deconstruction of that extreme form of efficiency and hegemony." (58-59)

He also says, rather provocatively, "There is no 'good' use of media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions." (31)

Anyhow, it's an interesting read ... I know some people were offended when we read it as undergrads, I think because he can 'read' something like 9/11 almost as if it were a public performance piece; personally, I think it's poetic and vastly brilliant.

QUESTION: WEEK 8 – TELEVISING VULNERABILITY: SURVIVOR VIDEO IN DOCUMENTARY FILM AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA

Mary Ann Doane argues persuasively in her essay "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe that "Time is television's basis, its principle of structuration as well as its persistent reference. The insistence of the temporal attribute may indeed be a characteristic of all systems of imaging enabled by mechanical or electronic reproduction." (pg.222). How would you interpret this statement?

The way I interpreted her stance on the significant and leading role of time as it relates to the production and reproduction of the televisual is that TV centralizes, organizes time, and represents the loss of the body (the audience) to spectacle, which is best captured by the media event. The media event represents the absolute centralization and the near-complete ’binding’ of the media experience: we are all transfixed witnesses at the same moment in time, but our interpretations of the media event(s) and the emotional experiences we bring to our viewing will differ depending on a number and/or a combination of factors such as socio, political, economical, gender, racial…etc. What are some examples of significant media events that come to mind in such a case?

Doane also suggests that television promises us the chance encounter with the ’reality’ of a catastrophe. Television shocks, and then repeatedly assures; a comforting presence in an insecure world. "Televisual catastrophe is thus characterized by everything which it is said not to be .it is expected, predictable, its presence crucial to television’s operation" (pg. 238) She reiterates the idea that technological media produces distance, concealing and containing bodily violence. Do technological media block the shock effects of traumatic events, screening them, allowing them to be viewed from a distance? Give examples.

She concludes in her essay “If information becomes a commodity on the brink of extinction or loss, televisual catastrophe magnifies that death many times over” (pg.238). What does she mean by this?

I believe Technological life or the “logics of Television” to be inherently turbulent, spatially dispersed, contagious and conflictual. But it is precisely these paradoxes that bring about various possible viral strategies of transmission and flow of information and possibly the challenging of our time spent. In short, it is a dreadful and violent time to be alive, but it is also a dynamic, strange and intellectually challenging one.

How does the need of the Television industry to fill airtime with whatever information is at hand shortcut the process of shifting through, evaluating, editing information before it is brought to the public attention?

During the discussion I wish to delve into the documentary Trouble the Water and tie into the readings and in class excerpts by examining the ways in which media texts have reinforced and justified inequitiesv based on difference in gender, race, class, national origin, sexual orientation, and other categories of difference. Below is a utube link for Trouble the Water trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq426VjZD1E

ANIMAL CAPITAL response

In “Animal Capital”, Shukin uses the double-entendre of the word rendering.  The double meaning refers to the representation of animals and the act of processing animals.  This “double edged sword” effectively “signals a tangle of biopolitical relations within which the economic and symbolic capital of animal life can no longer be sorted into binary distinction… Animal memes and animal matter are mutually overdetermined as forms of capital, and its aim is to track what Bourdieu terms the “interconvertibility” of symbolic life and economic forms of capital via the fetishistic currency of animal life”. (p. 7)

In other words the representational or translational act of rendering animals cannot be wholly separated from the historical and current practice of rendering or processing animal flesh.  This is one of the central themes of Shukin’s “Animal Captial” and she includes three case studies that support her “cultural materialist approach” (in the words of T. Sipley) in the chapters “Automobility”, “Telemobiltiy” and “Biomobility”.  While we have read and discussed the concepts behind “Biomobility” in ch. 4, I found that ch. 2, on “Automobility”, traces the fascinating material history of the slaughterhouse, the automobile industry and modern film.  In summary, the Ford assembly line was designed on slaughterhouse rendering or disassembly equipment, and the most important ingredient in the film industry was gelatin made from animal rendering.  The apex of the history of the car, film and the animal is seen when the automobile replaces the animal as the primary mode of transportation.  Advertisements for the automobile begin to represent the car as an animal that is part of the natural landscape.  Overt examples of such advertisements show the car actually morphing into an animal.  When the car is translated as an animal “the destroyer of nature is naturalized”.  

I think this is the commercial in which Shukin refers.

RESPONSE TO SHUKIN READING (Introduction and chapter 4)

In the introduction reading of Shukin I enjoyed the fact that the author highlighted many of the ethnographers that we have been speaking in class. Agabem, Foucalt, Derrida and many other ethnographers were mentioned in this reading. She reexplained their argument as well provided her insight or questioned someone else's theory. What I particularly like about this article is that she speaks about two different aspects about 'animal' and 'capital'. On page 16 she says,

The ring in this book's title intimates, with simultaneously ominous and hopeful repercussions, that animal and capital are increasingly produced as a semiotic and material closed loop, such that the meaning and matter of the one feeds seamlessly back into the meaning and matter of the other.

Looking at the chapter 4 reading, Shukin continues discussing about 'animal' and 'capital' but in terms of biopolitics. For me the reading was a bit confusing, but she did not fail to address her arguments further. She is trying to focus on the life of the animal and again refers to the ethnographers listed above.

Looking at the films from Wednesday class, I enjoyed the Parenthesis film. I thought of it as kaleidoscope in that the author wanted to portray as sometimes viewing a film closed minded...and not seeing the bigger picture. The film had no narration just pictures and sounds; the only picture seen was of one animal. My question is, was this the point of her film, that some people only look at animals one way? Whether they would studying them or conducting an experiment, what purpose did this show, or was that the purpose to see right through the lens that we normally do not see?

Response, Shukin & The Era of Pandemic Speculation

I find myself haunted by the images from Ashes and Snow, and dazzled the fact (according to wikipedia) "critical reception of the exhibition has been largely positive."

The New York Times review noted "The earth-tone photographs are ... windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time." Just where this world exists is unclear. But the deep sepia tone connotes the idea that space and time are traversed in a single step, as we once discussed in relation to Fabian.

Colbert is overt in this conceptualization, suggesting his photos are "'a direct connection to ancient man and his Paleolithic cave paintings,' to a period of prehistory in which 'humans coexisted with their fellow beasts'" (Shukin, 19.) The term "ancient man," here and elsewhere, seems to rest on a generalized notion of all people who came before 1900. But the only thing authentically situated in the past are Colbert's colonial instincts.

These humans are said to coexist with their "fellow beasts." It is coincidental the "beasts" are all foreign to Colbert's native Canada, and none of what we can perhaps coin their "fellow humans" are white? As Shukin sharply observes, in "reiterating well-worn orientalist tropes, the East is both feminized and infantilized, semiographed as a terrain awaiting sexual discovery by the white male explorer. In virtually every photo, the eyes of the languid other are closed, enabling viewers of Colbert's exhibit to reproject imperialism's primal scene of intercourse with a passive virgin territory" (195).

Perhaps it this passivity that keeps me on edge in each frame. My first thought is that the animals have been visually caged, stripped of any natural prowess. But so have the women and children--held captive in a sort of mystical trance, frozen in postures that make me want to shout: "run! run!"

For in all its meditative babble, Ashes and Snow seems to interiorize a rather anesthetized form of violence. This is a perfect example:

Does this kiss truly represent peace or the fact child and animal have been rendered aesthetic props, a sort of human and animal interaction reminiscent of a circus spectacle?

Nowhere do woman, child, or (sometimes swaddled) animal appear to make noise--nor do any of them hold the gaze of the camera, which would implicate the viewer in the act of gazing.

They remain speechless, nameless fodder of the artist's fantasy. Perhaps it is safe to say they are mere signifiers in a larger cultural script. The rather frightening question is: What do they signify? What did audiences identify with in their raptured viewings?  

If I were feeling brilliant, I might even tie this in to the idea of the aura.

RESPONSE: Shukin

In response to Shukin’s analysis of pandemic discourse – did anyone else immediately think about the swine flu? I think it’s eerie how prescient this particular chapter was in light of the h1n1 phenomenon (I think it was published right around the time of the outbreak).

At the time the pandemic was at its height, I remember being amazed by how quickly the rhetotic turned deeply nationalistic, and became so clearly racialized. Conservative pundits had a field day of course. But I think there were more insidious examples of the racism and xenophobia inherent to the pandemic discourse, as well. The medical coverage, for instance, raised troubling questions as to why the disease was so fatal in Mexico (was it biological? Societal?) And now that we know it was less lethal than predicted, one wonders … was the media response an overreaction? And if so – why?

With all the talk about quarantine, I think the rhetoric revealed some interesting dynamics about how we negotiate and talk about the “borders” of our race and ethnicity, as well. This article was particularly revealing in this respect I think.

Shukin, Chapter 4- Biomobility

I apologize for not getting this up last night, I hope everyone will still get a chance to look at it. Skukin's text brings up so many possible topics of discussion that it was hard for me to try to cover it all. Here are some questions to get us started.


In chapter 4- Biomobility: Calculating Kinship in an Era of Pandemic Speculation, Shukin discusses the implications and consequences of a global humanity united by the threat of pandemic. "If on the one hand," she writes, "pandemic discourse seems to unify a global humanity on the basis of its irreducible biological vulnerability to disease, on closer inspection it can be seen to effect racialized reinscriptions of cultural difference within the 'bare life' of the biologically continuous humanity it invokes." (187)

What does Skukin mean when she says that pandemic discourse signals that the survival of biological life itself is reemerging as an object of biopower? And in what ways does the media contribute to this pandemic discourse? Can the media shape the discourse in a positive way?

Shukin says that the species line emerges as a prominent material stress line in neoliberal culture and pandemic fears have begun to institutionalize speciesism on an unprecedented scale...

"The "small world" of the global village no longer popularly connotes an ideal of multicultural mingling in a world marketplace. Instead, in pandemic discourse the "village" re-emerges as a breeding ground of disease that must be quarantined from the space of liberal cosmopolitanism to which it had been intimately articulated but that it now threatens to infect"

What are some other examples of material stress lines in our culture? How does this speciesism and pandemic fear of the "small world" inform ethnography and vice versus?

What about our "liberal longing for posthuman kinship"? (188)

What does it mean to create a bestiary for our culture? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls of this idea? Is Colbert's brand just orientalism?

MAKE UP RESPONSE/ The open

Make up response

The open: Man and animal


According to Descartes animal are machines and humans are machines with minds but he base his concept in his religious views of the man. To this Agamben answers “Surely Descartes never saw an ape” and agues how hard is to identify differences from the natural science point of view. Also Agamben talks about the unclear boundaries between anthropoid apes and primitives populations.

Linnaeus was the first to place man among primates without any specific identyfiying characteristic besides philosophical idea that humans recognize themselves. (know yourself) HOMO SAPIENS
“man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself”

Agamben states that is impossible to assign a characteristic to “homo sapiens” he says we are only a machine for producing the recognition of human. An “optical machine” according to Linnaeus “man must recognize himself in a no-man in order to be human”

Agamben agues that the production of man appears through opposition man/animal, human/inhuman he says is a machine that works by means of exclusion and he wonders what’s at stake here. The missing link is only determine by language, by an animal without language? By a man without language? This is the bridge Homo alalus- a non speaking man.

It is difficult and confusing to separate man from animal and it is very interesting how the definition has evolve. It is a very important question to raise today when we start deciding who is human and who is not among humans, who deserve human rights, it goes along the same line as Faucoult discourse about war.

MAKE UP RESPONSE/ The open

Make up response

The open: Man and animal


According to Descartes animal are machines and humans are machines with minds but he base his concept in his religious views of the man. To this Agamben answers “Surely Descartes never saw an ape” and agues how hard is to identify differences from the natural science point of view. Also Agamben talks about the unclear boundaries between anthropoid apes and primitives populations.

Linnaeus was the first to place man among primates without any specific identyfiying characteristic besides philosophical idea that humans recognize themselves. (know yourself) HOMO SAPIENS
“man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself”

Agamben states that is impossible to assign a characteristic to “homo sapiens” he says we are only a machine for producing the recognition of human. An “optical machine” according to Linnaeus “man must recognize himself in a no-man in order to be human”

Agamben agues that the production of man appears through opposition man/animal, human/inhuman he says is a machine that works by means of exclusion and he wonders what’s at stake here. The missing link is only determine by language, by an animal without language? By a man without language? This is the bridge Homo alalus- a non speaking man.

It is difficult and confusing to separate man from animal and it is very interesting how the definition has evolve. It is a very important question to raise today when we start deciding who is human and who is not among humans, who deserve human rights, it goes along the same line as Faucoult discourse about war.

QUESTION: from Shukin and Costa reading

In the Nicole Shukin reading there were many researchers (some ethnographers) mentioned and everyone was trying to critique the other person. For example, Agabem, Derrida, Marx, Foucault, Chow, Deleuze and many others. I will discuss more of this reading in class but I wanted to start the discussion with the words 'animal' and 'capita;'. Shukin suggests:

"this book struggles , unfortunately with no guarantee of success, against the abstract and universal appeal of 'animal' and 'capital', both of which fetishistically repel recognition as shifting signifiers whose meaning and matter are historically contingent". (page 14)

Do you agree with this statement looking at the reading as a whole?

Shukin explains that

on one hand, "Animal Capital constitutes a resolutely material engagement with the emergent "question of the animal". On the other hand, "animal capital across Fordist and post Fordist eras, the book seeks to rectify a critical blind spot in Marxist and post-Marxist theory around the nodal role of animals, ideologically and materially, in the reproduction of capital's hegemony" (page 7).

Do you agree with this statement looking at the reading as a whole?

I will discuss more of my viewpoint in class along with trying to figure out the Super Bowl Nissan car example and how that ties into this reading. One of many questions in this book I have is, is 'animal capital' looked at in a political sense or depending on the theorists who is "politically" correct?

Footnote to Monday

Read this and thought perhaps Foucault was a prophet.

Russia is "publicly neutered" and who is going to save it?

Born into brothels

Lastly, Born into Brothels presents a lot of information in its first four minutes. It opens with moths beating against a light bulb and proceeds, with a throbbing score, to move between images of crowded streets, a child's face, men counting money, and prostitutes soliciting customers. After the title scene, we see rodents, disturbing excerpts of an interview with a child, and black and white images of prostitutes with clients.

The filmmaker then introduces herself with the voiceover and words, "It's almost impossible to photograph in the red light district."

How does this introduction predispose the viewer to interpret the rest of the film? How does it position the filmmaker in regards to the story? Did she gain your trust as a voice of authority in the first 20 minutes?

Maureen first of all thank you for your post it was very interesting and fun to read!

In the first 4 minutes she presents an atmosphere of despair. Who knows why she choose the light bulb for the first scene maybe she felt she was the only light those kids had… The first minute and15 seconds everything is slow the music and the pace. We see close ups of the kids faces and we see the surroundings, or what she saw at least. My answer is yes after the first minute you know how she feels about this, you don't know anything about the documentary but she is already setting up a very sad environment. She is giving the audience her vision as a VISITOR as an outsider. I am sure she had good intentions that is not in doubt here and I know how you said Maureen that is very easy to criticize her but I do think that represent everything like someone from outside. "I knew I couldn't do it as a visitor I wanted to stay with them and live with them and understand their live" What she really wanted was to impose her settings of right or wrongs according to the west. As the article you posted (thank you for that also, very interesting) there are a lot of things going on but she decided to present a part of the truth totally distorted by our own believes like Pooja was saying yesterday. What we have in our head is the model of education or labor. Why she didn't put in context this information or give voice to other people? We just see through her eyes.

After this intro of 1.15 the pace is fast and the music changes. After this second set that has more images of the surroundings and less faces the music fades and we have a big close up of a rat. That could had been an scene here in New York no need to be in Kolkata to see that. What was she trying to say? And then she contradicts herself. She doesn't want to be a visitor but the way she presents her documentary so far is setting her as an outsider. Even in New York I think I noticed the rats more when I arrived here now I don't even care it won't be the first think I put in a documentary about New York. Anyways she had an intention and she was frustrated about what she experienced. I wonder why the camera project? Why not just trying to "understand" like she said. She was trying to do something else, she was trying to empower and to change. Like Chris said the documentary suddenly take that path is a documentary about how she struggles to fulfill her dream, this idea of what she thought was the right option for them.

After the rat comes the interview "the man that enter this building are not so good" again in all this time doesn't seem to me she wanted to understand she is telling me her point of view and definitely not earning my trust. Then she starts her statement about how difficult was to photograph here (it didn't seem to me like she had any problem to access) and then my least favorite phrase "I knew I couldn't do it as a visitor I wanted to stay with them and live with them and understand their live" I think this is the problem is very nice of her of wanting to stay with them instead of a five star hotel but she is indeed a visitor and that was the only way of telling this story and she forgot about that or at least gives that impression.

Response: Incitement/Resistance

I agree with Maureen in the senses that that there are many themes one can touch upon, but since its relevance to the study of Ethnography, race, class and gender and other fields in the humanities, I decided to pay particular attention to Chow’s “Keeping them in their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation”. Chow delves into and investigates the subject of mimesis. According to Chow, there is a suggestive affinity between caged animals on the verge of extinction but preserved (in zoos) and the predicament of those labeled as ethnic whether in white capitalist societies or observed. Chow argues that however much concentration an onlooker (i.e. a subject not labeled as ethnic) might devote to those 'inside the cage', something will always seem 'out of focus' (Chow 96-7), and it is this condition of out of-focussedness which she thematises. I could not help but draw on a similarity between Chow’s take on the ethnic subject and the movie Born Into Brothels. There was a specific part in the middle of the film where the children of the prostitutes were taken for an outing at the Zoo and were constantly taking pictures of the caged yet wild animals. The boy (named Manrik if im not mistaken) described the caged animal and the poor and degrading treatment it received almost as though he was implying or hinting to the viewers (gazers) that the children of the brothels are in the exact same predicament as the animals. The children were asked to take pictures of the animals, yet they were being filmed and being gawked at, if you will by us (the viewers).
The question she seems to pose is whether such an image can ever be in focus and concludes that 'however benevolent and complimentary the visitor might be, the image produced of the animals - in this case, the third-world cultural workers, the ethnics caught in the plight of post imperialist nationalisms - is bound to be out of focus because they are the products of a certain kind of gaze to which they are pre-supposed to play as, to act like, to exist in the manner of something'”(100).

Questions: Camaroff & 'Born into Brothels'

Camaroff presents a provocative look at the branding of culture, perhaps best summarized with the line,

"in an age in which 'fantasies work where reality fails,' contemporary advertising techniques, those neoliberal weapons of mass instruction, are replicated in the production and alienation of culture; culture, that is, not in the anthropological sense of the term, but in the guise claimed by those who would assert a collective subjectivity by objectifying it for the market." (18)

My first question is quite broad, but: What examples of the commodification of culture or national identity can we think of?

One striking example is Aveda's Uruku makeup line. This is Aveda's official version of the partnership. (It's under five minutes and very interesting.)

These are samples of their ads:

And an image from a fashion show with Chief Tashka Yawanawa. Yes, I believe he is applying eyeliner.

And we seem to have arrived again at the idea of an aura. I think anthropology may use it in a specialized sense, and I know professor Rangan spoke of its allusion to 'power over the viewer', but I can't find a definition outside the general:

1. An invisible breath, emanation, or radiation.

2. A distinctive but intangible quality that seems to surround a person or thing; atmosphere. (Free Online Dictionary)

Camaroff writes of "the aura of ethno-commodities" and debates if it dies with their reproduction. Yet he posits perhaps "authentic reproductions, like 'genuine fakes,' tend to underscore the uniqueness of the original." (20)

This language made me wonder what consumers seek in the marketplace of culture. What is the appeal of "licensed shamans," "ancient Shapibo ceramic artwork" and "retreats in jungle lodges"? (2-3) Does it tie into the anthropological impulse? Is it an attempt to escape the trappings of consumerism ... by falling into its newest manifestation? What sort of 'aura' does it hold in Western eyes?

Lastly, Born into Brothels presents a lot of information in its first four minutes. It opens with moths beating against a lightbulb and proceeds, with a throbbing score, to move between images of crowded streets, a child's face, men counting money, and prostitutes soliciting customers. After the title scene, we see rodents, disturbing excerpts of an interview with a child, and black and white images of prostitutes with clients.

The filmmaker then introduces herself with the voiceover and words, "It's almost impossible to photograph in the red light district."

How does this introduction predispose the viewer to interpret the rest of the film? How does it position the filmmaker in regards to the story? Did she gain your trust as a voice of authority in the first 20 minutes?

Also, the film did win an Academy Award, but amid a large chorus of praise in the U.S. media there was a smaller voice dissent. This article seems to present all the major criticisms of the film and may help inform our discussion.

--posted by Maureen