Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner

Check out the website for The Fast Runner, the Inuit film depicting their creation myth. I really love this movie because there is no explanation for why things are--you just have to watch it and interpret the different facets of Inuit life, such as courtship or passing time in the igloo. Like Itam hakim,hopiit it's a totally different viewing experience. Inuit humor is really silly and awesome. Check it out!

Museum Talk Overheard

So, in order to get closer to children and gain insight into their learning process at the museum--I carried a digital recorder around, sidling up to different groups of people and recording their conversations. Most people didn't know I was around.

One has to listen very cafefully to these samples. Below is a playlist and synopsis of what each clip is dealing with. I've also added transcripts of the conversations where it is difficult to hear. Sometimes the best part doesn't come until the end, so listen to the whole thing.

Real Cheetah Fur--two little girls ask their mom "Is that real cheetah fur?" in the African Peoples Hall.


Transcript:
Girl 1: Is that real cheetah fur?
Girl 2: I think so.
Girl 1: Let me see it.
Girl 2: Now wonder why they’re almost extinct.
Mother: (Reads sign)
Yes, Lindsay.
Girl 1: It’s real?
Girl 2: It’s Leopard?
Girl 1: Leopard?
Girl 2: It looks like cheetah!


He's Naked!--little boy and dad look at the model of an ancient Egyptian irrigation system in the African Peoples Hall


Mermaids and Dragons--the current show at the AMNH is about mythical creatures. also the IMAX film. listen and ponder...


Great Wall--sometimes it doesn't matter what is written on the placard. two kids in front of a model of Peking in the Asian Peoples Hall


Uncle Charles--the child says, "Take a picture of Uncle Charles," while pointing to Akeley's favorite gorilla from the diorama


Giant Whale--we learn children aren't the only one looking for it


In'juns--how the John Wayne generation explains native America; Hall of Native American Peoples


Mother (to her son): These are all Indian chiefs here, ‘cause they got headdresses on.
They’re trying to make a fire and they’re gonna try and decide, if they’re gonna attack the white man! ARRRR!
(laughs)
No, I think they’re tradi’n their goods.
So that’s nice…
Look at all the food in the bowls and stuff.
Look they got pretty dresses on, let’s go look at their costumes over here.


Motherly Mead--taped this at the entrance to the Pacific Peoples Hall, from a video about Mead


Let's Read It--the classic scenario: kids ask questions, parents consult the placard



Listening to what people say while interacting with the museum shines a lot of light on how the technology (now so embedded into the narrative of childhood) funtions, even if it looks like a Wes Anderson movie in there.

Museum Talk

The role of the museum--specifically the AMNH--in the lives of young children was a theme that appeared in both Haraway and class conversations. Not only have natural history museums gained an equally natural place is the standard field-trip canon of childhood, this museum is highly identitfied with what it means to be a New York child. As Harlan mentioned, this museum shows up all the time in popular culture.

Why do we take children to the museum? To learn of course. Yet stripping back the layers of mediation, as Haraway does, we see that the museum funtions as a technology to expose participants to a certain normalizing ideology. Youth, Nature, Manhood, and The State aside, what do we really learn in museums? What does the child's mind, actually take away from the day spent with nose to the glass? What do adults learn, for that matter?

I became very interested in checking in with kids at the museum; to see if a certain knowledge was produced, and by who. I had a sneaking suspicion that parents know little beyond what's written on the trite little placard, and this "knowledge" is what they pass on to their irksome and trying children, hopped up on Juicy Juice, trying to make sense out of the real/fake stuffed giraffe standing next to their McClaren stroller.

At first, I wanted to take photos of the children. But as I soon realized, parents get creeped out when you try and take close-ups that capture pre-k enchantment. Here are the distant shots I was able to gather. But it wasn't close enough. So I decided to record. More later.

World Town: NYC Chronotype in 2007

“A refugee in New York during the second World war, the anthropologist [Claude Levi-Strauss] is bewildered and delighted by a landscape of unexpected juxtapositions. His recollections of those years, during which he invented structural anthropology, are bathed in a magical light…As Levi-Strauss tells it, the New York of 1941 is an anthropologists’s dream, a vast selection of human culture and history…In New York one can obtain almost any treasure….Everything somehow finds its way here. For Levi- Strauss New York in the 1940s is a wonderland of sudden openings to other times and places, of cultural matters out of place” (237-238).

Sixty years later, New York is still the place to obtain any treasure, still a dense, intense, overlapping and interacting space where countless cultural circuits are at work. At the same time, New York is also a nucleus of late capitalism; it is here where we may also view the gradual homogenization of global cities. The chief difference between Levi-Strauss’s New York and ours is perhaps that we think about those juxtapositions and sudden openings; today we worry less about vanishing words.

Once while walking up Broadway in Soho, I passed a familiar face. Celebrity sighting number 587687667, big deal. A tall interesting-looking dude with a distinctive nose passed, sporting a hot purple jacket, baggy dark jeans, and a pair of bright Nike Air Max sneakers. He was carrying a skateboard and talking sweetly to an equally stylish girl by his side. I walked passed and heard an excited group of teenagers squeal, “That was Mos Def!”

This celeb moment has stuck with me, because I love Mos Def, but also because it was a visual example of why today, “cultural matters” in fact do not seem out of place in New York. We live in the age of hybrids and mash-ups and we are accustomed to it. What did I imagine a rapper to look like? Mos Def was carrying a skateboard, not a sports jersey. His jacket was skate but his jeans were hip-hop. Self-consciously I thought about the enormous fake gold doorknocker earrings I was rocking at the time, the ones that made me feel a little sheepish in the subway—did people think I was trying to be Puerto Rican? First I was a gentrifier; now I was appropriating the very culture of the folks I was displacing! But here was Mos Def, culture-crossing along with me.

In “On Collecting Art and Culture,” J. Clifford posits that traditionally “culture” has been viewed as whole, unified, and enduring. “Culture is a process of ordering, not of disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism. It does not normally ‘survive’ abrupt alternations” (235). Clifford brings forth the example of Margaret Mead and the Mountain Arapesh. “Mead found Arapesh receptivity to outside influences ‘annoying.’ Their culture collecting complicated hers” (232). The Arapesh, like our modern day New Yorkers, interact within several cultures at once, and quite naturally so. Mead wants the Arapesh to have an isolated culture, enduring from times past, that does not demonstrate the influence of “the outside world” (230-231).

This model, viewing cultural authenticity as related to historicity or preservation in “another time,” is the same technology that Donna Haraway analyzes as functioning at the American Museum of Natural History in Teddy Bear Patriarchy. “To see ethnography as a form of culture collecting…highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached, from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement” (231). In the context of the Museum, this means that certain ways of presentation may lead to essentialist notions of cultures, rather than nuanced and materially complicated ones. For example, a sign reads “Masks and Magic,” above an assortment of African masks. All the masks are grouped together, inferring similar uses and meanings, when in actuality they could have been collected from all parts of the continent and function in very distinct ways.

But the xenophobic logic of preservation that forms the underlying ideology of the AMNH has not persisted. As Clifford shows in his diagram of the “Art-Culture System,” today’s material culture can travel all over, a landscape stretching from MoMA to the souvenir shops of Times Square. And this is reflected in the real life materials choices of New Yorkers. When I wear my gold earrings, I’m participating in my own culture collecting, and this is a multi-layered process that shows how “appropriation” of culture cannot be defined as merely good or bad thing, appropriate or inappropriate. Now more than ever our definitions of culture are rapidly changing, with all rhetoric and concrete material processes of globalization. Gone are the days when we can be annoyed by the Mountain Arapesh reading the index of the Golden Bough.

On the subject of primitive art and its eventual inclusion in the modern fine art canon, Clifford writes, “What had begun with the vogue for l’art nègre in the twenties would become institutionalized by the fifties and sixties; but in wartime New York the battle to gain widespread recognition for tribal objects was not yet one” (239). Again in 2007, we find ourselves in war time New York. What objects are traveling through the art-culture machine today? How has the New York chronotype changed, and what therefore do we constitute as the material corpus of our hybridized, globalized culture? If we remade the AMNH today, with a focus on NYC, what would it look like?

Tierra Santa!

Tierra Santa is a theme park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that features a life size recreation of the Holy Land! A rich ethnographic space--I personally washed the feet of Jesus, observed the last supper, and dined on Holy Land pizza. It was amazing. I went during Holy Week, so entire families were out interacting with this visual/narrative/diorama. The AMNH wants to preserve, while this place wants to make a believed-but-not-seen past into a present, material truth. I went to here six months ago, and I still can't stop thinking about Tierra Santa.

on claiming reality

The Little Dear, 1946. Frida Kahlo

When Breton saw Frida's work, he declared her a surrealist.

Frida said, "I paint my own reality."

She is also rumored to have said, "They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris."

Frida was en ethnographer in her own right, I think. She invested herself deeply in the folkloric of Mexico, and who else better to learn about embodied knowledge, than from someone whose body was mutilated and constantly reproduced through the image?

your FACE is surrealist!

“Ethnography combined with surrealism can no longer be seen as the empirical, descriptive dimension of anthropology, a general science of the human. Nor is it the interpretation of cultures, for the planet cannot be seen as divided into distinct, textualized ways of life. Ethnography cut with surrealism emerges as a theory and practice of juxtaposition. It studies, and is part of, the invention and interruption of meaningful wholes in works of cultural import-export” (147).

What does a surrealist ethnography look like? Or an ethnography that uses elements of surrealism? What is surrealist about Land Without Bread? Or better yet, how does Land Without Bread demonstrate a surrealist way of knowing? (I’m really posing these questions—answer me!)

Clifford notes, “I am using the term surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). I think Clifford is explaining that his conception of “surrealist ethnography,” or their intersection, or their mutual abilities to generate new meanings of self and other, doesn’t necessarily have to do with what we think of as “surrealist” art per se. In other words, I need not summon images of French aristocrats inspiring themselves with the wealth of spiritual and exotic outlets so many primitives may lend them. Right?

He wants to view surrealist as a way of seeing, that in turn will produce knowledges. Land Without Bread confused me though, because it seemed straightforward in its ethnographic methodology, whether it’s meant to be parody or not. When I first thought of “surrealism” and “ethnography” as related concepts, Juan Downey’s Laughing Alligator came immediately to mind. If surrealism is about being open to other realities, breaking down the whole and seeing the fragments, and juxtaposing those fragments in new ways, then Downey’s film seemed to demonstrate this well. The aspect of Laughing Alligator that appealed to me so was that it supposed that Yanomami consciousness, and sub-consciousness, aught to be explored, even through the somewhat cheesy tricks of late 70’s video art.

If we are not to think of surrealism in this context as directly aligned with the artistic movement of the same name, and more of an attempt to use “the full human potential for cultural expression,” then putting a surrealist label on ethnography seems to me to be more of a symbolic act than an actual practice (129). In practice, I hope, ethnographers have been attempting to see or capture alternate realities for a long while.

At the same time, I know Clifford is not advocating that we put a surrealist label on ethnography. He draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and it’s converse, surrealist ethnography (146). Yet I don’t understand what methodologies might support a surrealist ethnography. He states, “An ethnographic surrealist practice…attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. Two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other” (146). This is an interesting juxtaposition with MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, which seemed to want us to look for the similar, the familiar, to find that the other and ourself were/are not so different or apart. Might MacDougall and Clifford be saying essentially the same thing, but phrasing it in distinct ways?

Clifford closes his essay by using two examples that demonstrate “juxtaposition and intervention in the modern world system” (147). The first is the typified surrealist scenario—Picasso sees an “African” mask and voila—cubism! Clifford writes, “Something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic,” or, being exposed to something new but that also is a expression of the human experience will lead us to understand others, but mostly ourselves, in a fresh and meaningful way (148).

The second example is more specific. Trobriand islanders, handed the colonial practice of playing cricket, end up playing the game in the post-Malinowski era, but in a tricked-out, carnivalesque, and basically Trobriand way. So humans will ingest, invert and subvert the cultural mandates given to them; even the colonized are actors with agency and the power to negotiate meaning. For Clifford, the blue plastic Adidas bag from which the Trobriand shaman-umpire extracts his betel nuts can be viewed in a similar vein as Picasso’s African masks—and this exemplifies ethnographic surrealism. I see this interplay as less surrealist per se, and more of a plain old example of why we cannot talk about the tribe any longer. Ethnographic objects cross boundaries, are re-positioned, invested with new meanings, are re-presented.

I’m not doubting (read: criticizing) Clifford’s connections between surrealism and ethnography. I just need to understand more fully what he means when he writes of a surrealist ethnographic attitude.