Interesting alternative perspective on "Avatar"

[walksalone11]

http://www.counterpunch.org/price12232009.html


Hollywood's Human Terrain Avatars

By DAVID PRICE

This week, as James Cameron's 3D cinematic science fiction saga dominates the American box office, and tie-in products permeate fast food franchises and toy stores, it is worth noting an interesting bit of cultural leakage tying our own real militarized state to Cameron's virtual world of Avatar.

Avatar is set in a world where the needs of corporate military units align against the interests of indigenous blue humanoids long inhabiting a planet with mineral resources desired by the high tech militarized invaders.  The exploitation of native peoples to capture valuable resources is a story obviously older than Hollywood, and much older than the discipline of anthropology itself; though the last century and a half has found anthropologists' field research used in recurrent instances to make indigenous populations vulnerable to exploitation in ways reminiscent of Avatar.

Avatar draws on classic sci-fi themes in which individuals break through barriers of exoticness, to accept alien others in their own terms as equals, not as species to be conquered and exploited, and to turn against the exploitive mission of their own culture.  These sorts of relationships, where invaders learn about those they'd conquer and come to understand them in ways that shake their loyalties permeate fiction, history and anthropology.  Films like Local Hero, Little Big Man, Dersu Uzala, or even the musical The Music Man use themes where outsider exploitive adventurists trying to abuse local customs are seduced by their contact with these cultures.  These are themes of a sort of boomeranging cultural relativism gone wild.

Fans of Avatar are understandably being moved by the story's romantic anthropological message favoring the rights of people to not have their culture weaponized against them by would be foreign conquerors, occupiers and betrayers.  It is worth noting some of the obvious the parallels between these elements in this virtual film world, and those found in our world of real bullets and anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2007, the occupying U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed Human Terrain Teams (HTT), complete with HTT "social scientists" using anthropological-ish methods and theories to ease the conquest and occupation of these lands. HTT has no avatared-humans; just supposed "social scientists" who embed with battalions working to reduce friction so that the military can get on with its mission without interference from local populations.  For most anthropologists these HTT programs are an outrageous abuse of anthropology, and earlier this month a lengthy report by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (of which I was a member and report co-author) concluded that the Human Terrain program crossed all sorts of ethical, political and methodological lines, finding that:

    "when ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment - all characteristic factors of the HTT concept and its application - it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology."

The American Anthropological Association's executive board found Human Terrain to be a "mistaken form of anthropology".  But even with these harsh findings, the Obama administration's call for increased counterinsurgency will increase demands for such non-anthropological uses of ethnography for pacification.

There are other anthropological connections to Avatar.  James Cameron used University of Southern California anthropologist, Nancy Lutkehaus, as a consultant on the film.  I recently wrote Lutkehaus to see if her role in consulting for Cameron had included adding information on how anthropologists have historically, or presently, aided the suppression of native uprisings; but Lutkehaus wrote me that her consultation had nothing to do with these plot elements, her expertise drew upon her fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to consult with choreographer, Lula Washington, who designed scenes depicting a gorgeous coming-of-age-ritual depicted in the film.

Among the more interesting parallels between Avatar and Human Terrain Systems is the way that the video logs that the avatar-ethnographers were required to record were quietly sifted-through by military strategists interested in finding vulnerability to exploit among the local populous. Last week a story in Time magazine quoted Human Terrain Team social scientist in training Ben Wintersteen admitting that in battlefield situations ""there's definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject..There's no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field;" and the AAA's recent report found that "Reports from HTTs are circulated to all elements of the military, including intelligence assets, both in the field and stateside."  Like the HTT counterparts, the Avatar teams openly talked about trying to win the "hearts, mind, and trust" of the local population (a population that the military derisively called "blue monkeys") that the military was simply interested in moving or killing.  And most significantly, the members of the avatar unit had a naive understanding of the sort of role they could conceivably play in directing the sort of military action that would inevitably occur.  Sigourney Weaver's character, the chain-smoking, pose striking, tough talking Avatar Terrain Team chief social scientist, Grace Augustine, displayed the same sort of unrealistic understanding of what would be done with her research that appears in the seemingly endless Human Terrain friendly features appearing in newspapers and magazines.

Past wars found anthropologists working much more successfully as insurgents, rather than counterinsurgents: in World War II it was Edmund Leach leading an armed insurgent gang in Burma, Charlton Coon training terrorists in North African, Tom Harrisson arming native insurgents in Sarawak.  These episodes found anthropologists aligned with the (momentary) interests of the people they studied (but also aligned with the interests of their own nation states), not subjugating them in occupation and suppressing their efforts for liberation as misshapen forms of ethnography like Human Terrain.

Anthropologically informed counterinsurgency efforts like the Human Terrain program are fundamentally flawed for several reasons.  One measure of the extent that these programs come to understand and empathize with the culture and motivations of the people they study might be the occurrence of militarized ethnographers "going native" in ways parallel to the plot of Avatar.  If Human Terrain Teams employed anthropologists who came to live with and freely interact with and empathize with occupied populations, I suppose you would eventually find some rogue anthropologists standing up to their masters in the field.  But so far mostly what we find with the Human Terrain "social scientists" is a revolving cadre of well paid misfits with marginal training in the social sciences who do not understand or reject normative anthropological notions of research ethics, who rotate out and come home with misgivings about the program and what they accomplished.

On the big screen the transformation of fictional counterinsurgent avatar-anthropologists into insurgents siding with the blue skinned Na'vi endears the avatars to the audience, yet off the screen in our world, this same audience is regularly bombarded by media campaigns designed to endear HTT social scientists embedded with the military to an audience of the American people. The engineered inversions of audience sympathies for anthropologists resisting a military invasion in fiction, and pro-military-anthropologists in nonfiction is easily accomplished because the fictional world of a distant future is not pollinated with the forces of nationalism and jingoistic patriotism that permeate our world; a world where anything aligned with militarism is championed over the understanding of others (for reasons other than conquest).

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist.  He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ new book Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published last month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu

[walksalone11]

A Science Fiction Masterpiece for Liberals:

/Fantasies of the Master Race/ goes to Pandora

by Val D. Phillips

If you wish to read copious praise for /Avatar/'s special effects
and political good intentions, kindly look everywhere else on the
net. It's time we so-called radicals start talking about the failure
of Avatar's good intentions and James Cameron's eyes-wide-open walk
into racist storytelling.

I'm not going to restate the plot of /Avatar/ here. If you're one of
the five people on the planet who hasn't seen it yet, it's basically
/Dances with Last Samurai In Space/.

Instead, I need to go straight to the question that has plagued me
since seeing this film. Why is it cinema's indigenous peoples, no
matter how wise, spiritually enlightened and physically fit they
are, can somehow /never/ figure out how to defeat whitey without
whitey? And not just whitey as an advisor, a double-agent, who maybe
can shed a little useful intel on the enemy, but as their /leader/?

Three months into his relationship with the indigenous Na'vi, Jake
Sully, a /grunt /by his own admission, appoints himself general of
the entire Na'vi resistance against their human invaders.
Apparently, humans are so incredibly smart, so much more politically
and militarily brilliant than their Na'vi brothers, that even a
foot-soldier, a Marine corporal, can out-strategize the most
experienced Na'vi warrior, a man chosen /by/ his people to /lead/
his people. Said warrior just steps right out of the way when Jake
Sully steps up to speak because, after all, Jake Sully is.../nobody/
/in particular/, not to mention the guy whose treachery just
resulted in the complete destruction of the people's home!

Apparently there isn't a single Na'vi, male or female, who, having
lived on Pandora an entire life, knowing its landscape and peoples
intimately, raised as hunters and warriors in daily communication
with Na'vi ancestors, spirits and non-humanoid animals, could lead
the people better than /this/ guy. Apparently native peoples simply
can't figure out for themselves that they all need to work together
to get rid of the genocidal imperialist bastards.

Apparently Tecumseh never made it to Pandora. Or any of James
Cameron's classrooms.

Also, apparently, whitey need only exploit indigenous history
(anthropogists call it "myth" if they're feeling charitable and
"superstition" if they're not) to persuade a people still reeling
from the trauma of brutal ethnic cleansing that despite his
responsibility for said ethnic cleansing, he's really an okay guy
and someone to be trusted with their very survival. Sweet they are,
these Na'vi. Sweet, noble, and maybe just a tad naive?

Was I the only one who cringed deep into my seat when Jake Sully
attempted to repair his relationship with his adopted tribe by
"bonding" with the largest bird on the planet so he can convince the
people he's really special and someone to be admired. This is the
same guy who, upon "bonding" with his first, smaller bird-steed
said, "you're mine now," showing that despite Na'vi princess
Neytiri's patient tutelage, he still hadn't a clue about indigenous
peoples' relationships to the natural world. Now, I can't claim to
be a "Na'vi expert" (despite the fact that I'm white, and therefore
an expert on all things indigenous) but it would seem to me the
whole concept of "owning" an animal to whom you have made a lifetime
commitment would be considered anthema to a people with a worldview
like the Na'vi.

Apparently, the indigenous people of Pandora are so physically and
spiritually inept compared to Jake Sully that while only 5 of their
people in the /entire history of their world /have ever bonded with
this creature, Jake Sully manages it so easily Cameron can't even be
bothered to show us the struggle on film.

Narratively, in such a white liberal wet dream, it goes without
saying that the gorgeous and brave Na'vi princess Neytiri, superior
to Jake Sully in every way that Cameron explores, would, for no
apparent reason, fall in love and mate for life with the man ninety
days after she had first called him a child in his understanding of
her world. The only criticism most folks seem willing to offer of
this nonsense is that it's cliched. It's not just cliched; it's
/racist, /not to mention ridiculous.

I'm guessing Cameron thought he could get away with this--if he
thought about it all--because he put the white human in a blue
Na'vi's body. In the 20th century they called this type of acting
"putting on black face." Apparently in the 21st century we've
evolved to "putting on blue face (and body)." Now there's a
cinematic achievement.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good race traitor movie as much as the
next person. And I really do appreciate some of /Avatar/'s attempts
to bring eco-consciousness and an anti-invasion sentiment to the
youth of this country. Trudy, the Marine who turns against her own,
is a fine heroine, and Neytiri definitely channels the more bad-*bleep*
side of Pocahontas. There are few things that make me happier than
seeing imperialists successfully repelled, particularly the white,
corporate, English-speaking variety.

But if you want to see a good film about a race traitor, the movie
to see is /District 9/, not /Avatar/. With /Avatar/, James Cameron
had the opportunity to create his magnum opus, a masterpiece of
cinematic storytelling in which his technological achievements were
matched by a truly eye-opening story. He not only failed, he
reinforces with /Avatar/ some of the most destructive racist myths
written by white liberals.

Enjoy the 3-D, but don't let the nifty glasses keep you from seeing
it for what it is.

[mcrap85]

i/ve hear it sas really good, but have not seen it yet..i will soon, and will let you know how it was.

[walksalone11]

*An /AVATAR/ Awakening*
By David Swanson
http://afterdowning street.org/ node/48770

Let's face it, if James Cameron had made a movie with the Iraqi
resistance as the heroes and the U.S. military as the enemies, and had
set it in Iraq or anywhere else on planet earth, the packed theaters
viewing "Avatar" would have been replaced by a screening in a living
room for eight people and a dog.

Nineteen years ago, Americans packed theaters for "Dances with Wolves"
in which Native Americans became the heroes, but the story was set in a
previous century and the message understated.

The Na'vi people of "Avatar" are very explicitly Iraqis facing "shock
and awe," as well as Native Americans with bows and arrows on
horseback. The "bad guys" in the battle scenes are U.S. mercenaries,
essentially the U.S. military, and the movie allows us to see them, very
much as they are right now in 177 real nations around the world, through
the eyes of their victims.

People know this going into the movie, and do not care. For better, and
certainly for worse, they do not care. Millions of people stand in
lines, shell out big bucks, wear stupid-looking 3-D glasses, sit in the
dark for three hours, identify with twelve-foot- high pointy-eared blue
people, cheer as the credits roll, and simply do not care that actual
human beings suffer the same fate as the computer-generated creations,
albeit without miraculous happy endings.

Imagine if a tenth of the people who now sympathize with these bony blue
beings were to take three hours to read a book or watch a movie about
the people of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Iran. Our
real planet would then be a different world.

When I saw "Avatar" in a packed 3-D theater in Virginia, and the crowd
cheered the closing shot, I shouted: "And get out of Iraq too!" No one
cheered for that. But no one called me a traitor either.

But will anyone in that crowd lift a finger to pressure their
representatives in Congress to stop funding the evil they'd just seen
sanitized, animated, relocated, and ever so slightly disguised?

Rob Kall at OpEd News suggested that we make flyers to hand out at
theaters following screenings of "Avatar." Having now seen the film, I
think he's right. Here's a flyer (PDF)
<http://www.afterdow ningstreet. org/sites/ afterdowningstre et.org/files/ avatar.pdf>.
Here's the text:

AVATAR

Did you know that the Na'vi people are real, their troubles are real,
and you can be a hero who saves them? It's true!

The story of "Avatar" is the story of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
other countries attacked and occupied by U.S. mercenaries and U.S. troops.

It's harder to think about that, than it is to sympathize with giant
blue computer-animated creatures. But it's extremely important that you
take the step to explicitly admit to yourself what you've just watched
in this movie, and that you take the additional step of doing something
about it.

You don't have to ride a dragon or shoot an arrow, but you do have to
call this number 202-224-3121 and ask to speak with your representative
in the U.S. House of Representatives and tell them that their career
will be over if they vote another dime to pay for the evil depicted in
"Avatar."

Tell them that investing your money in education, transportation,
energy, or infrastructure produces many more jobs than investing it in
killing. Tell them that diplomacy and aid work better than bombs, and
that we do not need unobtainium, which is called that for a reason,
although we know it as "oil".

Call every day until you get the right answer, and report your daily
progress at http://defundwar. org

[clcflash]

I thought Avatar's story was ok. the effects of course were incredible.

[trujillo33]

I want to watch this movie.... a lot of people said its really good!!

[mcrap85]

hmmmm.....it was pretty good.

[eSineM]

Best money I have ever spent to see a movie...it's all about the 3 story IMAX screens in 3D