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UNIV2001 Fall 2021 Professor Lisa Karrer

Week #6 Part #1 Lecture Reading National Geographic

READ: Lutz & Collins Reading National Geographic (Coursepack) Using past issues of National Geographic as their topic, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins examine how photographs can be editorialized, manipulated and appropriated as cultural attractions or spectacles, a way of presenting cultures as “different” from ours. The authors examine how for decades National Geographic’s success was based on supporting western stereotypes, keeping these cultures “outside”, to be viewed as “the other.” HOW DO IMAGES DEFINE OUR DEFINITION OF THE WORLD? In this essay, the writers:

• Ask how people in other lands have been depicted, what they have been photographed doing, and how the photo has been composed.

• Look at photographs as they relate to each other (that is, the set of National Geographic magazines of the period) and to their historical and social context (the United States since 1950).

• Develop a critical sense of the photograph as an artifact that can be analyzed with some reference to—but not reducible to—its makers’ institutional context, constraints, intentions, and unconscious motives on the one hand, or, on the other, its readers’ construction of meaning.

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• According to Lutz and Collins, images can be:

• Exoticized • Politicized • Sexualized • Idealized

EXOTICIZED:

• Accentuating cultural differences (strange-seeming rituals or inexplicable behavior, (see Horace Miner Nacirema)

• The Role of Color Photography presenting an exotically peopled world; saturated color makes for intrinsically more interesting images

• The non-Westerner comes to be portrayed as a ritual performer living in a sacred (some would say superstitious) world.

• Promoting the view of “the other” as superstitious or irrational makes the viewer feel superior

• Making ritual routine – flattens (deadens) the emotional life of the people depicted (see Tom Driver The Magic of Ritual)

• The funeral becomes a moment of cultural display (with special customs of paraphernalia or dress) rather than a moment of grief

IDEALIZED:

• The Smile - The smiling, happy person evokes the goal of the pursuit of happiness, written into the Declaration of Independence

• Gentle Natives and Wars Without Brutalized Bodies

• Shunning of the poor, the ill, and the hungry

• Americans see themselves as no longer in possession of a culture but as holding on to history through their scientific advancements and their power to influence the evolutionary advance of other peoples to democracy and market economies (capitalism)

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SEXUALIZED:

• The Naked Black Woman / The first inclusion of a bare-breasted woman in the pages of the Geographic occurred in 1896, and was accompanied then, as now, by shameless editorial explanation

• The imputation of erotic qualities or even sexual license to non- Westerners (particularly women)

• None of the hundreds of women whose breasts were photographed in the magazine were white-skinned

POLITICIZED:

• Chiefly derogatory

• Relating to, affecting, or acting according to the interests of status or authority within an organization, rather than matters of principle

• Compare to The White Man's Burden: the alleged duty of white people in authority to manage the affairs of “less developed” nonwhites

Submit your detailed Written Notes to Week #6 Part 1 Assignment Folder DUE before Noon Sept 30