Anthropology At The Movies A Brief History
How have anthropologists interpreted and analyzed popular movies in the past While there is not a large body of literature on this subject, it is important not to ignore past approaches, as we do not wish to reinvent the wheel, but, rather, to build on the strengths and avoid some of the pitfalls of the work of previous anthropologists. This brief review considers most of the major works which have analyzed Hollywood movies, and notes our own points of overlap with and divergence from these...
Dream Palaces And Beyond
On the one hand, we have to attend to the many different factors that influence viewer perceptions, and anthropology's main methodological contribution will continue to be ethnography. On the other hand, ethnography is not a panacea. Neither ethnography nor any other methodology has direct access to what people really think, especially not when it comes to movies. Wogan's mini-ethnography on audience feelings about Jaws illustrates that we've entered a complex area filled with inner feelings...
Notes
1. We use the term America to refer to the United States, but in doing so we don't mean to slight Central and South America. Much of what we say about the U.S. America might also apply to Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places, as noted below. For the sake of conciseness, though, we stick with the term America and for variety, we also use U.S. 2. See, for example, Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002 Dickey 1993 Mankekar 1999 Askew and Wilk 2002 McCall 2002 Meyer 2003 . For reviews of the...
Out Of Sync
This film and the final twist, in particular often provoked bitter disappointment among critics and viewers. So what went wrong Why did a film, created by talented actors and an accomplished director, not only fail to make it to blockbuster status, but actually stir up hostility And what can this tell us about American culture We believe that the relative unpopularity of The Village was rooted in Americans' either or conceptions of small-scale societies. In the popular imagination, such...
Masculinity Polytemporality And Bowling
What the fuck are you talking about and Shut the fuck up, Donnie act not only as a futile restatement of the dominant linguistic ideology in the face of a reality that clearly escapes it, they are a futile restatement of dominant masculinity models in a film in which each gender performance seems to communicate across different temporalities and to hum with other possibilities, and other possible words, that undercut it as soon as it is asserted. Just so, the term Dude has multiple referents...
Student Perspectives On War
When I suggested that Jaws could be a commentary on Vietnam and the Second World War, my students seemed to find this idea plausible and interesting, but it was hard to know how much it resonated with their own experiences and emotions. There was good reason to think it did not resonate deeply. After all, these students were born in the mid-1980s, so they would have seen Vietnam and the Second World War as rather remote aspects of U.S. history. These wars are certainly not as close to them as...
The Wedding Scene An Initial Opposition Between The Old And New World
In the opening wedding scene, writing is identified with mainstream American society, specifically the state and capitalist relations. While the Corleones are implicated in this society, we also see through their disdain for writing, and their use of food and drink that they belong to another cultural order. For example, in the opening scene where FBI agents in the parking lot are shown writing down license-plate numbers on notepads, an FBI agent flashes his identification badge at Sonny, Don...
Baseballs Social Significance Lines As Images Of Social Control
Our approach here derives from our research outside the U.S. While studying literacy symbolism in the highlands of Ecuador, Wogan noticed the importance of a certain kind of lined paper, used in a witch's book that was said to kill victims. Wogan traced the symbolic origins of this witch's book back to other types of archival writing, such as birth certificates and baptismal records, noting that they all used the same kind of lined paper. He argued that magical writing like the witch's book...
Jaws Knowing The
Obviously the shark in Jaws 2005 1975 instills fear, but fear of what, besides the visceral fear of sharks and the ocean depths What social anxieties does Jaws play on, and what does the shark symbolize These are the questions addressed in this chapter. If people just wanted to be scared by big animals on screen, by now we would have had scores of blockbuster films about angry bears, marauding cougars, and other frightening animals, but we haven't, and few films have stood the test of time as...
Quotability Miscommunication And Metalinguistics
What makes language quotable, and why is this film, in particular, deemed so quotable There are a number of aspects of language in TBL that need to be unpacked before we can answer this question we first need to spend a little time getting a feel for the role of language in TBL. Since these exchanges can be quite funny, we hope that readers will be patient with, and take some pleasure from, our extended examples. First, TBL seems to revel in miscommunication and non-sequiturs. From the opening...
Jaws Synopsis
Jaws is set in a small oceanside town that depends for its survival on the summer tourist business. The town suffers a series of vicious shark attacks, and it is inferred that the perpetrator is a single shark. After some debate about how to handle these attacks, three men set out to search for the shark in the deep seas police chief Brody Roy Scheider , marine biologist Hooper Richard Dreyfuss , and fisherman Quint Robert Shaw . Eventually the shark shows itself, and the men try to kill it...
Linguistic Anthropology And Quotability
A brief tour of recent work in linguistic anthropology will help illuminate the quotability of TBL. Indeed, questions of miscommunication, metalinguistics, and quotability have been at the heart of recent developments in the field. A number of linguistic anthropologists have drawn on the studies of Mikhail Bahktin to call for a rethinking of the way we conceptualize language's relationship to society and time. Bahktin's basic insight was that the speech of each individual person is not created...
The Eyes Of The Other
Let's return to Quint's speech about the Indianapolis, specifically the middle section omitted from the earlier block quotation. After describing the poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' of the shark attacks in the Pacific, Quint gives the following, chilling description of the shark's eyes and his own experience with death Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you, right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark He's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at...
Films Cited Multiple Times
The Big Lebowski 2005 , Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, directors, Universal City, CA Universal Studios. Field of Dreams 2004 1989 , Lawrence Gordon and Charles Gordon, directors. Two-disc Anniversary Edition. Universal City, CA Universal Studios. The Godfather 2004 1972 , Francis Ford Coppola, director. Hollywood, CA Paramount Home Entertainment. The Gods Must be Crazy 2004 1980 , Jamie Uys, director. Culver City, CA Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment. Jaws 2005 1975 , Steven Spielberg, director....
NOTES Wba
1. Despite poor reception by the critics, The Village still did well at the box office, probably based on Shyamalan's previous successes. Shyamalan's more recent The Lady in the Water and The Happening have been even less successful than The Village in terms of critical reception and popular appeal. 3. For anthropological analysis and critique of The Gods Must Be Crazy, see Gordon and Douglas 2000 , Tomaselli 1990, 1992, 2002, 2006 , and Volkman 1986, 1988 . Although these authors analyze the...
The Godfather The Gun The Pen And The Cannoli
The Godfather came out in 1972, yet it remains popular to this day. What could explain this enduring popularity Given the wildly expanded media options now available to audiences, it's remarkable that any film from the 1970s is still watched on a mass scale. And The Godfather isn't just watched out of historical curiosity, it's quoted in everyday life, especially by males, and consistently placed at the top of lists of all-time favorite movies. In a poll done by Empire Magazine in November,...
Jaws In The Classroom
Since 1999, I Peter Wogan have been teaching full-time in the Anthropology Department of the College of Liberal Arts at Willamette University,3 a selective liberal arts college, located in Salem, Oregon. The particular class in which I taught Jaws was titled Survey of Anthropological Theory, a required course for all Anthropology majors and minors. I used Jaws for a unit on French structuralism, taught about halfway through the semester. Analyzing a Hollywood blockbuster seemed like a good way...
Anthropological Studies Of Egalitarian Societies
Much of the anthropological literature on egalitarian societies actually parallels the village of Shyamalan's imagination. For example, in Eleanor Leacock's classic account 1981 of the Montagnais-Naskapi, a Native-American group in Canada's Labrador Peninsula, we see the crucial importance of the principle of autonomy or freedom from control of individuals by leaders. As much as there were leaders among the Montagnais-Naskapi, they tended to have minimal power. The chiefs were good talkers, but...
Previous Interpretations
Of the many published interpretations of Jaws, the most fruitful for our purposes are those that view the shark as an Asian wartime enemy of the U.S., namely, the Japanese in the Second World War and the Vietcong in the Vietnam War Rubey 1976 Torry 1993 Willson 1977 . According to these provocative interpretations, the shark represents an Asian enemy soldier, and the film toys with anxieties and guilt about American wars with Japan and Vietnam. For example, Robert Torry 1993 33-4 has noted the...
Tensions In American Society
The Godfather, in suggesting in this first scene that family values should carry over into the rational world of business decisions, taps into a number of major tensions in American society. Above all, the Corleones offer an appealing resolution to the split between public and private realms that capitalism demands and that anthropologists have studied at length Carrier and Miller 1999 Hart 2005 Herzfeld 1992 Hochschild 2003 . Bourgeois ideology opposes the mixing of these two spheres. Work is...
Field Of Dreams
So how does the preceding analysis of the foul ball help illuminate the meaning of Field of Dreams The short answer is that Field of Dreams, like baseball itself, pulls off magic tricks and liminal moments by juxtaposing clear lines with imprecise ones. But to understand what this really means, we have to carefully watch what the movie does with lines, and this requires more close attention to detail because the film's plot does not, at first glance, revolve around lines. Field of Dreams tells...
NOTES Arb
1. Even if that's the case, we can still say, as McMurphy did after trying to throw the sink through the hospital window in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, But I tried . . . at least I did that. 2. For a copy of this manuscript, Seinfeld's Anthropology, please visit this book's blog at http 3. Many people have trouble pronouncing Willamette correctly, so Oregonians half-jokingly suggest the following mnemonic aid Willamette rhymes with Dammit as in will-ammit . 4. For more discussion of this...
Other Views Of Jaws
In 2005 and 2006, I used Jaws only in class discussions, and then had the students choose other movies or a Turnerian analysis of ritual symbolism for their paper topics. In 2007, however, I tried something different. After we had analyzed Jaws in class, I asked the students if they'd like to write their papers on interviews about Jaws, rather than take up text-internal analyses of new movies. Everyone in the class voted for the Jaws option. Each student had to do at least two interviews...
Business Not Personal
While the previous examples reinforce the sense of the Corleones' differences from mainstream Americans, the lines start to blur with the introduction of a Corleone axiom business, not personal. Tom uses this phrase in the same scene where Michael proposes to kill Sollozo and McCluskey. In saying business, not personal, Tom is summing up the Don's philosophy so that he can win an argument with Sonny, who is threatening to start an inter-gang war Tom Your father wouldn't want to hear this This...
Polytemporal Nonhegemonic Masculinities
The concept of polytemporality, finally, illuminates one aspect of TBL given much attention by Film and Cultural Studies scholars the portrayal of gender. The goal here has been to determine the relation of TBL to dominant masculinity models in earlier Hollywood films and in U.S. society more generally see, especially, Cornwall and Lindisfame 1994 Kazecki 2008 Martin and Renegar 2007 . Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994 3 , for example, argue that hegemonic masculinities in different societies...
Michaels Attempt To Combine The Two Worlds
The Don's son Michael is clearly identified with mainstream American society he's a war hero, he went to college, and he doesn't work in the family business. As he tells his WASP girlfriend in the first scene, That's my family, Kay, that's not me. In fact, he only learns about the attempted murder of his father from a newspaper headline, depending on the mediation of print rather than face-to-face interaction. However, in this second stage of the film, it is precisely Michael's understanding of...
Ethnography Anthropology And Beyond
We have to stress that this book is not an ethnography, unlike most other recent anthropological work on mass media, which has focused on the production, circulation, and reception of various media texts worldwide.2 While we recognize the value of these ethnographic media studies, our own aims here are different. This book provides a textual reading of Hollywood movies,3 rather than an ethnographic analysis of their production or reception by specific audiences. We have cast our analysis at the...
Some Possible Objections And Alternative Readings
Our analysis is meant to be suggestive, not airtight. Having read other interpretations and shared our analysis with colleagues and friends, we have heard or been led to anticipate several possible objections to our reading. The first objection is that not everyone can buy a thousand acres of woodlands and then hire guards to make sure that no one goes into their private reserve. While this is obviously true, we would also note that The Village is an allegory, not a fullblown political strategy...
Notes 1
1. For these list results, see the following http www.empireonline.com 500 99.asp Burr 1999 and http www.metacritic.com film highscores.shtml, accessed June 10, 2008 2. President Obama revealed this in an interview with Katie Couric. Elaborating, he said the undertaker scene sets the tone for the whole movie . . . I mean, there's this combination of old world gentility and ritual, with this savagery underneath. It's all about family. So it's a great movie Couric 2008 . One could even speculate...
Anthropology And Death
The stereotype of the Mystery Killer applies to Hooper not only as a generic scientist, but specifically as an anthropologist. Anthropologists, after all, continue to study the Other, to extract his or her secrets and publish them for the world to see. Not that most cultural anthropologists revel in numbers, but, like Hooper, they strive to understand their subject with precision and exhaustive detail thick description . The public certainly knows that anthropologists or whatever such experts...
Field Of Dreams Foul Balls And Blurry Lines
Field of Dreams 1989 seems to make just about everyone cry. Even men, or perhaps especially men, cry at this movie. When Field of Dreams first came out in theatres, men stayed in their seats after the credits rolled, tears flowing down their cheeks Gehring 2004 116 Winkler 2004 704 . Even tough guys cried. One of the producers reported that when the movie came out, Arnold Schwarzenegger called to tell us that he couldn't stop crying . . . and Ron Darling, who pitches for the Mets, told me it...
Conclusion
Did any of the interpretations in this book give you something to think about Were you surprised when you read about the shark's eyes in Jaws, or the foul line in Field of Dreams, or the cannoli in The Godfather If so, then writing this book was worth the effort. But if all of our interpretations were ho-hum, then we have failed.1 It's that simple there's nowhere to hide with this kind of analysis. You have presumably seen these films, so you can decide whether we have added any insight into...
Theoretical Discussion
Written and oral symbolism is woven into the film's fabric from the first to the last scene. It resonates with the writing-orality complex including the nostalgia and sense of irretrievable loss that Clifford has identified. This is not a minor point. Writing and food symbolism affects the entire meaning of the film, leading to conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with those of earlier analyses. Previous scholars have claimed that the film's social critique lies in its revelation that...
Anthropology Movies
At a time when just about everything, from the mundane to the spectacular, has been subjected to an anthropological lens, why have anthropologists been so cautious about extending their insights to popular Hollywood movies And what might be the rewards of an approach to these movies that is unabashedly anthropological This book employs current anthropological concepts to illuminate American blockbuster movies, such as Field of Dreams, Jaws, and The Godfather While most mass media suffer...
The Moe Green Casino Scene Inversion Of The Movies Initial Position
After killing Sollozo and McCluskey, Michael goes into hiding in Sicily, where it seems likely that he will renew his ethnic roots. He improves his command of the Sicilian language, consumes real Italian food, and marries a Sicilian woman. As we realize by the end of the film, however, he can't easily recover his homeland or his father's ways. Michael's killing of Sollozo and McCluskey was a turning point in the Corleone family's trajectory. Once Michael started to use the New World system...
Carol Bardenstein University Michigan
We're gonna' need a bigger boat. That rug really tied the room together. Bonasera, Bonasera, what have I ever done for you to treat me so disrespectfully These and other movie lines have become so interwoven into our conversations over the past ten years of writing this book that, like a transformative fieldwork experience, they have become part of who we are. We barely imagined when we first presented a short conference paper on The Godfather in 1999 that we would spend the next decade...
References Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila 1997 , The Interpretation of Culture s After Television , Representations, 59 109-34. Abu-Lughod, Lila 2005 , Dramas of Nationhood The Politics of Television in Egypt, Chicago University of Chicago Press. Aden, Roger C 1999 , Popular Stories and Promised Lands Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages, Tuscaloosa, AL University of Alabama Press. Allison, Anne 2001 , Cyborg Violence Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines , Cultural Anthropology, 16 2 237-65. Altherr, Thomas...
Mystery And Measurement
The shark, as an elusive, rare creature of the deep sea, is clearly a symbol for mystery and wonder. Indeed, scientists still know relatively little about sharks. It s no coincidence that Melville saw mystery in the whale, Moby Dick, whose mask Ahab wanted to strike through. Hooper s primary goal as a scientist is to literally measure the shark s size, in other words, to strip away the shark s mystery. Hooper is almost as obsessed with scientific measurement as Ahab was with vengeance. In the...