A thought on images of race, colonization, and Aztec-Eskimo-Punks

[annwfyn]

I went to see ‘The Eagle’ last week, which I actually really quite liked. One thing that did occur to me (and I’m not sure if I’m articulating this well, so forgive me if I’m incoherent) was how much of a Western it was. It was as if all the truths of the rugged colonial west (as taught by Hollywood) had been taken and carefully applied to Roman Britain. You could have called it ‘Dances with Celts’ and you’d not be too inaccurate. It was a tale of one brave white man Roman and his Indian Celtic side kick and their adventures among the savage tribes of the colonized people. The Picts seemed, at times, to be a great big collection of Other, all glued together. I mean, admittedly, they were kind of awesome with it (I want to be an Aztec-Eskimo-Punk when I grow up!) but the imagery was weirdly familiar, and normally would be applied to people from Scotland.

And it got me thinking.

Do we create the racist images that we do – of Africans, of Native Americans – because those are the images that we have of the ‘Other’? Are they basic human responses to ‘those people are different’? Or do we create the images of the ‘Other’ in fiction – be they alien, or Pict, or whatever – based on the images that got manufactured by our society when we were romping across the globe in imperial glee, because that’s how we now see ‘the Other’?

Or…I suppose…did we create the iconography of the Wild West, and of the Native American, and the Noble Savage, and the Great White Hunter in Africa, and all of the above from a bunch of basic human instincts to ‘different people’ and would the Romans have viewed our ancestors much as our more recent ancestors viewed the Native Americans? Or do we now recreate that relationship using the iconography of the Wild West, or maybe the British Empire, because we can’t imagine how else it might have functioned, having so thoroughly brainwashed ourselves since the 19th century?

Does that make sense?

And does anyone have any opinions?

Comments

[eniel]

Not sure I'm qualified to answer all those question.
Said's Orientalism tries to explain how a lot of our given understanding of others is in part due to our yearning for a certain "magical" dimension, which we don't find in our own society, so we turn to founding myths, and in the process, create theories about other societies, who "not being as advanced as the Western ones" are closer to their own founding myths, which makes them both primitive and exotic.
You'd also want to have a look at frontier theory developed by Turner.

Back to the Romans well... they were racist, yes but in a very "different" way from our Western view of racism. Most of the Western view of racism can be boiled down to "looks different" and "doesn't share a common culture".
The Romans didn't care about looks. Their emperor Septimus Severus was of Lybian origin, with some "Italian" thrown in. That said, he wasn't discriminated against since he spoke flawless Latin and Greek.
So the racism, or discrimination (which is probably a better term here) was solely based on the "common culture" denominator.
Hence the conception of the "barbarians" being "anyone who's not us (and since the Greek came up with the term, we'll include them in "us" too)". As the empire grew, the provinces were integrated into the "us" and those that grew up there were considered Roman as long as they accepted the new culture along with their own traditions.

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

I think that yes we will always produce a cultural 'short hand' for people from another culture, the 'Other' for a number of reasons some less pleasant than others. This is especially true in cinema where the language and cues are built up to enable the story and dynamics to be set quickly with visual identifiers to make it easy for audiences to spot what part of the tale a certain character or group play.

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

You tend to find that images of 'the Other' are remarkably similar from culture to culture.

I've seen an interview with a Serbian nationalist, who claimed that the Serbian Empire (under Stefan Dusan, in the mid 14th century) had risen to prominence and established European civilisation at a time when "you English were still swinging in the trees".

What happens in +your+ back yard is almost always the most important, in part precisely because it's all that you know about. The limit of existence equates to the limit of your knowledge. Anything you don't know about can't be civilised and has to be primitive - or at best, an inferior version of what you +are+ aware of.

I remember a Peanuts cartoon strip in which someone refers to something having happened in the 1880s - and Linus (usually the academically 'smart' child) responds in astonishment, "Were there +people+ back then?" You'll tend to find the same attitude in the formation of nationalist identities.

And those identities are always formed in relation to something else. There is no nationalism without at least one 'other' to define itself against. It doesn't even necessarily have to exist in a coherent form save in the perception of the nationalists: identities can be forced upon people, as well as created by them.

That's not to say that the precise details of conceptions of identity are by any means universal - research has confirmed that the USA, for example, genuinely does appear to operate under different 'rules' in some critical areas - but there's a remarkable amount of commonality. The 'idiot neighbour' (about whom jokes are made, but that is free of domination in spite of past efforts to impose it) and the 'tricky, over-sophisticated rival that's now on the wane' archetypes are remarkably common in both regional and national identities. British attitudes towards the French are often near-identical to US attitudes towards the British, for example, just as close comparisons have been drawn between British jokes about the Irish and German humour about Poles.

It's an immense field of study, spanning history, international relations, sociology, and anthropology - as well as studies of individuals' mental processes. There's been a lot of re-inventing the wheel done across the various disciplines, and excessive influence from Benedict Anderson's (heavily Marxist, and therefore very deterministic) 'Imagined Communities', but there's a lot of interesting work done on it.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

A lot of the archetypes you mention are similar to, well, archetypes - Jungian or subsequent developments on same.

And Westerns obey a lot of classic story and role structures - indeed, they're a very archetype-heavy genre.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

~nods~ I know classical approaches to race and racism were very different, although I know that's also a matter for debate. It was less about the physical/visual and more about cultural markers/assimilation, which is why the Jewish people, for example, were viewed as being very much 'Other', and treated with a mix of bemusement, disdain and romanticisation - they didn't assimilate, kept their own customs, kept their own religious traditions.

Jez was talking just now about the frontier myth. Turner, you say? I shall have to poke him and try and find out more.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I suppose one of the things I'm pondering is whether the archtypes are cultural constructs or not.

[eniel]

 Oh yes, the Romans weren't necessarily "better", mostly different.
Also, this describes what I tried to say (but brain is melted after a day in the books, sorry :) ).
As for frontier myths, yes, look up Frederick Jackson Turner... I could find other reference books if you really want, later tonight; it's also interesting to see the parallels drawn (and existent) between American and South African societies in that respect.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I am also being brain melted and not really very clever about this. Thank you for recommendations.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's not just 'the other'; it's yourself. The reason the West retains it's mythic quality is because it was the last great unexplorered frontier - the place between us and...wherever. Frontiers are interesting places. Once we had stories about people who travelled over the hill to another land and found themselves. We had Sir John Mandeville and simlar folks to him. As the world expanded the frontiers vanished, but it's at margins where individual legends appear. A person goes to a place where things are different and must discover themself in an alien context. The actual alien, the frontier, isn't important - it's the personal, defining journey within that. The west remains mythic because the people there are recongnisable - they have guns and motorcars and trains, but they're also sat on a frontier where rules break down and they have to discover themselves within that.

Kennedy realised that in his 'New Frontier' speeches; clever fellers that his scriptwriters were. it's not about defining an 'other'. It's about defining yourself.