阿凡达Avatar与人类学

Avatar(阿凡达), pop culture, anthropology, ethic
981 文化人类学专题 982 | 06 元月, 2010 00:01
最近最卖座的片子Avatar(阿凡达), 一方面有处理"原始"社会, 一方面在片中有像是人类学家担任帝国将军顾问的情节. 有一些关于这些事情的讨论:
国立暨南国际大学人类学研究所

Avatar(阿凡達), pop culture, anthropology, ethic
981 文化人類學專題 982 | 06 元月, 2010 00:01
最近最賣座的片子Avatar(阿凡達), 一方面有處理"原始"社會, 一方面在片中有像是人類學家擔任帝國將軍顧問的情節. 有一些關於這些事情的討論:
國立暨南國際大學人類學研究所
http://uscnews.usc.edu/arts/a_world_all_their_own.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/price12232009.html

A World All Their Own

By Nancy Lutkehaus on December 24, 2009 7:59 AM
 
USC College anthropology professor Nancy Lutkehaus
Photo/Steve Cohn
Filmmakers are storytellers, but they are also architects and anthropologists. They must create whole worlds in which their stories can unfold. And the worlds they create must be coherent and believable, be they a representation of our own society or an entirely new universe.

Few filmmakers, however, have had the time or resources to do so with such attention to detail as James Cameron, director of such blockbusters as Titanic, Aliens and the Terminator films.

During the summer of 2008, I briefly experienced this aspect of Cameron when his associate, producer Jon Landau (a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts) contacted me. Cameron wanted to consult with an anthropologist who had worked with so-called “primitive” tribal groups about his film project Avatar.

Intrigued, I arranged to go to their studios — a sprawling network of offices, rooms crammed with computer monitors and electronic equipment, and a cavernous sound stage housed in a former airplane hangar, part of a complex near Playa del Rey where industrialist Howard Hughes constructed his Spruce Goose airplane.

There I met Landau, a short, affable man dressed casually in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. He proceeded to tell me about the film, Cameron’s sci-fi adventure set on the imaginary planet of Pandora some time in the distant future. One aspect of the project especially caught my attention. Early on, Cameron had hired Paul Frommer, a linguist from USC, to create an entirely new language to be spoken by the Na’vi people, the inhabitants of Pandora.

Frommer, who earned his doctorate in linguistics from USC College and is now professor of clinical management communication in the USC Marshall School of Business, told me that Cameron had come to him with a few Polynesian-sounding words he may have picked up in New Zealand. He asked Frommer to incorporate these into a new language — complete with its own phonetic system, morphology and vocabulary — for the Na’vi to speak.

Since Cameron envisioned the Na’vi to be a sci-fi version (9 feet tall, incredibly skinny and blue-skinned) of the so-called “primitive” tribes anthropologists once studied in places like Africa and Papua New Guinea (where I had done fieldwork), Frommer said he created a language for them that was “spiced” with what to most westerners’ ears would sound like “exotic elements,” such as ejectives and velar nasals.

On my second visit to the studios, I met Cameron, a tall, sandy-haired man not given to small talk. He also had hired L.A.-based choreographer Lula Washington, renowned for her work that incorporates elements of African dance and music. She was choreographing several of the ritual ceremonies performed by the Na’vi. As Cameron, Washington and I discussed aspects of the Avatar script, such as the coming-of-age ceremony that the film’s protagonist, Jake Sully, undergoes, it became apparent to me that Cameron was thoroughly familiar with much basic anthropology and had read widely about non-Western religious beliefs and practices.

When I finally viewed the complete film, it made sense to me why Cameron was interested in talking with an anthropologist who specialized in non-Western tribal societies. He is not only obsessed with details but also, not surprisingly, fascinated with expertise — both his own and that of others — especially when it bears directly on his own projects. Cameron is like a collector of fine art who sees himself as a connoisseur, and my function was less that of a dealer who brings rare objects to the collector, but rather that of a curator whose expertise provides the imprimatur of authenticity.

The lush primal world of Pandora and the exotic culture of the Na’vi revealed in the film include many of the basic elements of what used to be called “primitive” societies — animism, a coming-of-age ceremony and test of manhood, a religion based on a supreme (maternal) tree spirit. It is truly a 21st-century elegy to a lost world — as well as Cameron’s warning to our own.

Nancy Lutkehaus is professor of anthropology, gender studies and political science, and chair-elect for the Department of Anthropology at USC College.
http://uscnews.usc.edu/arts/a_world_all_their_own.html