African Aesthetics in the Films of Ousmane Sembene

In the 1960s, several African directors of the francophone region launched their filmmaking careers. Their films mark the pioneering of genre films that portray Africa through African lenses. The most well-known director among them is Ousmane Sembene, who achieved fame through the prominence of his films, 'Borom Sarret' (1963) and 'La Noire de...' (AKA 'Black Girl,' 1967). As we assess Sembene's film practice, it becomes clear that he is a gifted griot, an artist who has developed a unique cinematic method of 'Africanizing knowledge' - to paraphrase V. Y. Mudimbe. Africanization of knowledge hereby implies the creation of indigenous aesthetics, and this aesthetic orientation can be traced to two different traditions: the tradition originating from the conventions of dominant film practices, and that of traditional narrative style indebted to the African oral tradition.

Borom Sarret is Ousmane Sembene's first film, and also the first professional film made by a black African. It achieved international acclaim when it won a prize at the 1963 Tours International Film Festival - the second African film to do so after Mustapha Alassane's Aoure (Marriage, Niger, 1962). At first glance, it is possible to dismiss Borom Sarret for its simplicity and amateurish photography. A closer examination of its structure, however, reveals a uniqueness that is non-Western, non-European and non-conventional, signalling a different mode of representation, and introducing indigenous aesthetics.

Sembene exposes the dichotomy between the urban rich and the urban poor of Dakar by transforming a series of vignettes into a microcosmic representation of African neocolonial society. The film's explicit indictment of neocolonialism, coupled with Sembene's expressively detailed delineation of its virulent impact on society, represents the creation of a unique ethos that has contributed to the film's special place in African film history as an indisputable masterpiece.

Sembene juxtaposes a linear chronology of events interspersed with fragmented episodes presented as coded political messages to illustrate and educate. In this encoded structure, we find an intense critique of the new African elite, who are presented as recreant and even more treacherous than the former colonial administrators. Although the specific content is Senegalese, Borom Sarret represents an African universe; the same story could have been filmed anywhere in black Africa, because  the nature of the socio-economic and geopolitical experiences represented have been a constant feature from the colonial period to the neocolonial present.

Sembene believes that a filmmaker should strive beyond using the medium simply to inform. Rather, a filmmaker should stimulate individual consciousness and political awareness. In effect, the role of film in the African context must be construed as a modern form of enlightenment media capable of transcending, as he puts it, 'artificial frontiers and language barriers.' Sembene began as a writer, and moved to film as a medium for addressing that part of his audience prevented from experiencing his written works by illiteracy in French. Hence, in Borom Sarret, Black Girl, and in many sequences of his other films, he appears to appropriate silent film techniques to achieve clarity This can be seen in his painstaking attention to detail, as when the camera is made to assume the function of sound, a voice-over, or an observer. For Sembene, therefore, cinema is an educational tool, and its content must be made explicit. This strategy of emphasizing image over sound, cutting across 'artifical frontiers and language barriers,' is pertinent to understanding Sembene's coded political messages. By interweaving detailed indigenous images and explicit ideology, Sembene creates a unique aesthetic that his African audience can claim as their own.

Sembene and other African filmmakers, including Med Hondo, Safi Faye and Souleymane Cisse, believe in the reciprocity of ideas: ideas flowing from the artist to the audience and vice versa, unencumbered hierarchical barriers. The manifestation of this tangible objective can be seen in Sembene's filmic process. Borom Sarret and Black Girl, for example, resonate with character delineation, masterful use of monologue, and documentary voice-over narration. The narrative and stylistic component are fashioned to inspire the audience to participate in the experience of a typical routine of the cart driver and those of Diouana. By extension, the viewer is compelled also to think about the ironies of the newly-independent Senegal in transition. This is forcefully presented in Borom Sarret by Sembene's repudiation of formal closure, compelling the viewer to identify and reflect upon the cart driver's ambiguous life and the rapid dissipation of post-Independence promises. It is worth noting that Sembene leaves the endings of all his films open so as not to impose solutions, and to allow viewers so continue the discussion after film has ended.

Both Borom Sarret and Black Girl are structured to produce an emotional impact upon the viewer.This impact, however, derives not only from the historical significance of Sembene's pioneering opposition, but also from ideology - the African filmmakers' commitment to the use of the film medium as a timely and plausible cultural document for posterity. Since what is documented has an historical and a cultural function, there is concern for accuracy in presenting a realistic view of the content. This is what makes African film practice different from many foreign cinematographic representations of Africa that only glorify exoticism.

Third world and African film practices seek to develop an aesthetic deemed appropriate for their own cultural environment. Sembene, for example, usually depends on linear structuring and the explication of minute details, allowing events to happen in a natural time continuum. He has argued that this strategy enables him deliberately to slow the pacing of his films in pursuit of spectator-participation and for the benefit of his audience, who might not experience the full impact of the message if bombarded with a rapid succession of images.

Sembene's works force us to reflect upon the present period, when the Western media continue to expand as an enterprise of acculturation, and to ask: Can Africa be awakened through its own media to recover its own lost cultural heritage? Can this happen when Africans themselves are heartily embracing the cultural assimilation imposed first by colonialism, then by neocoloniaism, while vigorously pursued by the predatory claws of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank? In other words, how can the screen and other channels of information be completely decolonized to serve African interests? Who and what are the priorities?

[This is a slightly edited extract from the chapter 'The Creation of an African Film Aesthetic/Language for Representing African Realities,' originally published by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike in the book A Call to Action: The Films of Ousmane Sembene, edited by Sheila Patty (Praeger Publishers, 1996), pp. 105-107, 110, 115. For further insights into the work of Ousmane Sembene, readers may wish to consult Ousmane Sembene: Dialogues with Critics and Writers (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Clips from some of Sembene's other films can be viewed here.]

Thoughts from an Autochthonous Center

For approximately five hundred years, European civilizations subjugated or destroyed peoples around the world. By the 1890s, about 85% of the land mass of the earth was either a colony or a former colony of Europe. During the long period of conquest, Europeans developed an intensive and impressive body of ideologies to explain their success as the inevitable result of the inherent superiority of the culture and at points even their biology, although the expansion actually the result of military success. The psychological and social foundation of this period of conquest and colonization is found in the ability to coerce the peoples of the world to accept the rules by which European politics and ideologies claimed the power to determine what is legitimate about the human experience.

Other cultures have expanded and conquered, but none has expanded so far and so powerfully. At each stage of the expansion, European culture adopted new and more effective utopian ideologies which have proven powerful forces in motivating people either to support aggressive expansion and exploitation of others or to stand docilely in the face of such aggressions. The original utopia, the Garden of Eden, served as a model of coercive powers of the state.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans justified the plunder of the Caribbean and Central America on the premise that Christianity was the "true" religion and that they were doing subjugated peoples a service by forcing them to it. At one point the Spanish decided that because they were purveyors of God's message to "new" worlds, they should be exempt from physical labor and other people should do all the menial work. This kind of thinking became the foundation of racism in the modern world. People who can convince themselves they have solutions to all humankind's problems tend to do whatever is necessary to effect what they consider the desired ends and are almost always the privileged beneficiaries of those ends.

European utopian visions have been used to rationalize a range of criminal behaviors including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the annihilation of entire American Indian peoples as the (sometimes) regrettable but necessary consequences of the construction of some kind of future state of human perfection. Sometimes these visions suggested that the state of perfection would be realized on earth, sometimes in heaven, but always Europeans imagined themselves as its agents. This led to a sense of America as a "high civilization" that would motivate the world's people's to democracy, and always there were historians who wrote history to conform to such ideologies.

During the nineteenth century and the early decades of this century there was an intellectual movement to identify and make the world safe for an idealized biological human. Scientific racism paved the way for an attempt to eradicate certain types of humans who were deemed biologically inferior from the face of the earth. These movements and a great many others created the context for what has been called the modern era. Since around the middle of the twentieth century, however, European expansion has stalled and its influence has declined.

European flags fly over fewer and fewer colonial capitals. Indeed, where Europeans once invaded the lands of brown and black peoples, today brown and black peoples emigrate in large numbers to European-dominated lands. African, North African, and Middle Eastern populations are established and growing faster than European populations in North America. The unchecked expansion of Europe and European populations that was the defining condition of the modern era, has ended. The world has now moved to an irreversible condition of postmodernity.

None of the movements that characterized the five hundred years of European expansion has disappeared, but recent decades have seen counter-movements which have caused Europe's utopian ideologies to be exposed, deconstructed, and in the intellectual life of the West, discredited. Post modernism, a movement which announces the abandonment of Western utopian ideologies, should be seen as a consequence of the halt of five hundred years of European expansion. It is an interesting phase of development of Western ideology that signifies not so much "the end of history" or even "the end of Eurocentric history" as the intellectual collapse of European ideologies constructed around utopian visions.

Post modernism and cultural studies seek to develop theory concerning the changing conditions, consciousness, and opportunities and the legacies that domination and exploitation have wrought. Kuan-Hsing Chan has stated that both discourses seek to "bring the repressed voices of history back into the historical agenda." Both share

(o)n the level of cultural politics... the attempt to decenter or decentralize politics and recenter "culture." But this does not mean that politics has gone. Quite the contrary, in both positions, culture is pervasively politicized on every front and every ground, hence a cultural politics. Both discourses conceive of cultural practices as collective; cultural politics is empowering and endangering, oppositional and hegemonic; culture is neither the "authentic" practice of the "people" nor simply a means of "manipulation" by capitalism, but the state of active local struggle, everyday and anywhere.

For the purposes of this discussion it may be useful to conceptualize "post modernism" and "cultural studies" as distinct discourses with similar goals. Post modernism, in this context, might be seen as the development of the theory of how the dominant culture dominates and might include literature that seeks to demystify and deconstruct those channels of domination. Cultural studies might be seen as the discourse about what must be conceived or constructed to replace and accelerate the demystification of the dominant ideologies. The "limits to what we are able to utter and conceive" are cultural in nature. The lived experiences of people in a culture are different from those of people occupying a distinctly different culture, and the more distant the cultures, the more different the limits.

More and more peoples are responding to the reality of domination on ways that can be echoed throughout the world. More and more indigenous and formerly colonized people are realizing that even after their colonizer has returned home, hegemony remains

through the body of British texts which all too frequently still acts as a touchstone of taste and value, and through RS-English (Received Standard English), which asserts the English of southeast England as a universal norm, the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post colonial world. This canonical hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity.

Canonical hegemony has been maintained through a wide range of other disciplines as well. Very little of the Euro-centered canon can be considered non-hegemonic, value-free knowledge. Economics cannot make such a claim, and certainly not science and technology, not history, not literature. Within the framework of emerging definitions can be found strategies for escape from the cultural domination of the West, and in the emerging literatures and strategies that deny Eurocentered hegemony can be strategies useful to people in the dominant centers.

Philosopher Terry Eagleton has stated that it is possible to view dominant ideologies as factors that support the interests of the rulers and that such ideologies

help to unify a social formation in ways convenient for its rules; that it is not simply a matter of imposing ideas from above but of securing the complicity of subordinated classes and groups.

The idea that the process by which individuals in societies are socialized to "norms" and that the definition of "normal" is a political question was developed by post modernist philosopher Michel Foucault. Eagleton finds:

[I]n the view of Michel Foucault and his acolytes, power is not something confined to armies and parliaments: it is, rather, a pervasive, intangible network of force which weaves itself into our slightest gestures and most intimate utterances.

Lorraine Code, speaking from the perspective of the development of feminist theory, urged that this kind of thinking is unproductive:

there is no point in embarking on such an assessment unless one can assume that people can never intervene in their lives and take charge of the processes that shape them. Indeed, the idea of autonomous agency is appealing precisely because it promises maximum intervention and control. In its liberal articulations it appears even to eschew biological determinism and to offer individuals the freedom to make themselves what they will. Both Marxists and post modernists insist, however, that these are false promises, that choices are themselves constructed by sociocultural-economic circumstances in which people are intrinsically enmeshed.

According to Eagleton, Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies, strongly dissented from Foucault's theory:

Every social formation is a complex amalgam of what Williams terms "dominant," "residual" and emergent forms of consciousness, and no hegemony can thus ever be absolute. No sharper contrast could be found than with the later work of Michel Foucault, for whom regimes of power constitute us to our very roots, producing just those forms of subjectivity upon which they can most efficiently go to work.

Williams takes the view that resistance is always present, that the ideological constructs that serve to quiet the masses while the privileged few loot the planet are always under pressure and that the rulers are always "running scared." Eagleton states:

Williams acknowledges the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially more static connotations of "ideology'"; hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but "has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified."

Both views, that of Williams and Foucault, are informative. Foucault's views are exposed to the criticism that they are not productive, but Edward Said was able to use Foucault as a model in his Orientalism (1979) in which he deconstructs a British academic discipline. In the social environment described by Foucault it is difficult to take advantage of the dynamics described by Williams toward the ends desired by Code because social change within the confines of Western thought and experience is a problematic. A problematic is "a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive."

Ideology and culture, in some contexts, have similar definitions. It is difficult to imagine a culture that has no ideology. A practical alternative to the kind of one-answer utopian ideology of the period of European expansionism is a pluralism that acknowledges many different versions of reality that are legitimate across a wide range of contexts. Pluralism proposes that a society incorporates or at least is open to sets of ideas associated with more than one culture. Pluralism makes sense of the world through interrogation and rejection of the idea that a singular discourse can have a monopoly on answers to what creates the conditions for the perfection of humankind, or that such conditions are even possible. This is accurate even though pluralism promotes discussion of its own definition, its rules, and its exceptions to its rules. It accepts not only that people experience the world in the context of a diversity of versions of existence, but that both social and extra-social realities arise from random convergences.

Postmodernism and cultural studies emerge in the context of centuries of practice of domination/subjugation, of "high culture/low culture," of the war of rich against the poor, white against black and brown, of top-down histories, and so forth. Both are positioned in opposition to domination and therefore both seek to support the reversal of conditions of oppression. In essence this requires the encouragement of channels of communication and invigoration of the powerless and at a minimum requires a politics that proclaims the right of everyone on earth to enough food to eat, enough clean water to drink, freedom from political repression, torture, and dictatorship. To encourage diversity of discourse, postmodern cultural studies must hear the ideas of communities of people distinct from themselves and therefore must promote the acceptance of divergent "voices."

This requirement raises an interesting dilemma. The very complexity of human societies places limits on how much a person from one society can know about the inner realities of people of a different culture. The more two cultures differ, the greater the limitations. If we assume that the practitioners of cultural studies are serious about re-empowering the powerless, that they are not simply seeking informants from diverse culture to expand the self-identity of a Cultural Revolution or a New Age, we must then expect that the new rules around "legitimacy" will respect the limitations of such ambitions. At the same time, some of the views of the culturally distant may help review some of the dominant-centered ideology of the West. Vandana Shiva, a woman scientist from India, finds science to be a Euro-centered ideology:

the parochial roots of science in patriarchy and in a particular class and subculture have been concealed behind a claim to universality, and can be seen only through other traditions - of women and non-Western people. It is these subjugated traditions that are revealing how modern science is gendered, how it is specific to the needs of impulses of the dominant western culture and how ecological destruction and nature's exploitation are inherent to its logic. It is becoming increasingly clear that scientific neutrality has been a reflection of ideology, not history, and science is similar to all other socially constructed categories.

All over the world European powers brought the children of their colonies to the Western education process where the propaganda of Western legitimacy was installed in the minds of a cultures of these budding local elites. When the Europeans finally folded up their flags and went home, they left behind cadres of elites socialized to the European discourses of power and these elites continue to act in the interests of the colonizers at the expense of their own poor.

Colonized peoples have three choices in response to cultural colonization. They can become "good subjects" of the discourse, accepting the rules of law and morals without much question, they can be "bad subjects" arguing that they have been subjected to alien rules but always revolting within the precepts of those rules, or they can be "non-subjects," acting and thinking around discourses far removed from and unintelligible to the West. Both "good subjects" and "bad subjects," although able to point to a process of struggle with their former captors, tend to impose the West's social conditions of domination and hierarchy which they learned from the colonizers upon their own poor and downtrodden. In a world composed of fewer than a dozen distinct civilizations (including the metropolitan West) plus 3,000 to 5,000 distinct indigenous societies, the range of possible experiences (other "voices") is very great indeed. These are the autochthonous peoples whom such luminaries as Arnold Toynbee wrote entirely out of human history. Much of what remains of the range of human potential for creating versions of reality exists in the framework of the arts, stories, oral traditions, music and other cultural manifestations of these peoples. Their lived and dreamed experiences are the world's richest sources of exploration of the human potential.

Gaining access to these experiences will not be easy. Not only are the voices of these distinct "others" remote, the channels of communication are practically non-existent. Few individuals from tribal societies write novels or history texts.

The people who represent these societies to the West are, almost without exception, those we can identify as cultural "marginals," people with considerable experience in two or more cultures. As the movement in support of cultural integrity and diverse cultural legitimacy gains momentum, it is logical that people who lay claim to being "non-subjects" of the West, people who are closer culturally and spiritually to the autochthonous centers, will increasingly support alternative (non-Western) discourses of reality that legitimate entirely unfamiliar stories and versions about how the world works. They can be expected to do this in their own languages using images not derived from the West, and under rules which even the most progressive people in the West will find impenetrable. They will continue a culture of resistance to the West which, in its forms of analysis and criticism, will provide some windows of cross-cultural understanding while maintaining and even strengthening the fact of "otherness." We have already begun to see this happening in the form of rainforest peoples appearing on American television to defend their homeland.

This process, surprisingly, embodies a possibility of resolving some of the dilemma which E. P. Thompson mentioned in The Making of the English Working Class and which Michel Foucault developed in Discipline and Punish. The processes of socialization that invade consciousness of class interest and create docile populations are in some degree absent in many of these cultures. The beneficiaries of hierarchy are always in fear that the subject populations will revolt and construct new non-hierarchical social conditions. These beneficiaries have for centuries constructed elaborated institutions to control and limit the possibilities of both thought and action, but they are vulnerable to movements that can challenge their legitimacy. We are at time and place in the intellectual history of the West when new theories about what can possibly be conceived and uttered within the West's discourses are being constructed and politicized. It's about time.

[This article was written by Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John C. Mohawk. It was originally published in Akwe:kon Journal (Vol. 9, No. 4, 1992, pp. 16-21) and Cultural Survival Quarterly (Winter 1994, pp. 33-35) under the title 'Thoughts from an Authochthonous Center: Post Modernism and Cultural Studies,' and was recently reprinted in Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader (2010). John Mohawk, a Seneca Indian, organic farmer and captivating public speaker, was editor-in-chief of Akwesasne Notes from 1978 to 1983, which was then the largest English-language indigenous publication in the United States. He also served as the editor of Daybreak, a national Indian news magazine. Mohawk lectured in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was director of the Indigenous Studies Program. Yvonne Dion-Buffalo lectured in American Studies at SUNY, Buffalo.]

Lawrence of South Dakota

Well, here we go again. The ol' silver screen is alight once more with images of Indians swirling through the murky mists of time, replete with all the paint, ponies and feathers demanded by the box office. True, we are not confronted in this instance with the likes of Chuck Conners playing Geronimo, Victor Mature standing in as Chief Crazy Horse, or Jeff Chandler cast in the role of Broken Arrow's Cochise. Nor are we beset by the sort of wanton anti-Indianism which runs so rampant in John Ford's 'Stagecoach,' 'Fort Apache,' 'She Wore a Yellow Ribbon' and 'Sergeant Rutledge.' Even the sort of 'rebel without a cause' trivialization of Indian anger offered by Robert Blake in 'Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here' - or Lou Diamond Philips in 'Young Guns' and 'Young Guns II' - is not at hand. Yet, in some ways the 1990 'Indian movie,' a cinematic extravaganza packaged under the title 'Dances With Wolves,' is just as bad.

This statement has nothing to do with the entirely predictable complaints raised by reviewers in the New York Times, Washington Post and similar bastions of the status quo. Self-evidently, the movie's flaws do not as such reviewers claim rest in a 'negative handling' of whites or 'over-sentimentalizing' of Indians. Rather, although he tries harder than most, producer-director-star Kevin Costner holds closely to certain sympathetic stereotypes of Euroamerican behavior on the 'frontier,' at least insofar as he never quite explains how completely, systematically and persistently the invaders violated every conceivable standard of human decency in the process of conquest. As to these media pundits who have sought to 'debunk' the film's positive portrayal of native people, they may be seen quite simply as liars, deliberately and often wildly inaccurate on virtually every point they have raised. Theirs is the task of (re)asserting the reactionary core of racist mythology so important to conventional justifications for America's 'winning of the West.'

Contrary to the carping of such paleo-critics, Costner did attain several noteworthy breakthroughs in his production. For instance, he invariably cast Indians to fill his script's Indian roles, a Hollywood first. And, to an extent surpassing anything else ever to emerge from tinsel-town - including the celebrated roles of Chief Dan George in 'Little Big Man' (1970) and Will Sampson in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' (1975) - these Indians were allowed to serve as more than mere props. Throughout the movie, they were called upon to demonstrate motive and emotion, thereby assuming the dimensions of real human beings. Further, the film is technically and geographically accurate, factors superbly captured in the cinematography of Photographic Director Dean Semler and his crew.

But let's not overstate the case. Costner's talents as a film-maker have been remarked upon ad nauseam, not only by the motion picture academy during the orgy of Oscars bestowed upon him and his colleagues, but by the revenues grossed at the nation's theaters and by the misguided and fawning sort of gratitude expressed by some Indians at their culture's having finally been cinematically accorded a semblance of the respect to which it has been entitled all along. The vaunted achievements of 'Dances With Wolves' in this regard should, by rights, be commonplace. That they are not says all that needs saying in this regard.

In any event, the issue is not the manner in which the film's native characters and cultures are presented. The problems lie elsewhere, at the level of the context in which they are embedded. Stripped of its pretty pictures and progressive flourishes in directions and affirmative action hiring, 'Dances With Wolves' is by no means a movie about Indians. Instead, it is at base an elaboration of movieland's 'Great White Hunter' theme, albeit one with a decidedly different ('better') personality than the usual example of the genre, and much more elegantly done. Above all, it follows the formula established by 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962): Arabs and Arab culture handled in a superficially respectful manner, and framed by some of the most gorgeous landscape photography imaginable. So much the better for sophisticated propagandists to render 'realistic' the undeniably heroic stature of Lt. Lawrence, the film's central - and ultimately most Eurocentric - character.

In order to understand the implications of this structural linkage between the two movies, it is important to remember that despite the hoopla attending Lawrence's calculated gestures to the Bedouins, the film proved to be of absolutely no benefit to the peoples of the Middle East (just ask the Palestinians and Lebanese). To the contrary, its major impact was to put a 'tragic' but far more humane face upon the nature of Britain's imperial pretensions in the region, making colonization of the Arabs seem more acceptable - or at least more inevitable - than might otherwise have been the case. So too do we encounter this contrived sense of sad inevitability in the closing scenes of 'Dances With Wolves,' as Lt. Dunbar and the female 'captive' he has 'recovered' ride off into the proverbial sunset, leaving their Lakota 'friends' to be slaughtered by and subordinated to the United States. Fate closes upon Indian and Arab alike, despite the best efforts of well-intentioned white men like the two good lieutenants. ('We're not all bad, y'know.')

It's all in the past, so the story goes; regrettable, obviously, but comfortably out of reach. Nothing to be done about it, really, at least at this point. Best that everyone - Euroamericans, at any rate - pay a bit of appropriately maudlin homage to 'our heritage,' feel better about themselves for possessing such lofty sentiments, and get on with business as usual. Meanwhile, native people are forced to live, right now, today, in abject squalor under the heel of what may be history's most seamlessly perfected system of internal colonization, out of sight, out of mind, their rights and resources relentlessly consumed by the dominant society. That is, after all, the very business as usual that films like 'Dances With Wolves' helps to perpetuate by diverting attention to their sensitive reinterpretations of yesteryear. So much for Costner's loudly proclaimed desire to 'help.'

If Kevin Costner or anyone else in Hollywood held an honest inclination to make a movie which would alter public perceptions of Native America in some meaningful way, it would, first and foremost, be set in the present day, not in the mid-19th century. It would feature, front and center, the real struggles of living native people to liberate themselves from the oppression which has beset them in the contemporary era, not the adventures of some fictional non-Indian out to save the savage. It would engage directly with concrete issues like expropriation of water rights and minerals, involuntary sterilization, and FBI repression of Indian activists. It would not be made as another 'Pow Wow Highway'-style entertainment venture, or one more trite excursion into spiritual philosophy and the martial arts a la the 'Silly Jack' (AKA 'Billy Jack') movies. Cinema focusing on the socio-political and economic realities of Native America in the same fashion as these themes were developed with regard to Latin America in 'Salvador' (1986), 'El Norte' (1983) and 'Under Fire' (1983). Such efforts are woefully long overdue.

On second thought, maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea. Hollywood's record on Indian topics is such that, if it were to attempt to produce a script on, say, the events on Pine Ridge during the mid-70s, it would probably end up being some twisted plot featuring an Indian FBI agent (undoubtedly a cross between Mike Hammer and Tonto) who jumps in to save his backwards reservation brethren from the evil plots of corrupt tribal officials working with sinister corporate executives, and maybe even a few of his own bureau superiors. They'd probably cast a nice blond guy like Val Kilmer as the agent-hero and call it something Indian-sounding, like 'Thunderheart.' It stands to reason, after all: now that we're burdened with the legacy of 'Lawrence of South Dakota,' we can all look forward to what will amount to 'South Dakota Burning.'

[This article is by Ward Churchill and was originally published under the title 'Lawrence of South Dakota: Dances With Wolves and the Maintenance of the American Empire' in Churchill's book of essays Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (City Light Books, 1998). It has been slightly edited for inclusion here.]

A Film on Music in the Trobriand Islands

The Trobriand Islands are usually assumed to be well known, thanks to the research of Bronislaw Malinowski and numerous subsequent anthropologists. But in spite of the abundant documentation of other cultural components, the music of the area had been little studied and is almost inaccessible aurally to listeners outside of Papua New Guinea. Therefore, the film 'Kama Wosi' ('Our Songs' in Kilivila language), shot in 1975 by Les McLaren and released in 1979, was a very welcome addition to knowledge of this area. What immediately strikes the viewer familiar with Malinowski's photographs of Trobriand life from 1915-1918 is that few things seem to have changed in 65 years. Even traditional music had not been supplanted by string bands, as the opening credits reveal: 'Although some music was performed expressly for the film, it still functions integrally to Trobriand society.'

The commentary of the film relates basic information concerning the socio-political system, gardening, magic, intersexual relations, kula trade, and religion. Each of these subjects is illuminated by the music - either through its contextual importance to the topic being discussed or through the relevance of the song text. For example, the discussion of the kula trade is followed by songs performed at various stages during the voyage, as well as songs with textual references to kula canoes and concern about success during the trade. Kilivila texts can be very complicated metaphorically, as can be seen by examining annotated translations (as in, for example, those done by Baldwin 1945 and 1950, and also by Kasaipwalova and Beier at the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in 1978). Undoubtedly some of this was lost in translating song texts for the film, but the translators did a good job in conveying some idea of the poetry involved.

No attempt is made to conceal the fact that a camera is filming and that the people being filmed are aware of this. Such honesty can be an effective technique. Two young men sit on a veranda. One of them is carving an intricate design on the handle of a drum. While carving, he speaks to the filmmakers, and, ultimately, to all outsiders: 'Carving is nothing special - what are you taking pictures for? Day and night, day and night - taking pictures for nothing. You take these pictures and take them away - what about us? People will laugh at us.' 'Don't worry about him... I think that's their work. They go and get their pay.' 'I'll do this carving. I'll spoil my design.'

A variety of songs are presented throughout the film. The majority are those known as wosi baku, which are composed on numerous topics and sung while walking in the bush or sitting in the village. Quite a few different solo singers are heard, ranging from a very young boy telling how perfectly he will dance, to well-known singers. In fact, the people of the Trobriands have great respect for singers and composers. Sebwagau is one of the most famous. In June 1981, when I showed 'Kama Wosi' at the government headquarters of Losuia and at Tukwaukwa Catholic Mission, both in the Trobriands, everyone present knew Sebwagau, although his village was not nearby. In the film he sings a newly composed song about a caterpillar, asking it not to eat his taro. His song was learned by the audience from these showings. Additionally, wosi moyovau (kula songs) and valam (mourning 'cries') are heard. Regarding the latter, as in many parts of Papua New Guinea Trobriand Islanders do not classify their mourning as 'song,' even though poetic texts are included. Rather, it is considered a type of crying.

In the Trobriands, as in many other parts of Papua New Guinea, songs are much more important than purely instrumental music. We do, however, hear some examples of the latter, particularly the loloni, an end-blown flute made of a papaya branch. The distal end is alternately opened and closed to produce the corresponding overtone series.

At the end of the film, a portion of a choreographed usu mwaya dance called Bwetayobu is presented. The dancers (kasa), who are all male (and do not sing), wear women's skirts (doba) and hold pandanus streamers (biyala). They dance in a circle around drummers (towaisi kaisosau) and singers (towosi or tokaiwala), a group collectly known as kepou. Two sizes of drums are used: katuneniya (a small drum, which signals changes of dance movements) and kaisosau (a larger drum, which provides a rhythmic back-up to the katuneniya). The mweki (literally, 'go with') dance is commonly presented at national festivals on 'culture days,' although it has only developed in the Trobriands within the past 30-35 years. Boys hit their buttocks and both boys and girls thrust forward their pelvises while chanting sexually explicit texts. Mweki is disliked by elders, not because of its overt sexual references, but because it lacks the seriousness and poetic metaphors of other music. (Information contained in the three preceding paragraphs is the result of fieldwork undertaken by the Music Department of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1974-1981.)

'Kama Wosi' suffers a bit from scenes included to conform to a Westerner's fantasy of the idyllic tropics, but they do not tarnish the overall sensitivity of the presentation.

[This is is an edited version of a review by Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, Boroko, Papual New Guinea. It was originally published in the journal Ethnomusicology (Vol. 26, No. 3, September 1982, pp. 505-506). Although Niles used a 16mm print and transcript to write the review, the film is now available on DVD from Documentary Educational Resources in the US and from Ronin Films in Australia. Further information on Melanesian music and the music of Papua New Guinea is available here.]

Images of Native Americans in US Cinema

The handling of American Indians and American Indian subject matter within the context of commercial U.S. cinema is objectively racist at all levels, an observation which extends to television as well as film. In this vein it is linked closely to literature, both fictional and non-fictional, upon which may if not most movie scripts are at least loosely based. In a very real sense, it is fair to observe that all modes of projecting concepts and images of the Indian before the contemporary American public fit the same mold, and do so for the same fundamental 'real world' reasons. This essay will attempt to come to grips with both the method and the motivation for this, albeit within a given medium and examining a somewhat restricted range of the tactics employed. The medium selected for this purpose is commercial cinema, the technique examined that of stereotypic projection. The matter divides itself somewhat automatically into three major categories of emphasis. These may be elucidated as follows.

We are all aware of the standard motion picture technique of portraying the Native American with galloping pony and flowing headdress. We have seen the tipi and the buffalo hunt, the attack on the wagon train and the ambush of the stagecoach until they are scenes so totally ingrained in the American consciousness as to be synonymous with the very concept of the American Indian (to non-Indian minds at any rate and, unfortunately, to many Indian minds as well). It is not the technical defects of the scenes depicted here - although often they are many - which present the basic problem. Rather, it is that the historical era involved spans a period scarcely exceeding 50 years duration. Hence, the Indian has been restricted in the public mind, not only in terms of the people portrayed (the Plains Nations), but in terms of the time of their collective existence (roughly 1825-1880).

The essential idea of Native America instilled cinematically is that of a quite uniform aggregation of peoples (in dress, custom and actions) which flourished with the arrival of whites upon their land and then vanished somewhat mysteriously, along with the bison and the open prairie. There is no 'before' to this story, and there is no 'after.' Such is the content of 'They Died With Their Boots On,' 'Boots and Saddles,' 'Cheyenne Autumn,' 'Tonka Wakan' and 'Little Big Man,' to list but five examples from among hundreds. Of course, commercial film has - albeit in many fewer cases - slightly expanded the scope of the stereotype. The existence of the peoples of the Northeast receive recognition in such epics as 'Drums Along the Mohawk' and 'The Deerslayer.' The peoples of the Southwest have been included, to some extent, in scattered fare such as 'Broken Arrow,' 'Fort Apache' and 'Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here.' The Southeastern nations even claim passing attention in efforts such as the Walt Disney Davey Crockett series and biographical features about the lives of such Euroamerican heroes as Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston.

The latter deviations from the Plains stereotype - which has assumed proportions of a valid archetype in the public consciousness - drives the timeline back some 75 years at most. A century-and-a-quarter selected for depiction is hardly better than a fifty-year span. Further, it should be noted that, costuming aside, literally all the geographical/cultural groups presented are portrayed in exactly the same manner. The point of the historical confines involved in this category is that indigenous people are defined exclusively in terms of certain (conflict and demise) interactions with Euroamericans. There is no cinematic recognition whatsoever of a white-free and autonomous native past. Similarly, no attention is paid at all to the myriad indigenous nations not heavily and dramatically involved in the final period of Anglo-Indian warfare. U.S. audiences know no Aztec, Inca or Anasazi parallel to 'Cleopatra,' 'The Robe' or 'Ben Hur.' Small wonder audiences view the native as some briefly extant, mythic and usually hostile apparition. As a consequence, the public perception of the historical existence of Native Americans is of beings who spent their time serving as little other than figurative pop-up targets for non-Indian guns.

Nor is there an abundance of films attempting to deal with contemporary Indian realities. In effect, the native ceased to exist after the onset of the reservation period of the Plains peoples. This is evidence by the fact that the author could find only two films listed - biographies of Jim Thorpe and Ira Hayes, both starring Burt Lancaster - released prior to 1980 which featured the indigenous experience after 1880 in any meaningful way at all. As to current events, well... There's always the Billy Jack series: 'Born Losers,' 'Billy Jack,' 'The Trial of Billy Jack' and 'Bill Jack Goes to Washington' (the latter, thankfully, was shelved before release), utilizing the vehicle of an ex-Special Forces mixed-blood karate expert to exploit the grisly mystique of 'Shaft' and 'Superfly'-type superheroes (or anti-heroes, if you prefer). The result is a predictably shallow and idiotic parallel to the Batman TV series.

The single (lackluster) attempt by Hollywood to equal for American Indians what 'Sounder' and 'Lady Sings the Blues' have achieved for African-Americans was rapidly withdrawn from circulation as an 'embarassment.' So steeped in cellular myopia are filmdom's critics - so full, that is, of their own self-perpetuating stereotyping - that they panned the characters in 'Journey Through Rosebud' as 'wooden Indians.' This, despite the fact that most Native Americans viewing them ranked them as the most accurate and convincing ever to come from the studios. Possibly, other films of the stature of 'Journey Through Rosebud' have been made but not released, in effect doing nothing to alter the time-warp involving American Indians in film. A result is that the US mainstream population finds itself under no particular moral and psychic obligation to confront the fact of Native America, as either an historical or topical reality.

An Anishinabe (Chippewa) friend of mine visited the Field Museum in Chicago. While examining the exhibits of American Indian artifacts located there, she came across an object which she immediately recognized as being her grandmother's root digger, an item the museum's anthropological 'experts' had identified and labeled as a 'Winnebago hide scraper.' She called the mistake to the attention of the departmental director and was told that she, not the museum, was wrong. 'If you knew anything at all about your heritage,' he informed her, 'you'd know that the tool is a hide scraper.' My friend, helpless to correct this obvious (to her) misinformation, went away. 'They never listen to the people who really know these things,' she said later. 'And so they never understand what they think they know.'

The above sad-but-true story is not unusual. It serves to illustrate a pattern in Euroamerican dealings with indigenous people which extends vastly beyond the mere identification of objects. In terms of commercial cinema and acting, the problem may be considered on the basis of 'context' and 'motivation.' Put most simply, the question of context is one in which specific acts of certain American Indians are portrayed in scenes devoid of all cultural grounding and explanation. From whence is comprehension of the real nature of these acts to come? The viewing audience is composed overwhelmingly of non-Indians who obviously hold no automatic insight into native cultures and values, yet somehow they must affix meaning to the actions presented on the screen. Scenes such as those presented in the John Ford 'classic,' 'Stagecoach,' are fine examples of this stereotyping approach. Thus, the real acts of indigenous people - even when depicted more-or-less accurately - often appear irrational, cruel, unintelligent or silly when displayed in film.

Motivation is a more sophisticated, and consequently more dangerous, consideration. Here, a cultural context of sorts is provided, at least to some degree, but it is a context comprised exclusively of ideas, values, emotions and other meanings assigned by Euroamerica to the native cultures portrayed. Insofar as indigenous American Euro-derived worldviews are radically and demonstrably different in almost every way, such a projection can only serve to misrepresent dramatically the native cultures involved and render them nonsensical at best. Such misrepresentation serves two major stereotyping functions. Since the complex of dominant and comparatively monolithic cultural values and beliefs of Eurocentrism presently held by the bulk of the US population are utilized to provide motivation for virtually all American Indians portrayed in commercial film, all native values and beliefs appear to be lumped together into a single homogeneous and consistent whole, regardless of actual variances and distinctions.

Given that the cultural values and beliefs extended as the contextual basis for motivation are misrepresentative of the actual cultural context of Native America - and are thus totally out of alignment with the actions portrayed - the behavior of American Indians is often made to appear more uniformly vicious, crude, primitive and unintelligent than in cases where context and motivation are dispensed with altogether.

A primary device used by Hollywood to attach Eurocentric values to native acts has been to script a white character to narrate the story-line. Films such as 'Cheyenne Autumn,' 'A Man Called Horse' (and its sequels), 'Soldier Blue' and 'Little Big Man' exemplify the point. Each purports to provide an 'accurate and sympathetic treatment of the American Indian' (of yesteryear) while utterly crushing native identity under the heel of Euroamerican interpretation. To date, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, there has not been one attempt to put out a commercial film which deals with native reality through native eyes.

This third category is in some ways a synthesis of the preceding two. It has, however, assumed an identity of its own which extends far beyond the scope of the others. Within this area lies the implied assumption that distinctions between cultural groupings of indigenous people are either nonexistent (ignorance) or irrelevant (arrogance). Given this attitude regarding the portrayal of Indians in film, it is inevitable that the native be reduced from reality to a strange amalgamation of dress, speech, custom and belief. All vestiges of truth - and thereby of intercultural understanding - give way here before the onslaught of movieland's mythic creation.

The film 'A Man Called Horse' may serve as an example. This droll adventure, promoted as 'the most authentic description of North American Indian life ever filmed,' depicts a people whose language is Lakota, whose hairstyles range from Assiniboin through Nez Perce to Comanche, whose tipi design is Crow, and whose Sun Dance ceremony and the lodge in which it is held are both typically Mandan. They are referred to throughout the film as 'Sioux,' but to which group do they supposedly belong? Secungu (Brule)? Oglala? Santee? Sisseton? Yanktonai? Minneconjou? Hunkpapa? Those generically - and rather pejoritavely - called 'Sioux' were/are of three major geographic/cultural divisions: the Dakotas of the Minnesota woodlands, the Nakotas of the prairie region east of the Missouri River, and the Lakotas of the high plains proper. These groups were/are quite distinct from one another, and the distinctions do make a difference in terms of accuracy and 'authenticity.'

The source material utilized to create the cinematic imagery involved in 'A Man Called Horse' was the large number of portraits of American Indians executed by George Catlin during the first half of the 19th century and now housed in the Smithsonian Institution. However, while Catlin was meticulous in attributing tribal and even band affiliations to the subjects of his paintings, the film-makers were not. The result is a massive misrepresentation of a whole variety of real peoples, aspects of whose cultures are incorporated, gratuitously, into that of the hybrid 'Indians' who inhabit the movie.

Nor does the dismemberment of reality in this 'most realistic of westerns' end with visual catastrophe. The door to cultural reduction is merely opened by such devices. Both the rationale and spiritual ramifications of the Sun Dance are voided by the film's Eurocentric explanation of its form and function. Thus is the Lakota's central and most profoundly sacred of all ceremonies converted into a macho exercise in 'self-mutilation,' a 'primitive initiation rite' showing that the Indian male could 'take it.' It follows that the film's Anglo lead (Richard Harris) must prove that he is 'as tough as the Sioux' by eagerly seeking out his fair share of pain during a Sun Dance. Just bloody up your chest and no further questions will be asked. How quaint.

This, of course, paves the way for the Harris character to become leader of the group. The Sioux, once they have been reduced to little more than a gaggle of prideful masochists, are readily shown to be possessed of little collective intellect. Hence, it becomes necessary for the Anglo captive to save his savage captors from an even more ferocious group of primitives coming over the hill. He manages this somewhat spectacular feat by instructing his aboriginal colleagues in the finer points of using the bow, a weapon in uninterrupted use by the people in question for several hundred generations, and out of use by the English for about 200 years at the time the events in the film supposedly occur. But no matter the trivial details. The presumed inherent superiority of Eurocentric minds has once again been demonstrated for all the world to witness. All that was necessary to accomplish this was to replace a bona fide native culture with something else.

The technique employed in 'A Man Called Horse' is by no means novel or unique. Even the highly-touted (in terms of making Indians 'the good guys') Billy Jack series could never lock in any specific people it sought to portray. The Indians depicted remain a weird confluence of Navajos and various Pueblos, occasionally practicing what appear to be bastardizations of Cheyenne and Kiowa ceremonies. All the better to trot them around as props for every non-Indian fad from the benefits of macrobiotic cookery to those of Aikido karate.

It is elementary logic to realize that when the cultural identity of a people is symbolically demolished, the achievements and very humanity of that people must also be disregarded. The people, as such, disappear, usually to the benefit - both material and psychic - of those performing the symbolic demolition. There are accurate and appropriate terms which describe this: dehumanization, obliteration or appropriation of identity, political subordination and material colonization are all elements of a common process of imperialism. This is the real meaning of Hollywood's stereotyping of American Indians.

It should be relatively easy at this point to identify film stereotyping of American Indians as an accurate reflection of the actual conduct of the Euroamerican population vis-a-vis Native America in both historical and topical senses. North American indigenous peoples have been reduced in terms of cultural identity within the popular consciousness - through a combination of movie treatments, television programming and distortive literature - to a point where the general public perceives them as extinct for all practical intents and purposes. Given that they no longer exist, that which was theirs - whether land and the resources on and beneath it, or their heritage - can now be said, without pangs of guilt, to belong to those who displaced and ultimately supplanted them. Such is one function of cinematic stereotyping within North America's advanced colonial empire.

Another is to quell potential remorse among the population at large. Genocide is, after all, an extremely ugly word. Far better that the contemporary mainstream believe their antecedents destroyed mindless and intrinsically warlike savages, devoid of true culture and humanity, rather than that they systematically exterminated whole societies of highly intelligent and accomplished human beings who desired nothing so much as to be left in peace. Far better for their descendants if the Euroamerican invaders engaged in slaughter only in self-defense, when confronted with hordes of irrationally bloodthirsty heathen beasts, rather than coldly and calculatedly committing mass murder, planning step by step the eradication of the newest-born infants. 'Nits make lice,' to quote US Colonel John M. Chivington.

Filmdom's handling of 'history' in this regard is, with only a few marginal exceptions, nothing more or less than an elaborate denial of European/Euroamerican criminality on the American continent for over the past 350 years. Implicitly then, it is an unbridled justification and glorification of the conquest and subordination of Native America. As such, it is a vitally necessary ingredient in the maintenance and perfection of the Euroempire which began when the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Hollywood's performance on this score has been, overall, what one might have legitimately expected to see from the heirs to Leni Riefenstahl, had the Third Reich won its War in the East during the 1940s.

As the Oneida comedian Charlie Hill has observed, the portrayal of Indians in the cinema has been such that it has made the playing of 'Cowboys and Indians' a favorite American childhood game. The object of the 'sport' is for the 'cowboys' to 'kill' all the 'Indians,' just like in the movies. A bitter irony associated with this is that Indian as well as non-Indian children heatedly demand to be identified as cowboys, a not unnatural outcome under the circumstances, but on which speaks volumes to the damage done to the American Indian self-concept by movie propaganda. The meaning of this, as Hill notes, can best be appreciated if one were to imagine that the children were instead engaging in a game called 'nazis and Jews.'

That movieland's image of the Indian is completely false - and often shoddily so - is entirely to the point. Only a completely false creation could be used to explain in 'positive terms' what has actually happened in the Americas throughout centuries past. Only a literal blocking of modern realities can be used to rationalize present circumstances. Only a concerted effort to debunk Hollywood's mythology can alter the situation for the better. While it's true that the immortal words of General Phil Sheridan - 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian' - have continued to enjoy a certain appeal with the American body politic, and equally true that dead Indians are hardly in a position to call the liars to account for their deeds, there are a few of us left out here who might be up to the task.

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay written by Ward Churchill that originally appeared under the title 'Fantasies of the Master Race: Categories of Stereotyping of American Indians in Film' in Churchill's 1992 book Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (Common Courage Press, pp. 231-241; revised edition published in 1998 by Clear Light Books). The book also includes his review of 'Dances With Wolves' that further highlights the inherent white supremacy of Hollywood cinema. Broader issues of the depiction of Native Peoples in American history were previously addressed by Robert Berkhofer in The White Man's Indian (Vintage Books, 1979) and Angela Aleiss explores the topic at length as it pertains to cinema in her recent book Making the White Man's Indian (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005).]

A Selection of Videos from PRATEC

The Project on Andean Peasant Technologies (PRATEC) is a Peruvian NGO that works with rural communities on various projects related to education and cultural affirmation. Active for over 20 years, PRATEC has evolved a way of working with the indigenous peoples of the Andean highlands that is based on the spirit of walking together with, rather than leading or guiding, the local communities. Independent filmmaker Maja Tillmann Salas collaborated with PRATEC from 2003 until 2007 to produce a number of videos documenting their projects and activities, ranging from deschooling and educational reform to the ritual nurturance of cultivated fields. Many of the films have been screened at international festivals. They offer a unique view of Andean peasant communities and their cosmovision.

Allin Kawsay: Well-Being in the Andes (2007)

In the Andes, when local people talk about welfare, "allin kawsay," they mean living in harmony among all beings, not just among humans. But for healthy living among humans, deities, and nature, material well-being is not the basis for feeling good. What matters most is respect. This video explores processes of cultural and agricultural rejuvenation in the High Andes, and features scenes depicting the recovery of knowledge nearly lost to recent generations, including the myriad uses of local plants, as well as discussions on the importance of maintaining respect for cultural traditions in clothing and music.

Sallqa Mama: Natural Communities in the Andean Highlands (2007)

The Law of the Earth is expressed in the Andes in the relationship of affection and respect that the Andean communities hold for their land, their duties and their deities, which are revealed in an active process of mutual nurturance. This understanding of the Andean peoples of today about community environmental governance guarantees the sustainability of life in their ecosystem, and ultimately on our planet. This video addresses two key questions related to the sallqa, or natural communities, of the Andean Highlands: What is the relationship of Andean Highlands communities with the wild? How is this relationship expressed in concrete community activities that may be strengthened?

Puchka Kururay: Threading Life Around (2006)

Insights to ritual life and community learning among indigenous peoples of the Andes. In Huarcaya, Peru, children known as bailiffs learn the responsibilities of ritual life in this agrocentric community by doing directly during the year, especially in the four moments of harmonization of the Pacha (the cosmos and the local world). In Carnival (February), Holy Week (April), Yarqa Aspiy (the water festival held in September) and Christmas (December), they are in charge of rituals where they converse with the deities. This conversation is an exchange of experience and affection that will accompany them in their lives. This is a way of learning how to thread life into rounds, it is a way of nurturing the children of Huarcaya.

Samaykuy: To Give Breath to Encourage (2005)

Since beginning its work in 2002, the Fund for Community Cultural Affirmation Initiatives has accompanied the indigenous peoples of the high Andes in the recovery of respect for traditional crafts within their extended families. As understood through the local cosmovision, these families include not only the people in their communities but also the spirits and nature of the local environment. Samaykuy shows the experience of the Nucleus of Andean Cultural Affirmation with the Fund by focusing on the first three years of its operation to recover weaving and pottery making.

Iskay Yachay: Two Kinds of Knowledge (2005)

This video brings the voices and minds of campesinos from Cusco, Peru. They explain what school they want for their children. What education is needed for life to flourish and for the strength of ancestral times to be carried over to new generations. Over the past decade the Nucleus for Andean Cultural Affirmation has been working in Cusco with groups of rural teachers and parents in order to attain an understanding of education and cultural diversity. The reflections they make on the way in which Andean children learn of both worlds, Western and Andean, lead them to unexpected conclusions that deserve to be listened to and taken into account.

Being a Wawa in the Andes (2003)

The diverse world in which a child is nurtured in the Andes of Peru is alive. The inhabitants of the Andes are in constant conversation with nature. Humans nurture nature and nature nurtures humans. Maria Nunez from Cuchoquesera, Quispillaccta, Ayacucho, describes her life as being a garden in which different flowers are found. Maria Nunez sees in herself a community of flowers, not only an individual.

Allin Puriq: Virtuous Walking (2003)

Cultural Affirmation is an ongoing process by which the Andean communities who live in a place regenerate the practices which allow them to nurture their local world for a life worth living in sufficiency. In the Peruvian Andes this life turns around the ritual nurture of plants and animals in an affectionate and respectful conversation with Nature, promoting the flowering of great agricultural and biological diversity. The Fund for Cultural Affirmation is a program coordinated by the Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC). It is supported by the Geneva Federation for Cooperation and sponsored by the Swiss Organization 'Traditions for Tomorrow.' The Fund is destined to support initiatives of cultural affirmation of Andean and Amazonian Communities.

Loving Teacher (2003)

This video illustrates the effort toward understanding and learning to respect the visions of multiple communities in Peru, and how these are integrated in education. The cooperation between the Andean-Amazonian communities and their rural schools is a fundamental process in which teachers and communities seek to change attitudes, to convert the school to a place in which children learn in a loving way how to be in both worlds, the traditional local one and the modern western one, without neglecting or negating their cultural identity.

Culturally Sensitive Education (2003)

A culturally sensitive education program friendly to local knowledge in the high mountains of Peru. An experience of Vida Dulce in Andahuaylas in collaboration with Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas in the project Children and Biodiversity, funded by Terre des hommes, Germany. Schools in the high Andes design and implement a significant percentage of the school curriculum, which due to the hard work of communities and teachers has been adjusted to suit local needs, rather than those of the educational technocrats in Lima. At the time this video was made in 2003, the community designed 30% of the curriculum, but following the success of the project most of the curriculum is now in the hands of the community. This video documents the early stages of that process. Special thanks to the communities of Churrubamba and Cotahuacho.

The Ritual Nurturance of Cultivated Fields in the Andes (2003)

In the Andean Highlands and in the Upper Amazon, ten Nuclei for Andean Cultural Affirmation are operating as executing units of the project in situ for the conservation of native plants and their wild relatives. They carry out these activities in coordination with the Andean Project for Peasant Technologies (PRATEC), which has learned to walk hand in hand with, and even be guided by, the peasant communities. This project received financial support from the Global Environmental Facilities and the Italian Government, managed by the local United Nations Development Program office.

Maja Tillmann Salas is currently a member of InsightShare, where she has worked since 2008 at participatory video production with a focus on illustrating the cosmovisions of indigenous peoples. Prior to her films with PRATEC, she created the audiovisual department at the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge in Kunming, China, and she studied visual anthropology and filmmaking at the University of San Francisco. She has made over 40 films, several of them award winning.

[The videos featured on this page can be downloaded from the TV Multiversity channel on Vimeo. Selections of PRATEC videos are also available on YouTube. For more information about PRATEC and its activities readers may consult The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronts Western Notions of Development, edited by Frederique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (Zed Books, 1998).]

'Cannibal Tours' as Filmic Anti-Journey

Dennis O'Rourke is a Sydney-based filmmaker who has made a number of documentaries about people and situations in Australia, the Pacific and Papua New Guinea. His film 'Cannibal Tours' gives us insights into the phenomenon of tourism by Europeans and Americans to coastal Papua, and offers us a series of ironic episodic encounters between tourists and locals. The film is very definitely not an observational record of a single time-bound visit to a single identifiable place. It is quite difficult to form a sense of particular places (although a small number are mentioned) and there are no clues as to time. Although the film appears to start with an arrival and ends with a departure, almost everything happens in between has an arbitrary, unlocated, unspecific character to it. The only constant is that locals comment on the visitors, alternating with visitors commenting upon the locals. And there is a sense that the visitors' perceptions are usually countered with a specific anti-perception by a local. That is clearly a very deliberate construction even if it is made to look spontaneous, and balanced in a tit-for-tat exchange process.

Perhaps the opening of the film is intended to playfully evoke Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but it could equally well be a spoof on a Tarzan film. The film starts out in a boat, a little bit out from a coast. We hear bulletins of news from different radio stations around the world. We approach slowly by water through shots of enigmatic palm trees, a young boy who stares and drops his eyes and stares again. A local man is carving a ritual object. There is an atmosphere of Mystery.

Then a white man aims a camera at the landscape - is this to make us think of Conrad's description of the gun firing into a Continent? A white tourist is shown a place where he is told by a local that 'human sacrifices' took place. He wishes to photograph it. He is clearly enthusiastic about the idea of human sacrifice. He is a plump middle-aged man, German, Swiss or Austrian (?) who reappears throughout the film. he is weighed down with cameras. He turns out to be much travelled, articulate, and aware of the arguments against the very form of tourism he is enjoying. Is he Mr Kurtz? MacCannell (1990) seeks to link him to National Socialism, even though he could scarcely have been born by 1945. (Would National Socialists have chosen to spend their holidays on the Sepik?).

One theme of the film is mutual incomprehension - but with a difference. The tourists are 'informed' superficially about Sepik culture. They know there is no longer cannibalism of any sort. They know the people have been changed, and that they once lived in some sense closer to their local environment. But they are stuffed with preconceptions, such as that with the locals you have to bargain for what you buy. Or that the locals are happy as they are, still living a life in which they can easily satisfy their wants without money.

But the locals tell us that they feel poor, and are not happy as they are and that if they were paid more for the things they sell they too could be tourists and travel. And they tell us that they really do not understand the whites - particularly, why they take photographs, but more profoundly, who they are and where they come from.

The incomprehension is partly because of the differences of power, and also, we can see, because of the lack of common languages. The visitors cannot speak the local trade language, Tok Pisin, and few of the locals we meet can speak good German or American English. We come to appreciate the sense in which the contacts are inevitably superficial, and lead to little real insight.

On comment on the film deserves to be disputed. MacCannell has written, 'The tourists are most unattractive, emotional, self-interested, awkward and intrusive. It is difficult to imagine a group of real people [i.e. non-actors] simply caught in the eye of the camera appearing less attractive. This is not because of any obvious filmic trick...' (1990). This is in contrast to the locals who are 'attractive ... lightly ironic ... clear-sighted and pragmatic ...' I wonder how MacCannell would react to a documentary about the Khmer Rouge, or the Kray twins, if these tourists are the most unattractive people he can imagine? Surely, as documentarists are fully aware, the casting of central characters is crucial here, and the selection and discarding of material, equally so. Whether we call them 'filmic tricks' is a matter of taste, but there is no reason to suppose that these tourists are thoroughly typical of all visitors to the Sepik. They have been carefully framed, in several senses.

There is one crucial difference in the attitudes of visitors and locals. The locals are clear about what they do not know or understand, but the visitors are complacently sure that they know a good deal about whom and what they are seeing. They appear, then, to make an anti-journey which takes them nowhere and teaches them nothing. Such reflection as there is, is done by the locals, and, through further layers of irony, by the audience.

[This is a slightly edited excerpt from the chapter 'First Exits from Observational Realism: Narrative Experiments in Recent Ethnographic Films' by Peter Loizos, originally published in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 88-90. Three short excerpts from 'Cannibal Tours' can be viewed online here and further information on the film and filmmaker is available here.]