ANTH3242W: Hero, Savage, or Equal? Representations of NonWestern Peoples in the Movies

This course will explore images of nonWestern peoples and cultures as they have appeared in the movies and in other popular media. It has four aims: l) to introduce the problem of nonWestern peoples in the West from historical points of view, 2) to discuss the relationship between mass media and issue of representation to the marketplace, 3) to introduce the concept of morality in and through collective representations as developed by Durkheim, and 4) to analyze the problem of moral agency in a series of Hollywood and Independent movies which portray nonwestern peoples and cultures. We will watch movies portraying three different groups of cultures, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and the Japanese. In each unit, we will first read important commentary on Western representations of each of these peoples, such as Bernard Smith on Pacific Islanders and Vine Deloria on images of Native Americans and Gina Marchetti on Hollywood’s Japanese.

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