Reflecting on the Anthropology of Media

This class in the Anthropology of Media has opened my critical mindset towards the media, and how pervasive its messages can be. The impact that radio can have on the community it serves – CBQM, Israeli and Australian radio stations – has been more far reaching than I had once thought. However, it is the reproduction of A. R. Rahman’s “Jai Ho” that was most interesting to me. This post looks at two other contributions to the topic written by Emily Hitz and Eli Chamberlain that discuss new remediations of “Jai Ho” and their wider implications.

            Emily Hitz’s blog post “The Homeland is Partly Invented” creatively juxtaposes two remediations of “Jai Ho,” one made into a music video and popularized by the Pussycat Dolls (insert hyperlink here) and the other by a Tampa, Florida Tamil Sneham group as a means of celebrating their disconnectedness together. She discusses if either video can truly be seen as “authentic,” seeing the Pussycat Dolls’ video as a “poor imitation” (Hitz 2011) devoid of any true genuine value, whereas despite fitting the mold of Walter Benjamin’s criteria of including the “existence in time and space,” the Tampa Tamil group’s video is still a reproduction that that is being reproduced yet another time on YouTube. Emily’s first comment suggests that it is almost too late to talk about what constitutes an “authentic” identity, as an individual’s identity is tied to one geographic region, cultural pathway, or religious belief. However, as globalization has flattened the world, the lines that have constructed our identity are blurred (Friedman 2005). Canada is seen as a cultural mosaic, where each distinct ethnicity or culture is seen as a small piece of the bigger picture, and therefore our image should reflect this. Authenticity may not be the focus of the analysis. Maybe, as Appadurai sees it, the spotlight should be on an ethnoscape where “genealogy and history confront each other, leaving the terrain open for interpretations of the ways in which local historical trajectories flow into complicated transnational structures” (Appadurai 1996:65). This relationship of genealogy and history could form the basis of the emerging global ethnoscapes on which these global cultural processes can be analyzed.

            Eli Chamberlain’s blog post Slumdog Million’where’? identifies the same two videos in a different vein. Eli sees the Tamil Sneham’s reproduction as a moment of, as Appadurai terms, “transnational irony” (1996:57), that “many threads of international culture that are interwoven to create such a globalized product are too complex to undo in this brief context” (Chamberlain 2011).  In turn, Eli agrees with Walter Benjamin’s argument, consenting that “repetition and reproduction of an art-piece results in a kind of cheapening is quite agreeable” (Chamberlain 2011). Reproduction for profit, as seen in the Pussycat Dolls’ video, is shameless and in a way disrespectful, as they play off their fame to make profits from large cell phone and headphone companies, a “distracted reception” (1936) as Benjamin deems it. Finally, Eli questions the evolution of film and technology, and how it has led to the progression of YouTube performances that cause a negative connection with the original. Since it has blurred the lines between author and audience, maybe, Eli suggests, society should not recreate this information even though we have the means to do so. However, I feel that YouTube recreations have not in fact caused a negative connection to the original, as Eli argues it does. Although Benjamin values the “aura” that is associated with each original work, I see it the aura as changing, not a quality that “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 1936). Although there are both great and terrible contributions to social media outlets like YouTube, these outlets ultimately serve to facilitate (re)creativity itself, which would not occur if the original copies did not exist. Rather than creating a negative connection, as Eli suggests, I see it as a positive and mutually reinforcing relationship that changes with the ebb and flow of society; these recreations reflect and are a part of the society in which they are created, constructing a new aura tempered to the present time.

            These blog posts have merited informed theoretical discussions on the reuse and reproduction of media in an ever-increasing transnational community, and have contributed to the discourse of anthropology and media. It has been an invigorating experience as I have interacted with new media with interesting theoretical concerns that peek my interest. Never again will I look at the Pussycat Dolls video with a critical eye without thinking of Walter Benjamin’s work on reproductive technologies, as this blog post drew my attention to the theoretical qualities of the video. Well, that may be a lie…

References

Appadurai, Arjun

1996  Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Pp. 48-65. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, Walter

1936  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

Chamberlain, Eli

2011  Slumdog Million’where’? Medianth Blog: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Media. http://medianth.blogspot.com/2011/02/t-he-international-cinematic-success-of.html, accessed April 2^nd 2011.

Friedman, Thomas L.

2005  The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hitz, Emily

2011  “The Homeland is Partly Invented” (Blog 3). Can’t Stop the Press Blog. http://cantstopthepress.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/“the-homeland-is-partly-invented”-blog-4/, accessed April 2^nd 2011.

Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Feminist Theory

            Many major films produced in Hollywood today place males at the forefront of films, dominating the majority of roles while leaving the passive, comforting and domestic roles to women, who discuss little other than the men that control the film. I argue that by looking from a feminist perspective at two characters in director Hayao Miyazaki’s anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), we can see that creating several oppositional traits present in the film challenge traditional gender roles that are evident in wider society.
 

            The Bechdel Test was developed and embraced by the gay/lesbian community and popularized in response to the lack of female protagonists present in present day films. Feminist theory is greatly concerned with these politics of representation, how different groups, primarily females, are being presented to the film’s audiences and are representative of the wider public (Gray 2010:70). In applying the Bechdel Test to Hayao Miyazaki’s film Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) we see that the movie passes with flying colours. The movie involves the military searching for the fabled city of Laputa, existing as a flying ship protected by large thunderstorms, while several smaller groups attempt to stop them. As a self-proclaimed feminist, Miyazaki often centers the plot on many female characters, projected as independent and competent individuals that attempt to repress patriarchal systems. Such is the case with Sheeta, as pictured, the protagonist in Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), a confident and strong young girl. Though the film does depict Pazu – a miner whom Sheeta meets – as Sheeta’s savior, it is Sheeta who is in control of solving the problems that arise. Escaping away from several sky pirates with Pazu, Sheeta is the one leading the way, making the decision to run into the village, hide in railway tunnels, and use the mines as a tool to losing her trackers. Also, with the help of Pazu, it is Sheeta’s efforts that destroy Colonel Muska’s chances of harnessing Laputa for the military’s benefit as a super-weapon, using the Spell of Destruction found in her mystical pendant. Miyazaki gives Sheeta the characteristics that traditionally fall to the male, in both Hollywood and Japanese films.

            Miyazaki also challenges traditional representation in creating the character of Dola, a matriarch heading a pirate family of sons that loot the skies, a job that opposes the patriarch system of governance in place. As a heavier-set woman, her presence is felt much more than other pirates in the skies as well as the villain Colonel Muska. Her loud aggressive behaviour and courageousness significantly overshadow the actions of her three smaller sons. Her overbearing personality is creatively juxtaposed to her husband’s submissive and very passive quality, contributing little depth to the movie. After initially pitting Dola against Sheeta, Miyazaki allies the two in a front against Colonel Muska and the traditional Japanese society he represents. Even the colours Dola and her family wear are reversed, with Dola wearing blue (a colour often seen as the exemplary colour associated with males) and her sons and husband wearing orange frocks and pink bottoms. Miyazaki utilizes Dola in a creative way to again challenge the representation of women in film in direct ways.

            We see here how director Hayao Miyazaki has reversed traditional images and roles of men and women in Japanese film to challenge past and contemporary gender roles and inequalities in wider Japanese society, one arguably the most tied to its roots in terms of values. It is no surprise that in 2002 he won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with his work Spirited Away (2001) and been nominated for his 2004 flim Howl’s Moving Castle.

References

Gray, Gordon

2010  Film Theory. In Cinema: A Visual Anthropology, Pp.35-73. Oxford, New York: Berg.

Miyazaki, Hayao

1986 Laputa: Castle in the Sky. 126 min. Tokuma Shoten. Japan. 

Global Iconic Radios

            Radio has the ability to transcend space with ease, reaching those in remote towns, major cities, or altogether different continents. Stations also have the ability to attract various audiences, each one different from the next. This essay discusses two stations – radio CBQM in Fort McPherson, Canada, and a collection of aboriginal radio stations in northern Australia – that are iconic in both creating and reflecting the community it serves.

            Radio CBQM is a small citizen-run multilingual radio station that hosts a variety of forms of media, from country music to call-in shows, poetry readings to local shout-outs. It is broadcasted from Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, a community of no more than 1000 residents, 80% of which are of Gwich'in aboriginal status. Dennis Allen’s documentary CBQM (2010) displays the community and their interaction with the radio in several interesting ways. The first is that almost everyone in the town is listening to the radio at all times; while driving, eating family dinners, knitting alone, or spending time with friends, the radio is on providing local entertainment and facilitating the translation of information to all people who are listening. As many listeners are elders who only speak the Gwich'in language Teet'lit Zheh, broadcasting in both English and Teet'lit Zheh evokes a sense of familiarity to all generations who listen. As a citizen-run radio that constantly fills the ears of the Gwich'in community with voices from their own community, CBQM serves as an important medium that brings the residents in Fort McPherson together, even in the long lightless months of the winter, while they are engaging in their daily lives. Secondly, the radio acts as an accessible means to disseminate information acting simultaneously as a radio show as well as a body to relay information to others: police officers warn residents of wolf sightings; friends wish others luck in bingo, an activity that also uses CBQM broadcaster as the caller; sometimes it is simply to tell another individual to hang up the phone so that another person can call them. All of this is encouraged by the constant ringing of the phone in the background of the radio broadcast, promoting more interaction between community members using the broadcaster as a mediator.

            Aboriginal radio stations in Northern Australia function in similar ways to CBQM, in that they connect dispersed kin, overcoming geographical distance and penetrating institutional barriers by “linking people up” (Fisher 2009:282) through radio request programs. These broadcasts involve ‘shout-outs’ in an attempt to connect aboriginal kin from across northern Australia, creating a “social imaginary” whereby groups produce their social world through radio and reflect on it (Fisher 2009:293). This is especially true of individuals in northern Australia jails, the majority of which are aboriginal men and women. Radio shows on Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA) send music dedications from kin that cut across geographical space to inmates who receive warm ‘shout-outs’ from home when they are confined within the physical walls of Australian jails. A family is recreated in a makeshift community when individuals become isolated in prison. Similarly, Warwick Thorton’s film Green Bush shows that radio has as much responsibility to link kin up as it does to playing song (Fisher 2009:288). Social relatedness clearly plays an enormous part in aboriginal radio programming and should be examined for its complex and unique constitutions of community.

Northern Australia’s use of radio is similar to CBQM’s in that through radio programming, they bridge space to create a sense of community where at a particular moment there is little. The unfolding of these activities also reflects the communities in which the activities serve, as they unfold in the “mundane spaces of building sites, cars, [and in Fisher’s case] office buildings, and prison blocks” (Fisher 2009:283). However, CBQM differs in that it is highly localized, creating and reflecting a community that is primarily in Fort McPherson, rather than promoting continuity of kin relations across the vast northern part of continental Australia. Nevertheless, these two examples of the ways in which aboriginal radio creates and reflects a community have wider social implications than was once thought.

References

Allen, Dennis

2010  CBQM. National Film Board of Canada.

Fisher, Daniel

2009  Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.

Remix Culture, Copy and Remediation

Virtually any piece of information can be found using Google while any video, song, or sports replay can be watched on YouTube. Though, with mass amounts of information comes an extremely vague sense of what one is entitled to use, reuse and/or distribute. It is this issue of copyright that has many individuals and corporations, the ‘owners’ of this material, up in arms over the appropriate reuse of media. Does media follow the same strain of thinking as the phrase “all publicity is good publicity?” This blog post looks at Canadian Copyright law and applies it too the burgeoning popular music remix culture in terms of a song’s recognizability and to peer-to-peer networking sites, looking at how power relations function

            Under section 3(1) of the Canadian Copyright Law, protection of all creative forms is given by protecting the right to authorship of one’s creation, reproduction, or performance of the creation automatically at the birth of the creation (Copyright Act). If an external body wishes to reproduce or perform this work, they must seek permission or attain some sort of license to do so. Today’s music remix culture accounts for this law by seeking permission to alter and reproduce a song, whereby licensing of electronic songs are sold to other disc jockeys (DJs) allowing them the ability to create new material. In an article looking at the remediation of aspects from the Bollywood song Jaan Pehechaan Ho, David Novak discusses dubs, an altered form of reusing a song:

To dub is not simply to copy, but to grasp the thing you behold; to name it as your own. The dub juxtaposes subjectivities in a context of “familiar-but-strange” – the “hey, that’s me” moment of recognition, mixed with the awareness that it’s not quite so (2010:54).

The electronic music community has embraced this mentality with thirty-four year old Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren breaking trail. As a pioneer of the electronic genre Trance, Van Buuren has many hit singles that are remixes that simultaneously evoke the familiar sound of the original and include his own style. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s view on remediation of Hollywood movies in Bollywood, the song therefore is recognizable yet new: “when you take an idea and rout it through the Indian heart, it changes entirely” (Novak 2009:52). This is similar to Van Buuren’s stance in a 2002 interview, where he acknowledges he works around the original copy: “I see it as a painting, you know you have to use the sun in your painting but the rest is not defined yet, so you can basically paint anything you want” (Slomowicz 2002). Van Buuren’s appropriation is only dependent on what he wishes to create, a song that renders identification through, to use his example, the sun. Van Buuren’s original and remix tracks are situated amongst other artists in his weekly radio show that broadcasts to over fifteen million listeners in over twenty-six countries a week. These examples display the pervasiveness of remix culture and the acceptance and encouragement of recognizable-yet-different songs among electronic DJs and their willingness to participate.

            However, there are inappropriate reuses of media in the music scene, such as the illegal copying and distribution of music to those who have not paid for it. This has had record labels up in arms since the beginning of the peer-to-peer sharing network boom popularized by Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire. By copying songs from one CD of one album onto a peer-to-peer network, millions of people have access to what cost one person fewer than twenty dollars and record labels millions. Therefore, no monetary compensation will not be granted to the record labels in court by consumers because it is not cost effective and too time consuming to carry out. Similarly, artists will not immediately be financially compensated by record sales, as they depend on their album selling. The pie chart above details approximately how much money goes into each album in production, marketing, shipping, pressing, and other stages of manufacturing. Apple has attempted to circumvent the system by attaching passwords to songs sold on the iTunes store. Once songs move from the iTunes account where there it was purchased, a password is required to listen to it. Though Apple has created a solution to solve their own method of copyright protection, this does not halt an individual lending a music CD purchased at a local music store to a friend for them to copy, nor does it stop the transfer of files to the Internet.

            From these examples, we can draw some commonalities in appropriate reuses of media, the first of which is of the utmost importance but often goes unnoticed: give credit where credit is due (usually coming in the form of money). However, what happens when bands like Radiohead offer to release albums for whatever price consumers wish to pay as long as it is more than the credit card handling fee? Do we give credit by attending their live performances or creating Radiohead cover bands? The issue of profiting from another’s work is another problem that is dealt with sufficiently in remix culture by selling licenses to artists that wish to remix the song. YouTube has developed its own way of prohibiting media that infringe copyright laws by hiring individuals to troll the servers manually, taking down videos that are improperly reused. Though, with the continuous expansion of the dot-com era and the dissemination of media so far reaching with the click of a mouse, these principles will need to be constantly restructured to meet the needs of the society. Therefore, a start in creating some systematic guidelines that apply to the reuse of media would include issues of ownership and property, consent of usage, and credit given to the makers in a pre-arranged form, be it money or public recognition.

References

Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42)

Novak, David

2010  Cosmopolitanism, Remediation, and the Ghost World of Bollywood. Cultural Anthropology 25(1):40-72.

Slomowicz, Ron

2002  Interview with Armin Van Buuren. About.com Guide. http://dancemusic.about.com/cs/interviews/a/IntAVBuuren_3.htm, accessed March 28^th, 2011.

Globalizing flows of Aid in Haiti

            Just over a year has passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit near the town of Léogâne, twenty-five kilometers west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The results have been devastating: estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people dead (over 10% of the city’s population), over a million individuals living in tent cities, and massive destruction of public identities, including electricity and, more importantly, fresh water (The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Due to the mass contamination of water, from both the devastation of the earthquake as well as the mishandling of the water from local streams, cholera swept across the region, using river streams for transport and breaching water infrastructures, further compromising the sanitation and the trouble in Haiti.

            At the same time that darkness engulfed Haiti, it became the spotlight of international media attention. Humanitarian aid and news broadcasting turned wide-eyed to see the events that were to follow in Haiti in the next couple months. However, as much of the mainstream telecommunications systems were destroyed in the earthquake and tremors, external media sources relied on social and digital media users who lived in Haiti. Facebook and Twitter users as well as bloggers provided first hand eyewitness updates as to what was happening on ground zero (Brainard 2010). Thus social media was successful in garnering initial worldwide attention and focusing it in on the problems Haiti faced. Humanitarian aid was one of the first private sectors on ground zero, providing roughly $1.4 billion dollars from 200 organizations all across the world. “Hope for Haiti Now”, for example, a live album featuring famous artists such as Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and Neil Young vied to send all its proceeds to relief efforts in Haiti.

            However, like all news, the thrill of breaking headlines, of people dying tragic deaths, become all too familiar with the world and the story loses popularity. As Haiti began to hunker down to begin large-scale economic changes, the spotlight shifted away from the constant struggles of daily Haitian life that to the media was a thing of the past (as we know, clearly it is not), to more sensational news concerning the present implying a future, a model characteristic of media broadcasters (Vansina). This unspoken future of the news is something that is often not covered by the media, and lost in the masses of analysis. Yet this money that we have donated in the present implies something will be done in the future. Then where has all this aid gone, the money that we have donated to ‘save Haiti’? Yes, it has left my pockets and gone into the hands of aid agencies like Oxfam or World Vision who have allotted it accordingly, but what has the money been actually used for? A report published by the Disaster Accountability Project (2011)– a non-profit organization aimed at improving disaster management systems and ensuring transparency in the occurrences on ground zero of the disaster – attempted to see how much of the roughly $1.4 billion in aid was being disbursed and how it was used by each organization. First of all, the Disaster Accountability Project found that only approximately $750,000, roughly half of the total aid received has been dispensed. There is a large amount of money that is sitting in banks and not being used for directly for rebuilding infrastructure and getting fresh water supplies to halt the spread of cholera. Secondly, and even more pressing, of the 197 organizations that actively solicited money for the purposes of relief in Haiti, only six had publicly available factual guidelines as to what would be done with the money while 128 organizations had little to no public reports stating what the donations would have been used for (Disaster Accountability Project). In theory, this money could be diverted for any number of reasons for any number of causes to any number of people, not for the causes that the donor wished it to. Often, as Gourevitch (2010) argues is the case in Biafra, financial aid can be taken by these humanitarian organizations and dispensed to journalists to report on the catastrophe. Instead of working for objective news agencies, these journalists work under these international organizations, often unconsciously ascribing to the companies’ ideologies. They are in a bind, attempting to “present themselves as objective outsiders [but] suddenly become the disciples of aid workers. They accept uncritically the humanitarian aid agencies’ claims to neutrality, elevating the trustworthiness and expertise of aid workers above journalistic skepticism” (Gourevitch). Thus, the journalists’ fall victim to the subjective positions of the humanitarian agencies, losing their critical analytical objective edge.

            Furthermore, in humanitarians’ cries for aid, they have turned the heads of those at the World Bank, currently assessing Haiti to see how they can ‘help’. As Jamaica suffered the wrath of the World Bank-imposed structural adjustment policies in the early 1980s, it will be no surprise that Haiti’s already and increasingly suffering economy – due to widespread malnourishment, HIV/AIDS epidemic, and relatively high tuberculosis rates supplemented by the outbreak of cholera and mass economic destruction – will be pushed even farther away from its pre-2010 position. Ultimately, I argue that the media can only do so much. By garnering immediate worldwide attention to the devastation is the media’s duty. Their efforts in soliciting aid, drawing out the facts as they come in, and recommending suggestions to government officials have been beneficial. However, much is out of the media’s realm of possibility. It is and will be ultimately up to the government to create jobs out of cleaning up and rebuilding the economy, installing efficient water systems to begin the sanitation effort, and figure out an efficient way of distributing the gridlocked aid where it is needed. No media source or news network is capable in fixing these problems.

References

Brainard, Curtis

2010  “New” Media Crucial in Aftermath of Haitian Earthquake. The News Frontier, The Observatory,  January 13^th. http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/new_media_crucial_in_aftermath.php, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Disaster Accountability Project

2011  One Year Follow Up Report on The Transparency of Relief Organizations Responding to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. http://www.scribd.com/doc/46320380/OneYear-Followup-Report-Transparency-of-Relief-Organizations-Responding-to-2010-Haiti-Earthquake, accessed January 28^th, 2011.

Gourevitch, Philip

2010  Alms Dealers. New Yorker, October. 11^th. 102-109.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation

2010  U.S. Global Health Policy: Health in Haiti and the U.S. Government Involvement. http://www.kff.org/globalhealth/upload/8053.pdf, accessed January 28^th, 2011)

Vansina, Jan

1985  Oral Tradition as Process. In Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin, Pp. 3-32. 

Constructing Identities with Graffiti

            Depending on who you talk to, graffiti can be a form of vandalism, yet at the same time a piece of art. This blog sees it as a creative form of self-expression and a tool of identity-construction that comes in various forms. Ranging from chalk on the sidewalk to wall murals spanning several stories, graffiti – from the Italian world graffiare, “to scratch” – sometimes evokes authorship in the “tag” of a particular fashion, while other times anonymity.

These notions are expressed in the multitude of graffiti frequently found on the engineering Cairn in a strip of Main Mall at UBC. The iconic monument has been symbolic of UBC’s engineering faculty since the mid-1960s, erected by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) in 1966 in appreciation of “the humble diversified and continuing contribution to campus life by the engineers”. The six-foot tall white pyramid with an enormous “E” on each side has been an object with a semi-permanent residence, but an enduring legacy of tradition. It has been moved many times around the campus, finally landing in the middle of Main Mall outside many engineering buildings. In the almost fifty years since its birth, the Cairn’s colours have been painted thousands of times by almost every faculty, AMS club, or student housing society. Though, after every defacing – occurring most of the time at night when no one is around – the engineers confidently repaint the Cairn in its white and red, adding layer by layer, year after year.

The defacing and subsequent repainting of the Cairn has been a ritualized experience of many of the students at UBC, with no real legal or social repercussions dealt to the infringers, even when their mark is left. Rodriguez and Clair (1999) sees similar acts of graffiti “frequently reflect[ing] tensions and conflicts among diverse groups”. As a place of diversity – in academic interests as well as ethnicity and race – it is no surprise that graffiti occurs specifically on the Cairn, as the Cairn historically has not been well-received by neither campus government or student society. Furthermore, they posit that “marginalized individuals perform acts that are intended to oppress other marginalized individuals” (1). In this case, each social group carries out these public defacements of the Cairn in inter-faculty competition. It is personified by these graffiti acts and yet the engineers, seemingly unphased, repaint the Cairn again and again.

The ways in which the engineers respond to the defacing of their Cairn is interesting. Even when distinctive residence or faculty marks are left – as seen in the “G” for Geology Cairn – the Engineers do not vandalize their structures; rather, they dutifully repaint the colours and return to business as usual. In this passive resistance to other social bodies, the engineers derive resilience, one they pride themselves on. By repainting the Cairn in their colours, they are reclaiming what is theirs, proving to the student society that engineers are resilient. By doing so, the Cairn functions to all the social units on campus as a temporary poster board for campus identification ad differentiation. Students know that whatever graffiti is painted is only returned back to its original state with virtually zero consequences. With no repercussions and almost no public backlash from the engineering community, it seems that they have embraced the fact that the Cairn is repeatedly painted over. In an almost desired way, the constant restoration encourages and facilitates the public defacement of the Cairn so that on the one hand, social clubs produce temporary representations of self-identification on the campus they belong to while on the other hand, develop the resilient quality the engineers have become to embrace.

            Talking to some engineers, I have received mixed remarks on the dynamics of the Cairn. Though one student thinks it’s funny that many people paint the Cairn in their own faculty colours or other pictures, the student sees that “to disrespect my monument on campus feels like they are disrespecting me and my peers”. Another student says if other faculties had monuments similar to the Cairn, students, maybe even engineers, would deface it as well in enjoyable acts of rivalry and competition. A graduate student in chemical engineering says, “it promotes a good-natured spirit of competition amongst faculties and programs… If you look at the big picture, it’s more about other groups challenging this clique by taking something away, and having the engineers respond by taking it back and reestablishing their engineering pride”.

Thus, in these graffiti acts we have a group of anonymous individuals often painting identifiable markings on the Cairn, with little to no recourse to halt more acts from happening. The dynamics between this anonymity and authorship are mixed together in the act of painting the Cairn, creating a systematically and almost mutually supported channeled output for the betterment of campus life. It seems to me that this is the ideal situation, no?

References

Begnal, Michael H. (1985) Graffiti as Intentional and Patterned Communication. Communication Quarterly 2:155.

The Engineers’ Cairn. (2010). The Engineers’ Cairn. http://heustory.apsc.ubc.ca/wiki/index.php/The_Engineers’_Cairn, accessed February 7^th, 2010.

Rodriguez, Amardo and Robin Patric Clair. (1999). Graffiti as communication: Exploring the discursive tensions of anonymous texts. Southern Communication Journal 65(1):1-15.

Globalization, may I introduce you to Mediation

            The media and its facets have transformed the self-representation and reflexive experience. The distance between information and its implications, and the general public has been bridged in many more ways than one. Television and the Internet serve as two far-reaching mediums of mediation that have emerged at the forefront of globalization, allowing people to have seemingly endless amounts of information at one’s fingertips at any second.

William Mazzarella (2004) sees various forms of capital, especially information, that have been projected into society as assets of media that need to be addressed. Looking to see how information is mediated through the media, he sees many screens and filters that information passes through – from which content is captured on film, to how it is framed, to how will it be represented – before a person receives it, be it on the social activists’ webpages, worldwide newspapers, or the six o'clock news. “Transnational imaginaries” often oppose “regional commitments and interests” (352), where corporate goals quash local considerations. Without media, many of these cases would pass unknowingly, or uncriticized, by the global populace. Thus, we have empowered the media as facilitators of knowledge, as bringers of ‘truth’, deciding what we should know and how we should come to understand it. Mazzarella pushes this further in a different direction, that commercial media sources have made people “cognitively and affectively dependent on external processes of mediation, whereas previously stable and locally rooted ‘schemas’ have sufficed to make sense of the world” (2004). We are no longer stopping to look around and critically judge for ourselves the problems of the world; rather, we are looking for answers found in Google search results or in CNN headlines, created by the meeting of globalization and mediation.

Nevertheless, Mazzarella sees media and mediation as an avenue to look at the ‘other’, at the “places at which we come to be who we are through the detour of something alien to ourselves” (356). As a self-reflexive process, we compare our culture to that which we see in the media. By looking here, we begin to understand more about what the culture we live in. Relatively speaking, the meeting of globalization and mediation has allowed us to look at the ways in which other cultures function and compare them to ours.

Through the media, for example, the Kayapo Indians residing in the Brazilian Amazon basin were able to assert their identity and their struggle for land claims in the face of imposing World Bank and Brazilian government-backed hydroelectric companies. Proposals for six hydroelectric damns along the Xingu river had been put forth that would devastate the Kayapo’s native land through population displacement and disruption of migratory fish routes (which the Kayapo depended on), destroying much of the Amazon rainforest along the way. Filming widespread demonstrations featuring Kayapo leaders and Western celebrities – Sting, and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick – to draw even more media attention, the Kayapo held press conferences with world news media, international human and indigenous rights organizations, as well as World Bank and Brazilian governmental officials to demonstrate what was at stake. Ultimately, the Kayapo managed to stave off the hydroelectric companies by asserting their identity to protect and secure not only their land, but their legal control over their resources as well (Turner 2003).

What is interesting is that it is one of the first cases in which the “combination of political, economic, environmental, and ideological pressures with revolutionary new media technologies that has enabled native peoples to take their case directly to the peoples and governments of the world” (Turner 2003). The Kayapo cut out the middlemen – NGOs, human rights tribunals – and took it amongst themselves to assert their identity and struggle to the world. What is also interesting, though not immediately apparent, is that this is telling of our own culture. In their preparation for the political demonstrations, the Kayapo consulted local British Columbian governments as well as First Nations groups to assess broader implications of our hydroelectric damns. Thus, we are looking at this “dual relation… of simultaneous self-distancing and self-recognition” (Mazzarella); the Kayapo are apart from Western society at the same time a part of it. Due to the collision of globalization and mediation, as evident in the Kayapo’s demonstrations, these apparently alienated places, places that the ‘other’ resides in, are not as distant as we once thought.

References

Mazzarella, William. (2004). Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual review of Anthropology 33:345-367.

Turner, Terence. (2003). The Kayapo Resistance. In Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, Spradley, James and David McCurdy (eds). Pp. 387-404. Allyn and Bacon: Boston.