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Title: Reading National Geographic by Catherine A. Lutz, Jane L. Collins ISBN: 0-226-49724-0 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: September, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Give me a break...
Comment: Quite simply, I don't buy into 90% of the authors claims, and the authors seemed to be completely blinded by their own preconcieved ideas that they can't be at all objective in their interpretation of the subject matter.
Ultimately, this books is nothing more than rhetoric about "white male dominated racist Western culture".
The authors clearly had this notion in mind when they wrote this book, and it taints virtually the entire book to the point where their conclusions aren't even remotely believable as being the result of objective research.
Rating: 4
Summary: Ethnocentrism gleamed from the pages of National Geographic
Comment: I found this book to be thorough in its research of the geographic as an American institution. It presupposes that the reader is well aquainted with Gramsci's notion of mass media and the Frankfurt school borne out of this belief of hegemony perpectuated by a controlling elite. The author also takes liberty that the reader is aquainted with research methods using coding to differentiate subjects responses to pictures portrayed. Lastly, the author's use of interviewing technics and the subsequent interpretation of those responses enables the reader the opportunity to realize how the geographic and social background of the readers influence the perceptions people have when encountering this quasi-scientific journal. As an anthropological study this book illuminates the ethnocentric idealations of the Geographic's demographic readership, that is upper middle and middle class white euroamericans.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good, basic points. Flawed book.
Comment: The book is about the "making and consuming of images of the non-western world." And images, after all, "have taken over from written texts the role of primary educator." The two look at a set of 600 photographs published in the magazine from 1950 to 1986 (roughly their NG -reading lifetimes). They argue the photos are selectively chosen to present a view that does not disturb middle-class American self-identities and connected views of the 3rd world. The photos usually show a gentle, peaceful, content, colorful exotic people who, though they might not be wealthy yet, are on the road to modern progress on the Western model. The non-Western world is appropriated, its description has helped maintain social hierarchies in the First World. Even worse, the NG's practice goes so far as to abet war-making on the people it purposefully misunderstands.
There three methodological steps are to look at the process of producing the images (a social endeavor over which no individuals have total say throughout the process), examine the structure and content of the images, and identify how readers view the photographs.
"We chart the tendency of the magazine to idealize and render exotic third-world peoples, with an accompanying tendency to downplay or erase evidence of poverty and violence. The photographs show these people as either cut off from the flow of world events or involved in a singular story of progress from tradition to modernity [ahem, two very different things unless you're not thinking hard about "modernity"], a story that changes with decolonization."
Their goal is make NG and other mass media "understand and historicize the differences that separate interconnected human beings," to heighten empathy without fostering stereotyping or paternalism.
Criticism: I can't deny that the writers made such a negative impression on me with their dogma and attacking hyperbole (and dripping class resentment) that their useful ideas are weakened in my view. I wouldn't assign this to students I hope will write well.
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Title: Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by John Monaghan, Peter Just, John Monagham ISBN: 0192853465 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien ISBN: 0767902890 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 29 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall ISBN: 0618056769 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 21 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology) by Annette B. Weiner ISBN: 0030119197 Publisher: International Thomson Publishing Pub. Date: March, 1988 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Culture and Conduct: An Excursion in Anthropology by Richard A. Barrett ISBN: 0534147240 Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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