“Critical Perspectives on the documentary form and concepts” Paul Basu

The whole essay http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/staff/basu/usercontent_profile/basu_reframing_ethnographic_film.pdf http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/staff/basu/usercontent_profile/basu_reframing_ethnographic_film.pdf

The extract is am looking at

On (not) going tribal

In the UK, anthropologists sometimes mourn the passing of the ‘halcyon days’ of the

1970s and 1980s when documentary films with an explicit anthropological content

were a regular feature of the television schedules. As Paul Henley has recently noted,

in this period, ‘perhaps as many as 100 hour-long television documentaries were

made for British television based directly on the fieldwork of one or more consultant

anthropologists’ (2006: 171). Indeed, programmes made for Granada’s Disappearing

World strand, which ran intermittently from 1970 to 1993, are often still used in

undergraduate anthropology teaching and are distributed for educational use by the

Royal Anthropological Institute. Combining observational styles with subtitled interviews

and expository voice-over narration, these films were concerned with such

issues as gender relations among the Maasai (Masai Women, 1974), gift exchange in

the highlands of Papua New Guinea (The Kawelka: Ongka’s Big Moka, 1974), and

conflict and social change in the Columbian rainforest (The Last of the Cuiva, 1971).

They also reproduced a somewhat stereotypical public perception of anthropology as

a discipline concerned with remote, tribal peoples, whose traditional ways of life were

threatened with extinction. By the 1970s, most professional anthropologists would

distance themselves from this outmoded ‘savage anthropology’ paradigm, and yet the

programmes had sufficient ethnographic credibility to gain a generally positive

critical response from within the discipline (e.g. Loizos 1980; see Banks 1994, for a

more negative critical view).

Since this golden age, anthropological programming has, as Henley (2006)

quips, itself become a ‘disappearing world’ on British television. Contrary to this

trend, in 2005, the BBC broadcast a series of six one-hour programmes entitled Tribe

(the series was broadcast on the Discovery Channel in the USA as Going Tribal); a

second, three-part series followed in 2006, and six more programmes are in production

at the time of writing, scheduled for broadcast in 2007. Each of the programmes

is concerned with a different indigenous group, and follows the trials and tribulations

of the on-screen presenter, Bruce Parry, as he undergoes various initiations and seeks

to ‘go native’ and live as the tribespeople do. Each episode follows a similar structure,

which sees Parry travelling to a remote destination, meeting and interacting with

members of the host ‘tribe’, learning about and attempting to participate in often

stereotypically exotic cultural practices, reflecting on his experiences and on the

endangered lifeworlds of his hosts, and eventually bidding his farewells and heading

off for another adventure. While Tribe was not explicitly presented as an ‘ethnographic’

or ‘anthropological’ series when it was first broadcast, it is interesting to

observe how it has been received as such by audiences and, indeed, how the

programmes have been repackaged within this rubric on a BBC website devoted to the

series (www.bbc.co.uk/tribe).

For each of the nine ‘tribes’ to feature in the first and second series, the website

thus provides maps, photographs, clips from the respective episode of Tribe, links to

related BBC, NGO and research websites, and written descriptions of everyday tribal

life, customs, beliefs, and the challenges that each group is confronted with. Much of

the textual content appears to be drawn from ethnographic writing. In addition to

these ‘tribe-specific’ pages of the website, five further sections address more generic

themes relating to indigenous populations under the titles: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Issues’,

‘Daily Life’, ‘Language’, and ‘Location’. These sections also contain informative texts,

clips from relevant episodes of Tribe, links to related websites (including links to an

‘Online Anthropology Library’ and the ‘Anthropological Index of the Royal Anthropological

Institute’), and reasonably comprehensive bibliographies comprised mainly

of anthropological references. It is clear, then, that through the BBC’s accompanying,

education-rich website, Tribe is framed as a popular anthropology series, and, indeed,

judging from viewer feedback comments posted in another section of the website,

this would seem to be how audiences perceived the series when it was broadcast.

While viewers have praised Tribe as being ‘informative and educational’,

providing ‘insight into ways of life totally different to our own’ and thus ‘raising

questions about our own culture’, the series has been strongly criticized by professional

anthropologists and characterized as a ‘Victorian romp’, ‘more primitive,

representationally, than the societies it purports to represent’ 22). Much of this invective has been directed towards the macho antics of the

on-screen ‘front man’ of the series, Bruce Parry, an ex-Royal Marine Commando and

self-proclaimed ‘adventurer’, ‘expeditioner’ and presenter of ‘extreme outdoors’ television

programmes. Superficially, Parry’s persona in Tribe is that of the ethnographer:

someone who travels to remote indigenous communities and who braves numerous

discomforts in attempting to live as his/her local informants do, staying in their

homes, eating their food, participating in their ‘traditional’ customs and so forth, as

way of learning about their society. The superficiality of the resemblance to an

ethnographic methodology is, however, drawn to our attention by the anthropologist

Pat Caplan, when she reminds us that:

(1) Parry is not a trained anthropologist; (2) he did not speak any of the local

languages; (3) he spent only an average of a month in each area; (4) there

was little or no reference to any previous anthropological research in the

region; (5) the material presented lacked much in the way of social or

cultural context.

(Caplan 2005: 4)

Academic anthropologists, in contrast, are, generally speaking, trained post-doctoral

researchers who learn the languages of those they are studying, engage in long-term

immersive fieldwork (typically a year or more), explicitly position their work in

relation to previous research in the region, and are at pains to contextualize the

phenomena they are studying within the broader social, political, economic and

cultural worlds in which they are embedded and from which they gain their

meanings.

It is, of course, somewhat naïve of anthropologists to expect this kind of

academic rigour from a popular television series. As André Singer, a prominent figure

in both ethnographic film and mainstream television documentary production, has

noted, the mass audience for whom Tribe is made probably wouldn’t dream of

watching the earnestly ethnographic works collected in the Royal Anthropological

Institute’s film library (2006: 24). But the stark differences between anthropologists’

and popular audiences’ experiences of the series are revealing of a more significant

disjuncture between the popular perception of anthropology (such as it exists at all)

and the realities of anthropological inquiry in the twenty-first century. The vehemence

of the anthropological critique of Tribe may thus be explained by the fact that

the series reproduces the very exoticist stereotypes that anthropologists have, for

generations, striven to problematize and distance themselves from (MacClancey

2002). The problem is that, while anthropologists have long worked in much more

diverse settings – including in their own and other complex urban societies – and are

more interested in engaging with modernity in its multifarious, localized manifestations

rather than collecting ‘pre-modern’, primitive survivals, in the popular imagination

the discipline is still associated with nineteenth-century adventure and exploration,

and with the investigation of exotic esoteria and tribal customs.

There is, however, a more profound issue here, beyond a lay misrecognition of

the object of contemporary anthropological study. We might ask just why mass

audiences are drawn to these stereotypical, ‘primitivist’ representations of indigenousness

rather than to the more typical contexts of current ethnographic research. And here one encounters a tenacious myth, and one with which the discipline of

anthropology is thoroughly implicated: that of the Noble Savage (Ellingson 2001).

Tribe thus reproduces a romantic fantasy of the modern Western mind, which

idealizes and constructs indigenous peoples as being closer to the ‘natural’ state of

humankind, and innocent of the moral corruption which is perceived to blight

modern, industrialized society. Connected still to their more authentic ways of life,

their traditional customs and beliefs, the endangered tribespeople are portrayed as

living in harmony with their environments, keepers of all that we have lost or

destroyed. Tribe is, however, far from being ‘Reality TV’, insofar as the more complex

realities of indigenous societies – realities which do not accord with the myth – are

not filmed or are edited out, and thus, in a way, denied. While seeming to advocate

social responsibility, the representational approach of Tribe reproduces a cultural

evolutionist worldview, which may once have informed anthropological inquiry

(Stocking 1987), but which has long since been discredited and found to be morally

insupportable. I suggest, then, that a significant reason why Tribe so rankles academic

ethnographers is that it represents an image of anthropology once exorcized from the

discipline, but which forever seems to return to haunt it via the popular media.

My Critique of this, one does not have to have been formally trained to consider yourself an anthropologist or to have any knowledge on the matter. For example i have never had any formal musical training but consider myself a musician and in an hour long program one cannot include in extensive research the Cardiff anthropological institutes work that they did for months before Bruce ventured out.

When Basu mention these Tribes are exoticised, surely the fact these Tribes Parry explores are so different means they are exotic? The embedded stereotype is due to lack of knowledge and one can see in the series that for example the Dasenach and Sanema would consider each other exotic as they are quite different to one another!

The writer disagrees with the program being anthropological. This is absurd as in comparison would he not say “time team” is not historical and superficially goes over events in only 45 minuites?

Basu refers to Victorian Romp. The exotic and the unknown will always remain a fascination to those with a different way of life and human nature will always show a small degree of prejudice to those who are different to us?

His main argument is how can one truly get an idea of what it is like to live with the tribe for a mere month? This is a valid point, of course you could live with the tribe for ten years but still not be accepted as you are technically an outsider but Bruce seems readily accepted within the allocated month. The program does not try and sell itself as the leading authority on a particular race on tribe and gives additionally information through its website.