What I'm struggling with is understanding why we should care about these modern criticisms in the first place. When someone says, "I'm offended", what course of action does this dictate in response? It's a film, not a government policy. I can't see how an extended discourse on this matter pertains to anything of value.

I understand that you can't generalize an entire gender and adequately describe all its members. Still it's unsettling that you think I'm so far from the mark.

If you want to tell me which factors you disagree occur at all (several of the things I listed were external), and how you compensate for the others, I would appreciate it. Please don't laugh at me and call me ignorant without helping me learn.

It's not about offensiveness. It's about constructing beliefs, and representations. About how our medias shape our knowledge on each others, in particular our perceptions of human groups that are exotic to ours. These "Bushmen", as a culture, as a way-of-life, and even, implicitely, as a "nature", are not presented as fictionnal (they're not ewoks). Beyond the comedy, that film works as a misleading documentary.

I just came by to proclaim my femaleness but now that I'm here I can also add a link to the "meaning of the word atheism" debate:
http://www.patrolmag.com/2012/10/10/kenneth-sheppard/atheisms-modern-history/

I've never viewed the GMBC movies as any more of a documentary of african culture in general or "bushmen" in particular than, say, the Pink Panther movies being french documentaries or Seinfeld being a documentary on american jews. What I see is how much alike we are, even though we do things very differently. I see the human ability to adapt and communicate. And, in the second one, I see a father's love for his children; as a father myself I can relate to that (and shed manly tears).

There's a lot going on in these films; from armed conflicts to poverty to elephants being killed for their ivory to eurpoeans versus africans etc etc. To me it's mostly just part of the backdrop, possibly because these things aren't presented as "good" or "evil" - just "there". The wide variation also communicates - to me anyway - that one can't read too much into these "glimpses" of a possible variation of the "truth about Africa".

Hence I focus on the story being told. Xi (N!xau) may be no more representative of "bushmen" than Amir is representative of afghans in "The Kite Runner", but neither are unplausible characters - we "all" know someone similar to them - and the stories use these characters to communicate something that has nothing to do with either Africa or Afghanistan, but with humans.

As a norwegian I'm quite used to the stereotypic representation of norwegians in foreign films - it's usually an uncommon blend of different scandinavian treats - but that's not a "problem" as long as that character is also a human. Human traits - good ones as bad ones - overshadow cultural differences and misconceptions. In my opinion, movies should never be dissected in a vacuum; whatever a movie "is", it's defined by the interaction between the movie and its viewers, hence the audience must be taken into account too.

Take the reasonably recent norwegian movie "Trolljegeren" ("The Troll Hunter"). What would a non-norwegian get out of it? Would he/she even have the same cultural understand of what a troll is, or even the wide variety of trolls in norwegian folklore? How do they react to the trolls being able to "smell christian blood"? You don't have to look hard on the 'net to find christians from other cultures that are convinced this was added as a slur against christians and are quite offended by it. For (most) norwegians, it's part of the cultural heritage from back when Norway was christened, and there was a "fight" between the old and the new religion.

What I'm trying to say is that sometimes it's better not to dwell on the actual facts (imagine me saying that...) but rather on the overall, actual impression not being too different from the "red thread". And if you can't explain something properly, perhaps down-play it enough to keep the viewers from making too many false assumptions (like with the christian blood above). The GMBC movies are not aimed at africans, nor antropologicans, but at "casual westerners" with enough of an open mind to see that there's a lot more than one way to do things.

Anyway, if you really want to be offended by a GMBC movie, check out the chinese movie "Fei zhou he shang" (1991) aka "The Gods Must Be Crazy III". In it you get to see N!xau being possessed by the spirit of Bruce Lee so that he can fight off warriors from another tribe - the ones that the chinese vampire isn't already fighting, that is. (No, I'm not kidding.)

That exemple is interesting. I happened to like Trollhunter a lot, amongst other reasons for its back-to-the-roots approach to trolls (even though there's a fair amount of modernist, positivist, rationalisation, such as UV lights playing the role of the sun at a "metabolic" level - but these are precisely compensated by the christian blood thing). I like Mike Mignola for similar reasons. I know very little about Norwegian culture, but I happen to be interested and reading a lot about european medieval folklore and its evolutions under church pressure, which does includes trolls and variations on all sorts of herr mannelig-like tales.

All comedies based on national stereotypes are problematic, as they reinforce prejudices (there's been interesting writings around "my big fat greek wedding", for instance). But even these have a limited impact, given that we kinda live in the same world, and have various tools to nuance it, including the awareness of the stereotypes to which we are reduced ourselves. The question is slightly different when it comes to exotic populations, or people from the other side of the Great Divide, our usual Others. Our common knowledge of traditionnal tribal cultures is limited and very much channelled through few sources, mostly documentaries and fictions. Think of the image of the amerindian in old western movies, or the way people envision amazonian tribes, "cannibals", etc. Such ways of life are remote enough (in access and in style) to make us dependant on a handful of storytellers. No surprise that they are, and always were, used as projection screens for our own fantasies, more than described for who they are. They ended up as receptacles for our dramatic images of fierce warriors, noble savages, pre-cultural aedenic innocence, animal-like pre-humans, etc. You can still see echoes of these in modern versions of colonial tales - the savages in Jackson's "King Kong", the indian in "The Brotherhood of Wolves" or the "Indian in the Cupboard", the natives of Disney's "Pocahontas", or even in science-fiction, with Avatar, STar Trek, Star Wars - which is less of an issue : while scifi still reproduces these convenient archetypes, they don't replace actual human identities with them.

But what Jamie Uys' film does is basically Mickey Mouse and the Boy Thursday. It's often our first and only contact with a population we know nothing about. The question is, what do we retain of it, what does it add to our vision of the world, geographically and philosophically. As a kid, I believed that this cute and heartwarming and "so pure" tribe was real, even if slightly caricatured like all the film's characters. It is presented so, an all-knowing voiceover describes the bushmen society and cultural values at the beginning of the film, if not all the long. There is no reason not to assume it's just establishing a "true" setting for a comedy. In a context where native rights are perpetually debated (how do you manage a modern society with more or less permeable pockets of strongly different cultures, how do you deal with special rights, non-forced assimilation, etc), the image that people have of natives societies have political impacts. Again, you can refer to the popular figure of the "indio" in south american countries, and the role it plays in state policies and political populism. Beyond that, there is whole visions of humanity that may be strengthened (evolutionism, biblical visions of morally pure origins, natives belonging to the realm of nature, rousseau-an corruptibility through society, etc), the very visions that romantic descriptions of natives were inspired by, and served to exemplify. It's a population's reality, hijacked to be replaced by our convenient fantasies.

So, there's a difference of degree. The distant myths that are built on such medias (fictions, or romantic spectacle-driven documentaries) are even more potent than prejudices amongst our neighbours. We're less armed against them, and they afford to be even more ignorant of realities : no film about XXth century norwegians makes them dress differently. Even though it's still caricatures of actual elements of former ways of life (some of these can be found in documentaries on the Africa of the 50s), it still takes more liberties than what we'd accept for more familiar settings. Ask yourself, after that film, what you "know" or "assume" about bushmen populations and way of life, even knowing that it is a comedy, even suppressing the most blatant comedic effects...

Anyway, you can argue that depicting even caricatured, outdated, fantazised cultural elements in an empathic way is better than depicting fierce savages like any old school colonial adventure would do. In that sense, the myth of the noble savage does encourage distanciation to our own cultural values, even if, to some extent, it takes reality in hostage for that. This is a better ground for further enquiry, than the symetrical way of demonizing "primitives". And I'm ready to bet that, amongst all the anthropologists who now loathe that film for the patronizing fantasy that it is, a huge lot of them had chosen that career out of curiosity and empathy generated precisely by that sort of romantic tale and depiction. Still, for many people who won't investigate further, the reality of natives is what is depicted in such films (and other glimpses will be rattached to it). People can't know what to "take" and to "leave".

It's no huge problem if people are aware of the bias of that film. Knowing it's a fiction doesn't suffice (you watch Hogan's Heroes, you still learn and retain there are wooden prisoner camps with watchtowers, barbed wires and germans in uniform), people can't evaluate which aspects are fictionous, exagerated, etc. They're a lot of components taken at face value. All it requires is a few notes contextualising it, the awareness of existing anthropological (and native) criticism. It's just that fans of that film just tend not to be aware of its questionnable aspects, and see it just as a nice comedy to the glory of some native population. It's got to be pointed that this film's universe is more largely a romanic fantasy than one would expect, and that it also does more disservice to the native's political reality than what the empathic fantasy of noble (puerile) savages would do at first sight. That's all.

O.o

I thought this was Female: Y/N thread?

More specifically "If you're a female say Yes."

[not a female, but the... discussion has been interesting]

I've been iterating on how to answer and I'm still not sure, so I'll go with a few no-brainers:
First of all - I did not intend to offend neither you nor anyone here, as I've already been trying to allude to.
Secondly - words are tools and can be used within different paradigms. You can't apply logic to something if everyone involved doesn't understand the word in the same way. Here we have a Polish guy trying explain to a Norwegian what he thinks a certain Russian fellow meant by a peculiar usage of an English word.
Third thing - it is pointless to try and establish "what does this mean ?" or "is this usage CORRECT ?" - there can be answers but only useful to linguists. What I prefer to ask is "what are you trying to say ?" and "in what sense (that MAKES sense) are you choosing to use this term ?". Sartre's "I am not who I am - I am who I am not" could be dismissed as an obviously false statement... or could be analyzed and understood in a way which is enlightening. Similarly: "Electra doesn't know who the person behind the curtain is. The person behind the curtain is Electra's brother. Therefore - Electra doesn't know who her brother is" - what's the deal ? "Logic does not apply (this way) within intensional contexts", AFAIR.
Lastly - you should be able to see that pretty much any statement I could make about our silly "pink poem" / "atheist argument" debacle CAN be dismissed as based on false premises or being a fallacy or whatever... Of course it can ! We're trying to establish what a term means and how it can be applied - this is something that occurs BEFORE logic and as such - it can not be analyzed using it. If you already HAVE a predetermined definition of the words "atheist" and "argument" and whatever else, insist on applying THEM and not anything else, then it OBVIOUSLY follows that you are correct and that no other answers are even possible due to how you set the problem up. There's no discussion possible here, you can comfortably sit back and call people illogical while they say stuff that is Cthuluish to you. I was trying to claim that there is a way in which the words could be understood. Does it have weird consequences if applied consistently throughout language ? Perhaps. Hey - that's not even my argument, for crying out loud. But it IS understandable. Saying "we think the same thing but you said it wrong" is cute but ultimately superfluous. I could call my glass "existing" and it would both be true and weird to say. You can drop the description altogether and not much is lost. The term Starmaker used did not add all that much to the conversation anyway, except that within non-religious contexts idiocy is very much possible. This only started to be a problem once you objected to the use of the word "atheist" in this context, instead of trying to understand in what sense it was casually applied.

It is my sincere hope that you will be able to parse the above and extract my thoughts from this humble piece of text... since that's what matters - not the letters and the sentences but the thoughts of a mind that created them.

I'm a female for real!

Would that hurt any sort of rep around here?

I think the worst what could happen would be receiving lots of gift codes from male community members. :P

+1

:)

That'd definitely have an effect on your rep!

It's odd... in this thread I have found little surprise about the male/female ratio on here.
But on another thread I was actually actively surprised to find that I am in the average age on here. I guess on a site primarily devoted to classics I shouldn't be...

That must have been priceless to see!

No, in fact +1! :) And hi from New Zealand

EDIT: Whoops ninja'd!