G205 WEEK 9Lutz & Collins

Magazine themes in book (Lutz & Collins):

Discussion:

Social hierarchy evolutionary theory

of societyUniversal humanityPositivism

National Geographic

What are your general observations of or thoughts about National Geographic Who is the audience? What media are

involved?

Reading National Geographic Methodologies (in “The Color of Sex”)

Medium: Magazine Issues comparatively

1950-1986. Content analysis of

photographs Advertising U.S. History 1st World (“reality”) vs.

3rd World (“fantasy”)

Some findings Colorism (292-5); NG creates “racial spaces”

292-3; Hierarchy Sexism? Positivism refers to a set of

epistemological perspectives and philosophies of science which hold that the scientific method is the best approach to uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur.

Science or Entertainment?

In contrast to Sut Jhally’s analysis of commercial photography, National Geographic both produces knowledge and represents it through the photographic image.

Meaning is created selectively while destroying original context (p. 23)

How does NG do this?

What did Lutz & Collins say about this?

Images from National Geographic (online)

1st world versus the 3rd world

The Primitive Contrast

Identity formation draws upon the image of the other – contrast, inversion, opposition

Content of category non-Western or “primitive” change over time – used to construct alterego or confirm western “Our book is not at all about the non-Western world but about its appropriation by the West and National Geographic’s role in that appropriation.” Collins & Lutz

NG “invites (readers) to look out at the rest of the world from the vantage point of the world’s most powerful nation.”(p.7) 1st versus 3rd World What do these designations mean?

Three Worlds?

The three worlds as they were separated during the Cold War era (1939–1983), each with its respective allies.

Colors do not represent current economical development.   First World: the United States and its allies.Second World: the Soviet Union, China and their allies.Third World: Non-aligned and neutral countries.

Third World

The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World) or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World).

This definition provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on social, political, and economic divisions that began some time around the 1930s in America.

The Color of Sex, Lutz & Collins

Race is a trope (signifier) of ultimate irreducible difference between groups, cultures, etc.;

Inherently unstable and coded with complex social meanings, RACE must be ambiguous enough to change over time;

Like gender, race is a social category that is established through a constant process of identification--self identification and through external associations with categories and expectations (trope, signifier).

Objective Photography?The naturalist argument in photography (p. 66) –

“The value of the picture resides in its truth observation. This value is jeopardized to the extent that the photographer intervenes in the social circumstances, causing a rupture in what naturally would have happened”

(Becker, Art Worlds 1978)

This is a structuralist argument in which objective truth is a given.

What are some of the pitfalls/advantages of “objective” truth claims?

Do Images Matter?“more or less harmful ways of viewing difference”

Strategies for describing human differences have helped create and reproduce social hierarchies (p. 3)

“At the least these hierarchies have created small humiliations and rejections, and have lessened opportunities. At the worst, they have abetted wars of extermination, lynching, and rape. Representations…are never irrelevant, never unconnected to the world of actual social relations.”

Racialized Spaces / Gendered Spaces

First world“Real” peopleMachine usageWhiteActive

Third WorldSpace of “fantasy”Ritual practicesPassiveColorism by activity

(dark skin=more labor, poor, infantile)

Women represent “women of the world”

Women signify “Universal Human powers”

The Color of Sex Discussion Questions

How is nudity coded in NG?

How does viewing photographs differ from viewing ads?

What does the title of the chapter mean?

What happens to the gendering of public and private in the chapter?

What are some consequences of understanding race as a trope and/or a signifier?