Avatar

Avatar is the salvaged ethnography of the future. An accounting of a distant future, replete with the ongoing contemporary geopolitical/environmental/military interplantetary regionalism, and a plot complementary to the contemporary happenings of today. It would seem then, that not much has changed in Cameron's technically "luminescent" story of the Navi (short for Native?) as juxtaposed against the issues for indigenous peoples today.

Starn's statement, "it takes the settler to make the native," is an interesting reflection on the politics of indigenous projects, i.e. Avatar, where the implications of historic disrespect for both environment and native is common place and the dominant structure is still historically colonial and imperialistic, and remains in place by agressive military might of the colonizer.

Avatar is entertaining. For the broader public, it is a wonderful movie about the triumph of, once again, the typical plot: heroism, love, courage against all the odds, sacrifice, and finally, survival. Yet again, another landscape destroyed, another native peoples almost rendered to oblivion...why do these stories continue?

Clifford sees the relationship between the anthros and natives as a way of establishing a new "relationship" between colonizer and native, a "postcolonial future negotiated pragmatically in relations of respect and collaboration." Really? Simpson takes on Starn's Here Comes the Anthros (Again) by wrapping up the new field of
Indigenous Studies in the ideas of spectacle, anthropology and sovereignty, and ends with noted excitement regarding the opportunity to "think with, teach with the works of and authored by those people (Non-Indigenous and Indigenous) who "take critical analysis seriously and in doing so position readers as witnesses to the painful and spectacular life of U.S. and Canadian settler colonialism." A new kind of political formation that would defy the norm or stereotypical relationship between anthros/settler and native/colonized in the goal of re-establshing native nationhood   and sovereignty.

As for Starn, he writes that "the best new ethnographies focus not on native people alone, but rather on what might be called "formations of indigeneity" that focuses on
relationships of power and clarifying what that means in terms of white, black, Indian or something else." Within the framework of capitalism, could Avatar been created, produced, and the story told, without all of "ism" structures in place and be economically successful?

Kmehaiku