As Others See Us:
The Last Undiscovered Tribe Is About To Expose Themselves
By: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies
We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The X-Files: Point, Click, Hyperlink!
About three years ago I came across a remarkable piece in TV Guide (a journal
not often cited in the anthropological literature, but, hey, if you’re a student of American
culture, how can you ignore a text [hyperlink to tens of thousands of pages of said
literature] that has outsold the Bible twenty times over?). This was at a time when The XFiles was at the height of its popularity, but the TV Guide article, faithful to that journal’s
breezy style, didn’t address the source of that popularity, didn’t seek to identify the
curious appeal of the show’s paranoid logic. Instead, it focused on a situation I would
have thought impossible: the show’s popularity within the FBI.
X-Files aficionados will immediately recognize the puzzle here, since practically
every episode of the series implicates the FBI in the heinous doings of an underground
government in league with alien invaders out to contaminate our DNA before taking over
the whole planet. And though most of us are probably not prepared to accept that
depiction of the agency (hilariously developed in Men in Black), we do tend to think of
G-men as conservative, no-nonsense types who do not take kindly to public criticism or
ridicule. Incredibly, though, FBI agents were fans.
The TV Guide piece (that issue’s cover story) was filled with photographs of
David Duchovny’s and Gillian Anderson’s visit to FBI headquarters in Washington
D. C., where admiring agents showed them through their offices. Conspicuous on the
walls of some of those offices were photos of Mulder and Scully at work in their own
(reely real) FBI offices. Tacked to the wall of one office there was even a copy of the
signature “I Believe” flying saucer poster that adorns Mulder’s basement cubicle in the
series.
For a semiotically inclined anthropologist, it is always intriguing to find a case of
life imitating art (if we agree to call a bureaucrat’s existence “life” and The X-Files “art”).
But what really started me thinking here was the incongruity between the public image of
FBI agents (those flint-eyed, steel-jawed Hannibal Lecter-hunting, Waco baby-burning,
Ruby Ridge-sniping plainclothes soldiers) and the glimpse of their lives provided by the
TV Guide piece: ordinary, TV-watching, all-in-good-fun guys and gals. What this
incongruity started me thinking about was another incongruity, one I had pondered over
long before coming across that copy of TV Guide: cultural anthropologists, those liberalminded, hegemonic discourse-hating, consider-the-lilies champions of the weak and
downtrodden, are plain old sourpusses about anything that has to do with their public
image or the public image of their subject. In short, FBI agents can take a joke; most of
us, apparently, cannot.
The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
When it comes to examining their public image and that of their craft, most
cultural anthropologists are at a double disadvantage. First, they tend to occupy
themselves with exotic (read “exoticized”) people and places (whether of the traditional
“far-away places with strange-sounding names” sort or the homegrown variety of ethnic,
gender, and special-interest groups) rather than with the tawdry pastimes of downhome
America – its TV shows (including The X-Files), its music, its sports, its movies. They
are in no position to evaluate their public image because they more or less consciously
avoid paying serious attention to the unserious fare of popular culture and daily life.
They are fieldworkers who don’t speak the local language. It’s like, you know . . .
Second, cultural anthropologists, even the swelling tide of postmodernists who have
renounced any special claim to an objective, scientific vision of the world, tend to regard
their work and their craft (obsessively peer-reviewed and ghettoized in journals of
minuscule circulation) as a thing apart from and above the mass-circulation op-ed pieces
that fill our newspapers and magazines. They are legends in their own minds.
Because I have thought and written for a number of years about the cultural
significance of American movies, I am particularly sensitive to other anthropologists’
treatments of that subject – and more particularly when those treatments incorporate the
weaknesses noted above. My work adopts the perspective embodied in the turn of the
Shakespearean phrase that begins this section (it is not my own, but the delicious coinage
of Thomas Disch, who uses it as the title of his recent excellent cultural study of
American science fiction). I would claim that American movies should be viewed and
interpreted as parts of a Dreamtime world that envelopes and coexists with everyday
thought and experience; they are closely comparable with the Australian aboriginal
Dreamtime or Dreaming as described by William Stanner and others. Other
anthropologists, even when they deign to consider movies as a research topic (and almost
always as a brief diversion from their other, bona fide work), are not so ready to turn that
Shakespearean phrase. For them, the “stuff” of social life has priority over the “dreams”
of movie-life, and the arrow of influence or determinacy definitely flows from the former
to the latter: real life is reflected or, more often, distorted in the reel life of movies. The
tail does not Wag the Dog.
An outstanding example of what I take to be a wrong-headed approach to this
subject appeared in these pages several years ago (Anthropology Newsletter, December
1993). In “Anthropology in Hollywood: The Best and Worst Films of All Time,” J. R.
McLeod undertakes to rank films (note: not “movies”) according to their degree of fit
with ethnographic and historical fact. Thus One Million Years B. C. tops McLeod’s list
of the “Ten Worst” because it depicts humans (specifically, Racquel Welch bouncing
around in some gloriously skimpy skins) as coexisting with dinosaurs, and thereby
confuses the paleontologically challenged. (Still, Hal Roach’s 1940 movie, One Million
B. C., on which Racquel’s show~piece was based, did afford Victor Mature his one
opportunity to act in character.) Near the top of McLeod’s “Ten Best” list is Dances with
Wolves, which he found to be a welcome antidote to earlier Hollywood productions that
stereotype Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages. This glowing endorsement by an
anthropologist astounded me; other media critics found Kevin Costner’s fawning political
correctness almost as revolting as Hollywood’s anointing it with several Academy
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Awards (Pauline Kael commented that “in this movie Costner’s hair is full of feathers,
and so is his head.”).
The really offensive thing about Dances with Wolves is that it does not merely
seek to replace one shoddy stereotype with another (the whooping redskins of the old
John Ford westerns with the noble Lakota Sioux); it perpetuates the original sin of New
World colonialism, begun by Columbus, according to which there are good Indians and
bad Indians (for Columbus these were Arawak and Carib, for Costner Sioux and,
apparently, Pawnee). Good Indians are invariably gentle, bucolic environmentalists, and
graced with fair complexions; bad Indians are rampaging heathens, as dark-skinned as
members of street gangs whose menacing glances cause the fibrillating old hearts of
studio executives to act up as they are conveyed in starship stretches through L. A.
streets, on their way to canonize Costner and the Native American at the Awards
ceremony. Happily, though, Costner is about to make things right with the long-awaited
release of his sequel to Dances with Wolves: Plays Video Poker in Reservation Casinos.
The schoolmaster, ever mindful of his schoolmasterly duties, is careful to separate
the wheat from the chaff, to ensure that his youthful charges are instructed and not, God
forbid, entertained. And so he inadvertently satirizes himself and his craft, casting
himself as the stuffy old professor in a B-movie who claims to dispense Truth to a
roomful of kids who spend most of their waking moments thrashing around in a runaway,
media-saturated world.
Over the years, I have compiled a list of the best films for students to
watch outside class to peak their interest and enjoy what they have
learned. I have also put together a list of the worst films with pseudoanthropological themes or characters. On occasion I will use pieces of the
films listed to illustrate misinformation about what anthropologists
actually do for a living, or on rare occasions, I will show an exceptional
film to a class to make points that have been covered in readings or
lectures (AN December 1993, page 40).
Movie-stuff, like all magical substances, is too potent to hand out freely to the
uninitiated.
Krippendorf’s Tribe
A greater problem with McLeod’s lists for our purposes here is that they contain
only one movie specifically about an anthropologist (in the guise of the primatologist
Dian Fossey, in Gorillas in the Mist), as opposed to movies that generally (mis)treat
anthropological subject matter. Predictably, Gorillas makes the “Ten Best” list; it
situates the anthropologist in an appropriately exotic locale and valorizes her persona (but
one might wonder why Sigourney Weaver’s much stronger performances in the Aliens
quartet don’t make the cut; isn’t the theme of those movies – our relations with another,
sort-of-sapient species – just as anthropological as Gorillas?). The omission of movies
about anthropologists is not surprising; however, for the plain fact is that when we set out
to examine the public image of anthropologists we soon discover that it is practically
non-existent.
It is an intellectual curiosity worth pursuing that cultural anthropologists, whose
romance with exotica should be made-to-order for Hollywood exploitation, are almost
completely ignored in popular cultural productions, while the most unlikely types and
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professions receive star billing. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that a young
and unknown paleontologist picking away at dinosaur fossils while scrounging a living at
a place called the "Museum of the Rockies" in Bozeman, Montana would become the
model for the male lead in one of the very superest of supergrossers? Yet Jack Horner
and his work, through Steven Spielberg's cinematic rendering, is now known to the world
as Dr. Sam Grant (he gets ’em) of Jurassic Park. Equally surprising, if less lucrative,
turns of fate have propelled astronomers (Jodie Foster’s character in Contact) and
mathematicians (mathematicians??) (Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting) onto
the silver screen. Whatever happened to "The Anthropologist as Hero"?
In this improbable (as always) cultural milieu, Krippendorf's Tribe deserves our
special attention, rather than the knee-jerk dismissal it seems to have received from the
anthropological community (we aren't as good-natured as those FBI agents). And
besides, I thought the movie was a hoot: how can you go wrong with Richard Dreyfuss
partly reprising his role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a pretty ordinary guy
overwhelmed by events, with Lily Tomlin as the dowdy department chair, and with the
up-and-coming Jenna Elfman of Darma and Greg as the manic assistant professor?
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Besides being great fun, I liked KT for precisely the reason anthropologists have
shunned it: the movie presents cultural anthropology as a search for lost tribes – a
stereotype that, again, brings out that knee-jerk reaction of contempt. And as though that
were not enough to damn it in the eyes of respectable professionals, KT commits the
unpardonable sin: James Krippendorf, overcome by the death of his wife and
anthropologist-partner, by the dysfunctional mess of his family, and by the demands of a
dean and department chairman that he produce the results of an expensive research leave,
makes up a tribe on the spot, while stammering at a lecture podium. The “last
undiscovered tribe,” the Shelmikedmu are his children, the rebellious and heartsick
teenage daughter, Shelly, the younger Michael, and the five-or six-year old Edmund.
Having invented the tribe, Krippendorf enlists his children in hilarious backyard
videotaping sessions of Shelmikedmu subsistence practices, circumcision rites, and, with
Jenna Elfman’s unknowing assistance, mating behavior. In the end – which I will
disclose here, since if you haven’t already seen the movie you probably never will –
Krippendorf’s bacon (well, bagel) is saved by Shelly. Lily Tomlin is in New Guinea, out
to prove her rival a fraud, and is closing in on the reputed home valley of the
Shelmikedmu, when Shelly gets on the cell phone to an old family friend, the canny
headman of the village where her parents worked. The headman listens to Shelly’s
account of Shelmikedmu life, then proceeds to re-create it in situ, just before Lily Tomlin
comes huffing and puffing over the hill.
The description of the Shelmikedmu, and their unfolding role in the movie, gets
very thick, very quick. Rather than see KT as a regrettable farce, I believe the movie, as
is often the case with myth, provides a deeper understanding of cultural process than the
all-too-serious theoretical pieces anthropologists have been writing of late. (If one were
still permitted to mention Lévi-Strauss’s work, one might suggest that it would be better
for movies to produce lists of the “Ten Best” and “Ten Worst” anthropological works,
rather than McLeod’s procedure). Movie-myth is more insightful and revelatory than the
(dismissive) anthropological commentary that presumes to interpret it.
The (Wo)man Who Peaked Too Soon
In looking to movie-myth to understand something of anthropological practice, it
is intriguing to consider “The Man Who Peaked Too Soon,” an amusing set of sketches
done by Tom Wolfe and included in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (not quite
as far from the canon as TV Guide, but getting out there). In the fifties The Man took to
wearing a black leather jacket and boots, and wore his hair long and greased back into a
ducktail. Everybody called him a weirdo and a delinquent and pretended he didn’t exist.
Then Elvis exploded on the scene and every high school kid looked like that. But by then
The Man had rediscovered nature, letting his hair and beard grow long and free and
wearing a mish-mash of Asian and American Indian clothes and beads. Everybody called
him a weirdo and a bum and pretended he didn’t exist. Then Flower Power kicked in and
every high school kid looked like that. But by then The Man had cleaned up his act, wore
his hair short and combed back, and took to wearing flowing silk shirts and tight trousers.
Everybody called him a weirdo and a faggot and pretended he didn’t exist. Then
Saturday Night Fever and discomania took the land by storm . . .
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I would suggest that the cultural anthropologist is the (wo)man who peaked too
soon. In the early decades of this dwindling century s/he insisted, in the face of a
protofascist America, on the integrity – and integrality – of indigenous societies. NonWestern peoples were not deficient, but different, and the differences of a particular
culture formed a coherent pattern. Hundreds of thousands of kids were indoctrinated
with this view in Anthro 101 courses across the land, and some of those kids went on to
become the print and TV journalists, the authors of popular books, and the directors of
popular movies (Dances takes another turn around the ballroom) who influenced
hundreds of millions with their school-larned ideas about the wholeness and
distinctiveness of cultures. But by then the (wo)man who peaked too soon was onto
Lévi-Strauss’s transformations, Roy Wagner’s classic The Invention of Culture,
Drummond’s seminull essays on cultural generativity and intersystems, and a flood of
other works, all of which demonstrated that “cultures” were anything but whole, were, in
fact, fictive constructs of often incompatible processes, fragmented and infinitely
reflexive constellations of meaning.
The genie of public opinion, however, has been difficult to get back into the
bottle. Once exposed to the Benedictean rhapsody of whole cultures, the public seized on
the notion and would not let go. In fact, the public, in its infinite diversity, now has the
petal to the metal and, like a rabid bat, is careening down back roads and alleyways of
American society Ruth would never have imagined. Ethnic, gender, religious, and
special-interest groups of every persuasion vehemently proclaim their inviolate cultural
presence in a vast mix of other, equally distinct members of a multicultural world. The
public, thank God, has not made the postmodern turn with the vanguard of cultural
anthropologists, happily resisting the trend toward jargon-ridden discussions of academic
trivia. Is a particular account of this or that social phenomenon “essentialist” or (in the
new, intemperate canon) “anti-essentialist”? The public doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
The state of things at present is that anthropology’s public image is completely
out-of-step with what cultural anthropologists are up to.
People look to us,
understandably, to provide fresh validations for the old theory of cultural presence with
which we infected them in the first place. Just as understandably, they are confused and
generally pissed off when anthropologists fail to deliver those self-validating goods,
when at least a few of us are intellectually honest enough to decry the absurdity of the
claim to “repatriate” Kennewick Man, to bury Ishi’s brain, to open another of Costner’s
spiritual casinos. Between a warmed-over “essentialism” – now last year’s goods – and a
jingoistic “anti-essentialism” there is precious little to choose from to recreate
anthropology’s public image. That is why Krippendorf’s Tribe is such a treasure, with its
implicit suggestion that creating culture(s) is what ethnography is all about, and with its
celebration of the atrophying ability to have fun with what we do as anthropologists. The
last undiscovered tribe, about to be exposed, may be ourselves.
(Or perhaps a more somber epigraph/ending: Could it be that wisdom appears on
earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion? — Friedrich Nietzsche)
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