Turner and Ginsburg

The Ginsburg article addresses the debate concerning the impact of media created by indigenous peoples and the affect the exposure to Western technology may have. According to Ginsburg, having the ability to film and record daily occurrences among an indigenous group results in a kind of Faustian dilemma. For something to be considered faustian it usually implies some moral integrity has been compromised in order to achieve a higher level of success or recognition. To call this particular situation faustian is apt: on the one hand media allows indigenous people to translate their own identity as well as create films that serve their own purposes while on the other hand the spread of technology can be seen as an assault to indigenous culture, language, imagery, relationship between generations and respect for traditional knowledge (96). It's a similar debate that occurs when Westerners make ethnographic studies of other cultures. Are they merely spreading knowledge and creating an awareness of another society that lives in this world? Or is it an affront to the group's way of life, to be exposed like an object to strangers?

Turner, in his article "Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video," in addition to looking at how indigenous people, a group called the Kayapo living in Brazil, dealt with media technology, also wrote about the notion of the representation. He cites another another anthropologist, James Faris, who holds the view that Western produced projects destroy the subjectivity of those being filmed, the 'others,' and reducing them to objects of the Western 'gaze' (14). I don't agree with Faris and neither, it appears, did Turner but the simple act of turning a camera, wielded by a Western camera person, on a non-Westerner subject, does not always produce objectivity. Filmmakers who interact with their subjects - Jean Rouch - avoid this problem of 'gaze' by giving them power over what they are being portrayed as. In essence this is what indigenous media is all about. The ability of a group of people to represent themselves to others in the way they wish to be represented. Of course there are problems and issues but there is no perfect way to depict a culture that is going to be accurate every time, no matter if Western or indigenous.