Fluent Essays

Homework 1 Read the course lecture then read Lutz & Collins essay (both attached), then write notes of what did you read. HOW DO IMAGES DEFINE OUR DEFINITION OF THE WORLD? According to Lutz and Collins, National Geographic images can be:     •    Exoticized     •    Politicized            •    Sexualized     •    Idealized Homework 2 Read the NY Times article from 2018: National Geographic admits 'racist' decades-long coverage  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/business/media/national-geographic-race.html And write notes. UNIV2001 Fall 2021 Professor Lisa Karrer Week #6 Part #1 Lecture Reading National Geographic READ: Lutz & Collins Reading National Geographic (Coursepack) Using past issues of National Geographic as their topic, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins examine how photographs can be editorialized, manipulated and appropriated as cultural attractions or spectacles, a way of presenting cultures as “different” from ours. The authors examine how for decades National Geographic’s success was based on supporting western stereotypes, keeping these cultures “outside”, to be viewed as “the other.” HOW DO IMAGES DEFINE OUR DEFINITION OF THE WORLD? In this essay, the writers: • Ask how people in other lands have been depicted, what they have been photographed doing, and how the photo has been composed. • Look at photographs as they relate to each other (that is, the set of National Geographic magazines of the period) and to their historical and social context (the United States since 1950). • Develop a critical sense of the photograph as an artifact that can be analyzed with some reference to—but not reducible to—its makers’ institutional context, constraints, intentions, and unconscious motives on the one hand, or, on the other, its readers’ construction of meaning. 2 • According to Lutz and Collins, images can be: • Exoticized • Politicized • Sexualized • Idealized EXOTICIZED: • Accentuating cultural differences (strange-seeming rituals or inexplicable behavior, (see Horace Miner Nacirema) • The Role of Color Photography presenting an exotically peopled world; saturated color makes for intrinsically more interesting images • The non-Westerner comes to be portrayed as a ritual performer living in a sacred (some would say superstitious) world. • Promoting the view of “the other” as superstitious or irrational makes the viewer feel superior • Making ritual routine – flattens (deadens) the emotional life of the people depicted (see Tom Driver The Magic of Ritual) • The funeral becomes a moment of cultural display (with special customs of paraphernalia or dress) rather than a moment of grief IDEALIZED: • The Smile - The smiling, happy person evokes the goal of the pursuit of happiness, written into the Declaration of Independence • Gentle Natives and Wars Without Brutalized Bodies • Shunning of the poor, the ill, and the hungry • Americans see themselves as no longer in possession of a culture but as holding on to history through their scientific advancements and their power to influence the evolutionary advance of other peoples to democracy and market economies (capitalism) 3 SEXUALIZED: • The Naked Black Woman / The first inclusion of a bare-breasted woman in the pages of the Geographic occurred in 1896, and was accompanied then, as now, by shameless editorial explanation • The imputation of erotic qualities or even sexual license to non- Westerners (particularly women) • None of the hundreds of women whose breasts were photographed in the magazine were white-skinned POLITICIZED: • Chiefly derogatory • Relating to, affecting, or acting according to the interests of status or authority within an organization, rather than matters of principle • Compare to The White Man's Burden: the alleged duty of white people in authority to manage the affairs of “less developed” nonwhites Submit your detailed Written Notes to Week #6 Part 1 Assignment Folder DUE before Noon Sept 30 Four A World Brightly Different: Photographic Conventions 1950-1986 To make an exact image is to insure against disappearance, to cannibalize life until it is safely and permanently a specular image, a ghost. (Haraway 1984/85:42) T he result of the production practices and institutional his-tory just described is a rich and voluminous corpus of magazine issues and photographs. Even decades-old issues of the magazine have a significant continuing life. Millions of copies are archived in public libraries, and millions more inhabit the bookshelves and attics of private homes. Cur- rent copies are scattered liberally across America's coffee tables and doctors' waiting rooms. This corpus has, then, both historical significance and contemporary impact. To understand it, we begin with an analysis of the surface content of the photos. We ask how people in other lands have been depicted, what they have been photographed doing, and how the photo has been composed. The goals of this exploration are to describe the genre, to glean some clues as to the models of difference held by the producers of the magazine, and to relate both of these aspects to historical sociocultural processes and changes of the post- war period. In the next four chapters, we look at photographs as they relate to each other (that is, the set of National Geo- 87 Chapter Four graphic magazines of the period) and to their historical and social context (the United States since 1950). We develop our own critical sense of the photograph as an artifact that can be analyzed with some reference to but not reducible to—its makers' institutional context, constraints, in- tentions, and unconscious motives on the one hand, or, on the other its readers' construction of meaning. In reading the photographs in this way, we have drawn on the insights of the social historians and theoreti- cians of images, including especially Benjamin (1985), Gaines (1988) Geary (1988), Graham-Brown (1988), Modleski (1988), Sekula (1981)', Shapiro (1988), Sontag (1977), Tagg (1988), Traube (1989), and William- son (1978).l These scholars have drawn our attention to the many ways in which photographs signify—through formal elements such as color, composition, and vantage point; through narrative structure, including what is internal to the shot and what results from setting photographs in a sequence; through specific items in photo and caption that relate directly to cultural ideas and phenomena outside the picture; through their position in a cultural hierarchy that includes art, television, and consumer goods; and through their ability to assume or ignore, to evoke or discount, their readers' social experience and values. In addition to this kind of analysis of individual Geographic photo- graphs, we took a large set from the period 1950 through 1986 and systematically asked a series of questions about each. We chose this period because we wanted to trace effects of the decolonization process and the Vietnam War. Another consideration was that only after World War II did a large number of people contribute to each issue. Photo- graphs before the war reflect individual as much as truly institutional behavior. Our method consisted of randomly sampling one photograph from each of the 594 articles featuring non-Western people published in that period.2 Each photo was coded independently by two people for twenty- 1. It is perhaps not surprising that much of the most insightful work on the relationship between images and society has been done in the two areas of advertising (among others, Ewen 1988; Goffman 1979; Williamson 1978) and "documentary" photography. In this latter area, the bulk of the work done has been on early documentary photos in the U.S. and Europe (Moeller 1989; Tagg 1988; Trachtenberg 1989) and of tribal peoples (Geary 1988; Green 1984; Graham-Brown 1988; Lyman 1982). 2. "Non-Western" countries were defined as all areas outside of North America and Europe (the latter including Greece and Turkey). While Canada, Alaska, and the Soviet Union were generally excluded from our consideration, A World Brightly Different two characteristics (see Appendix A), many of which will be described and analyzed in the following chapters.3 Although at first blush it might appear counterproductive to reduce the rich material in any photograph to a small number of codes, quantification does not preclude or substitute for qualitative analysis of the pictures. It does allow, however, discovery of patterns that are too subtle to be visible on casual inspection and protection against an unconscious search through the magazine for only those which confirm one's initial sense of what the photos say or do. An important set of themes runs through all National Geographic ren- derings of the non-Euramerican world. The people of the third and fourth worlds are portrayed as exotic; they are idealized; they are natural- ized and taken out of all but a single historical narrative; and they are sexualized. Several of these themes wax and wane in importance through the postwar period, but none is ever absent. While each region, country,' •> or ethnic group has received some distinctive treatment, the magazine's global orientation means that readers may be likely to see all regions, even those occasionally not so depicted, as exotic, ideal, and so on. Together these themes establish National Geographic'?, style of coverage, and they have, over the course of a century, helped to set an important cornerstone of its readers' definitions of the world. By looking more closely at some of these features of the photos, we can begin to see how the process of world definition is achieved. An Exotic World The eye of National Geographic, like the eye of anthropology, looks for cultural difference. It is continually drawn to people in brightly colored, "different" dress, engaged in initially strange-seeming rituals or inexpli- cable behavior. This exoticism involves the creation of an other who is we did include articles on indigenous people of these areas. Articles on native peoples in the United States were not included because they constitute a very special group of people for magazine producers and readers alike. In taking our sample, we used only photographs in which a person was visible (more than a dot in a distant landscape). 3. The coders were ourselves and a graduate student in anthropology. Exten- sive preliminary coding led to revision and expansion of initial versions of the code sheet. After a final code sheet was decided upon, initial agreement between coders occurred for 86 percent of all decisions. Discussion between coders was subsequently used to resolve disagreements. The photographic features coded are described in Appendix A. Chapter Four strange but—at least as important—beautiful. At other times and in other media outlets, the exoticism of other people has been framed visu- ally and verbally as less beautiful and more absurdly or derisively differ_ ent. Movies, television news, and other postwar cultural artifacts have frequently trafficked in revolting ethnic difference. Take, for example the evil penumbra painted around the eventually self-immolating Arabs in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or the pathos and ugliness communicated by news images of Latin American poverty or Ethiopia's starvation (see also Postone and Traube 1986). These kinds of ugliness are relatively rare in the National Geographic. The exotic other is by definition attractive, albeit in a special, threefold sense. When the camera looks for the unusual, it ensures a reader whose attention is riveted by the intriguing scene. It draws attention, at least implicitly, to things that define "us" in our unmarked and usual state of humanness, that is, as people who dress and act in "standard" ways. It also creates a distance that the magazine may or may not have attempted to bridge in other ways. The distance is a product of making the pictured person a kind of spectacle, the latter defined as something that both demands attention and "offers an imagistic surface of the world as a strategy of containment against any depth of involvement with that world" (Polan 1986b:63). One of the effects of the emphasis on spectacle is to discredit the significance of the foreign, even to create a sense of its fictitiousness. A World of Ritual. No single feature renders the third world exotic more forcefully than the magazine's focus on ritual. Nearly one-fifth of all photographs with non-Westerners in them feature people engaged in or preparing for a ritual—ritual being defined in the narrow sense of sacred and formally organized group behavior. These pictures are among the most dramatic in the magazine, often chosen by the editors to spread across two pages in brilliant polychrome. A director in the photography department explained that all photographers naturally gravitate to ritual events because color and action make for intrinsically more interesting material. The interest also derives from cultural themes and helps repro- duce them. The non-Westerner comes to be portrayed as a ritual per- former, embedded (perhaps some would read encrusted) in tradition and living in a sacred (some would say superstitious) world. This is an em- phasis that National Geographic has shared with earlier photography of the non-Western world, whose focus on ritual "reflected the assumption A World Brightly Different f Boas's generation that ritual contained distilled history and cultural isdom that it was the most conservative and thus the most meaningful mnant of culture" (Banta and Hinsley 1986:106). In other instances, this focus on non-Western ritual can be consistent with a view of the ther as superstitious or irrational and might be responsible for contempt for the native mind (Drinnon 1980:442). National Geographic appears not to have taken this perspective, at least in the postwar period and in relation to the world's "great religions." Much of the text accompanying pictures of ritual in the National Geo- graphic makes explicit reference to an area's rituals and religion(s) as part of a long, ancient tradition. So the caption to a 1962 photograph of a New Guinea marriage feast notes that "tribal life still lies locked in millenniums-old patterns." Context for a Tibetan shaman at prayer in a 1977 photo is provided by a caption which asserts that "the ancient Tibetan way of life . . . combines animism with the teachings of Bud- dha." The magazine tends to downplay a ritual's contemporary actuality and the historical changes that preceded its current form, although reli- gious syncretism is often highlighted as a special kind of contrast narra- tive. Fascination with ritual stems from the sense that it is a key to the past and a sign of the trip through time taken by the photographer and writer. Anthropology has made parallel connections between past time and other people (Fabian 1983; Price 1989). Two primary features of exoticism—living close to the sacred or supernatural and living with the past—are actually combined in many of these pictures. By presenting the ritual as a feature of custom or tradition, these pictures can also have, for many readers, the unintended effect of flattening the emotional life of the people depicted. This is because the ritual procession can be seen as a routine that people follow rather than as an expression of individual and group faith. The funeral becomes a moment of cultural display (of special paraphernalia or dress, as well as custom more generally) rather than a moment of grief (Rosaldo 1989). '' Indexical Dress. In more than half of the photographs in the sample set, the non-Westerner is shown in indigenous dress, tribal fashion, and/ or ritual costume. The National Geographic searches out native clothing in its most elaborate form. The Indian woman is often dressed not sim- ply in an everyday sari, but in a gold-embroidered one, and she is fes- tooned with jewelry. A Tibetan couple in the July 1955 issue stand, arms down, in a full-front portrait with little in the background or 90 Chapter Four The narrative structure of photographs is often organized around an undiluted display of indigenous dress, which in- dexes exotic cultural difference, as in this 1954 photo of a Masai woman. (Photo: W. Robert Moore, © National Geographic Society) their gestures to distract from their bright silk and brocade outfits. A photograph such as that of a Masai woman (1954) is cropped so as to narrate a story about native styles of dress. Exotic dress alone often stands for an entire alien life-style, locale, or mind-set. This is true not only of the National Geographic but of other Western photographic work on the third world as well. Local costume suggests something about the social stability and timelessness of the people depicted (Graham-Brown 1988), and in a story drawing attention to the social transformation of a people, changes from native to western- 92 A World Brightly Different style dress are often highlighted by photographs that set locals in the two styles of dress in explicit contrast. A photo from the January 1983 Geographic shows young South American Indians dancing, some in na- tive skirts and loincloths, some in jeans and T-shirts. A central story of the picture, told by way of dress, is of an encounter or passage between an exotic cultural pattern and a familiar one. The Western observer is likely to see Western dress as saying something about the mind-set of the person wearing those clothes. The man in Western dress can be understood as desiring social change, material progress, and Westerniza- tion in other spheres. Exotic dress can stand for a premodern attitude, Western dress for a forward-looking Western orientation. The highlighting of native dress contributes not only to a view of others as different, but also to their framing as picturesque and erotic, beautiful and sexually alluring (Graham-Brown 1988:118). The orange silks and fur-trimmed shirts of the local elite wrap whole peoples in an imagined sensuality and luxurious beauty. Because differences in dress can easily be interpreted as questions of style and because they draw attention away from such matters as conflict of interest, they make the entire notion of difference among people easily digestible (Bolton 1990:269). Difference becomes assimilable to the idea of taste, and, like that concept, allows the renaming of poverty as "bad taste" and unlike values as matters of consumer choice. The focus on native dress in National Geographic shows some fluctua- tions during the postwar period, dropping slowly over two decades to 44 percent of the total in 1970. A sudden reversal of this trend put the figure at 63 percent in the early seventies, but that increase was again steadily eroded through the next fifteen years. It is not until the mid- eighties that the proportion of native dress found in photographs reached the lower levels of the late sixties. The editors of the magazine now face a substantial challenge in how they will deal with the theme of exoticism as differences in dress play less and less into defining cultural difference and as more and more tourists have already seen the dress and the festi- vals that have done the work of painting an exotic other. The Role of Color Photography. Contemporary National Geographic photographs display vibrant, striking colors. Advanced printing tech- niques now allow ink to be laid down in such a way that color virtually hovers above the glossy page. Giving the magazine its allure and self- definition, color has distinctive qualities both for those who take the 93 Chapter Four pictures and those who read them. Polan (1986a) contrasts the glamorous and wish-fulfilling qualities of color with the mundane factuality sug- gested by black and white. Advertising photos have, since the 1950s, almost always been made in color, while news photography has until recently almost always been reproduced in black and white. Through these practices, color has become the language of consumption and plenty, black and white the conduit of facts, often spare or oppressive. Color is the vehicle of spectacle, black and white of the depth of facts behind the screen. Accordingly, for journalists and some artists, color photography came to be seen as "frivolous and shallow," black and white, with its focus on light and shape, as "more artistic and creative" (Bryan 1987:295). On the whole, however, color photography has been perfectly suited to the National Geographic project of presenting an exotically peopled world. While photographs of animals, geological formations, and Amer- ican and European subjects are also, of course, presented in color, color in relation to people in exotic places can and does lend different potential meaning to a photograph. The color of an orange shirt on an American man can be absorbed as a visual pleasure in itself, while orange-colored robes on a Buddhist monk might become "saffron" in caption or in the reader's imagination, thereby underlining cultural difference. Some photos continued to appear in black and white into the period we are examining, particularly through I960,4 and it is instructive to note what subjects the editors have tended to portray in black and white when its use was declining. A significant number of these pictures show the Western narrator of the article, often explorer or anthropologist. It is almost as though the black-and-white photo says, "This is a person of a distinct type, standing to his 'colored' brethren as the factual black and white does to the fantasy, multicolor shot." Here, more clearly than elsewhere, the Western observer or explorer is portrayed as scientist, whose presence needs to be reported but whose appearance need not be examined in detail. Rarely treated in black and white are the ritual, the spectacle par excellence; and the portrait, a study of personality, the "colorful" individual.5 Declining use can also mean that a black-and- 4. Of the 568 sample pictures containing non-Westerners, 65 are in black and white. 5. Ritual tends to be depicted in color (x2 = 3.008, df = 1, p = .083); only three of fifty portraits are shown in black and white. 94 A World Brightly Different white photo is likely to be interpreted as an old photo by contemporary readers. Idealizations: From Noble Savage to a Middle-class World The American Museum of Natural History bears striking similarities to the National Geographic magazine (on the former, see Haraway 1984/85). Both began as scientific institutions in the last third of the nineteenth century, with the aim of collecting natural artifacts from around the world and making them available to a public much wider than an edu- cated or scientific elite. Both made extensive use of photographs, and both were concerned to present nature as highly ordered rather than random, creating, in effect, a world without blemish or handicap. Just as the Museum's dioramas never included old or feeble exemplars of elephants or zebras, so too has National Geographic presented, until the late 1970s, photographs that virtually eliminate the ill, the pockmarked, the deformed, or the hungry. The idealization of the non-Westerner, like the idealization of nature, has its roots in the magazine's explicit editorial policy. More broadly, we can see this beautification of the world's people as linked to a number of themes in American cultural history. The first is the notion that nature represented a spiritual domain in which the ills of civilization could be cured (Nash 1982). Since at least some non-Western people were sub- sumed under the category natural rather than cultural, their perfection and beauty would be represented. There are in the magazine traces of the nineteenth-century religious scientism in which nature was considered divine. These pieties, once centered in the wilderness concept and now in some kinds of environmentalism, echo Schiller's statement, "Everything that nature achieves is divine" (cited in Monti 1987:80). The ambivalence toward modernity that arose with the new middle class at the turn of the century (Lears 1981) could also be played out in these views of beauty and nature in a simpler, more natural overseas world. Another factor in idealizing is an anxiety about threats of chaos or decay. An ideal world, free of suffering, does not require work to bring about change. Connectedness and responsibility are downplayed, as the world's peoples become aesthetic objects to appreciate. The act of appre- ciating them lets the viewer see himself or herself as both humane (be- cause the photographed are still recognized as people) and as cultured (because the photograph is like a museum piece, a work of art). The 95 Chapter Four beauty of these pictures can also be seen, as Haraway (1984/85) points out for nature photography and taxidermy and as Stewart (1984) points out for the souvenir, as the attempt to simultaneously arrest time and decay and to allay elite and middleclass fears that the wealth of the American twentieth century might be lost. Finally, in looking for and finding perfection, the National Geographic camera may prevent the reader from finding the exotic other too differ- ent. Motivated by its classic humanism, the Geographic has cleaned up the culturally different person in the same way that other photogra- phers have created images of gays and lesbians in America, presenting "clean-cut, shiny-haired, Land's End citizens with a difference" (Grovcr 1990:168). The move to create a beautiful image can stir up new prob- lems, however, for the search for beauty can produce an intensification of the "fracture, partial identification, pleasure and distrust" (Rose 1986:227) that might accompany much visual experience. We can now consider some of the techniques by which the magazine achieves its idealization of others. The Smile. Though National Geographic editors see themselves as documenting naturally occurring behavior, the non-Westerners they photograph often acknowledge and turn to the camera. Twenty percent of all pictures have at least one foreground figure looking at the camera, and almost one-third of all photos show one or more people smiling. The smile, like the portrait, follows cultural conventions in defining and depicting the person. The smiling, happy person evokes the goal of the pursuit of happiness, written into the Declaration of Independence. These conventions stand in marked contrast to other ethnopsychologies (Lutz 1988) and other, more serious modes of composing the self for the photograph (King 1985). The smile is a key way of achieving idealization of the other, permitting the projection of the ideal of the happy life. Portraiture. The portrait often aims to capture the subject at that person's best; because it is posed, it allows for maximum control by both photographer and subject. Moreover, the goal of humanizing the other—giving the reader a sense that these are real people—is furthered when people are photographed as individuals and encountered as read- able faces. National Geographic staff, recognizing the value of the portrait, makes it a staple of virtually all articles. Nine percent of the photos we A World Brightly Different examined show a person close up and often outside of a recognizable context, and this percentage has remained relatively constant.6 Many of the photographs that National Geographic staff have selected as classic examples of photographs of the non-West are portraits. Portraits fre- quently adorn the walls of editorial offices; they are heavily reproduced in the book Images of the World (1981), which was published to define and celebrate National Geographic photographers; and they dominate in a centennial article on the magazine's photography (Livingston 1988). Of the twenty photographs in the article, which describes an exhibit in 1988 of National Geographic photos at the Corcoran Gallery in Washing- ton, D.C., thirteen were of people, and nine of those were portraits. The portrait allows for scrutiny of the person, the search for and depiction of character. It gives the ideology of individualism full play, inviting the belief that the individual is first and foremost a personality whose characteristics can be read from facial expression and gesture. In a related, although seemingly incongruous way, the portrait may also communicate a message of universal brotherhood. Many at the Geo- graphic might agree with Carder-Bresson's assessment of portraits: "They enable us to trace the sameness of man" (Galassi 1987). They do this by stripping away culture and leaving the universal, individual person. Benjamin (1985:682) notes that portraits were very popular when the camera was first invented as part of a "cult of remembrance," a kind of ancestor worship. The National Geographic portrait may likewise be re- lated to what Rosaldo (1989) calls imperialist nostalgia, that is, mourning the passing of what we ourselves have destroyed. But the National Geo- graphic portrait, like all close-ups of only a part of the body, leaves us with a fragment of a person. According to Mulvey, the close-up "gives flatness [and] the quality of a cut-out or icon" (1985:809) to the depicted. This can sometimes be amplified by the namelessness and exoticism of the photographed non-Westerners in past National Geographies. The portrait, then, has potentially paradoxical or different effects on viewers, highlighting the other as a personality, that central feature of the Western self, which yet remains unnamed, unapproachable, and frag- mented. The portrait humanizes and yet constantly threatens to be ab- 6. The portrait is a popular form of photography in all genres. The portrait in National Geographic is relatively uncommon in comparison with family and advertising photos, which prominently feature the face or full-body posed por- trait. Further research might reveal whether and how these differences in portrait rates occur by subject and genre. 96 97 Chapter Four sorbed into a taxonomic outcome—the mode of much previous photo- graphic work on non-Westerners, which has "presentedfed] them as ethnic types rather than individuals" (Geary 1988:50). Group Size. When going beyond the portrait, the National Geo- graphic still prefers to photograph non-Westerners in small groups. Al- most sixty percent of the sample photos show people in intimate groups of one to three persons, twenty-five percent in medium-size groups of four to twelve, and less than seventeen percent in large groups. Although National Geographies photographic subjects were rarely named until the 1980s (the exceptions were famous figures such as Imelda Marcos or King Hussein), individuals and small groups are nonetheless often de- picted in what might be read as rugged individualist stances. An African man is shown working alone plowing a field; a Japanese couple in their fishing boat reel in a heavy net. By contrast, print and television photo- journalism often shows large groups engaged in mass protests and the like, limiting small group photos to celebrities or the elite. Individuals or small groups appearing in other photojournalism often come in "human interest" stories, where they may include families undergoing a calamity such as a fire or earthquake. Gentle Natives and Wars Without Brutalized Bodies. In keeping with the stated policy of showing people at their best, very few National Geographic photographs show their subjects engaged in, being victimized by, or in the obvious aftermath of violent encounters. Only four photo- graphs from the entire sample show local people fighting or threatening to fight or giving evidence of previous violence. This does not necessar- ily indicate that the American audience for these images sees violence or militarism as negative; it may, though, when the violence is perpetrated or threatened by foreigners. Thus, to show these people at their best requires a nonaggressive subject. Western photographers in other pe- riods and genres have also hesitated to record militant non-Westerners, as when German photographers hesitated to depict King Njoya of cen- tral Africa in uniform during a period of anticolonial tension after 1909 (Geary 1988:53-59). In fully twelve percent of our sample photographs, however, there is some military presence, particularly men in uniform. In these photos, the military is presented as a regular, not unpleasant part of everyday life in the third world, but is rarely seen in internal or A World Brightly Different cross-national conflict. The military as an institutional force has been normalized, anger or aggression erased. The National Geographic represses what some other representations of non-Westerners prominently feature—the violent potential of the savage other. Aggressivity could be and has been seen as a sign of regression, a primitive loss of control (Gilman 1985:99). Violent resistance to empire building, American or European, has usually been treated as a personal- ity trait of natives rather than a situational response to the theft of land or other mode of attack (Drinnon 1980). This view of aggression as lack of control has led to non-Westerners being culturally constructed, like women and mental degenerates, as both physically strong and character- ologically weak (cf. Taussig 1987). While …