Abstract
This chapter argues that the rituals of warfare detailed in Robert Gardner’s film study of the Dugum Dani people offer a picture of cyclical human conflict kept in restraint, however chronically painful it might be to the participants, by corrective rituals. It further raises the problems faced by documentary filmmakers who would reconstruct the lives of people to present a coherent picture of societies long gone. The social, political, scientific, and artistic dimensions of film’s epistemology are highlighted, while the wider significance of ethnographic cinema, whatever its shortcomings, is considered in light of the expanded scope of human conflict in the Anthropocene.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Documentary Educational Resources (DER) website description of the film at http://www.der.org/films/dead-birds.html, accessed on March 20, 2017.
- 2.
Throughout the present study, film locations are specified by time-counter numbers.
- 3.
The most theoretically exacting and thorough critique of Gardner’s filmography in light of professional ethnography is Jay Ruby’s (1991) review of Dead Birds in the context of Gardner’s oeuvre. For more positive, if still mixed, assessments of Gardner’s contributions in ethnographic film, especially for the purpose of anthropological pedagogy, see Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, eds. (2009) as well as Jennifer Deger, where she comments: “Collectively, the contributors make a strong case for Gardner’s importance for new generations of filmmakers and ethnographers seeking to explore what Barbash and Taylor identify as the tension ‘between the discursive and the figural at the heart of visual anthropology’ (p. 2)” (2009, 48). For Gardner’s contribution to enlivening research, creativity, and teaching in anthropology through the production of his films on DVD, see, for example, John Bishop (2012).
- 4.
Plato says, for example, in his excursus on the good, “This thing, then, that grants truth to the objects of knowledge and renders the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of good: the cause of knowledge and of truth in so far as it is discerned and understood” (6.508e.1–3).
- 5.
“Actor” might be expanded, as Bruno Latour (2017, 72–79) argues, to “actant”— “an agent, an actor, and actant, by definition, is that which acts, that which has, is endowed with, agency,” (210). Actants include nonhuman agents.
- 6.
Benhabib elaborates: “This defense of human rights is subject to the same criticism as all other agent-centric views: that some condition is necessary for the exercise of my agency does not impose an obligation upon you to respect this condition, unless you and I also recognize each other’s equality and reciprocity as moral beings” (227, n. 17).
- 7.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations from classical and modern languages are my own.
- 8.
Hence, Mary Jane West-Eberhard comments:
It is not surprising that students of human behavior have been among the first to complain about the failure of evolutionary biology to deal effectively with complex adaptive plasticity. Anthropologists, for example, have good reason to question the explanations of a strongly gene-centered sociobiology. Human behavior is essentially circumstantial. We know intuitively that our phenotypes are molded by our environments—by mothers, fathers, schoolteachers, economics, and accidents of history. But in this respect human nature is like every other phenotype of every other animal or plant. A phenotype is a product of both genotype and environment. If this is true, then how can students of social evolution so often predict cultural patterns and insect behavior from models based on genes alone? (2003, Kindle location 484)
We shall return to the issue of adaptive plasticity in the discussion of altruism from an evolutionary perspective in Chap. 10. West-Eberhard, Mary Jane. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (Kindle Locations 488-493). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
- 9.
See José Medina (2011) for a good example of what I call “radical pluralism.”
- 10.
See “The Charm and Terror of Digitation,” in White (1998, 102–105).
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White, D. (2018). Documentary Intertext: Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds 1964. In: Film in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93015-2_3
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