metapunk

A lot of people on the glorious interwebz have raised issue with the lack of subtlety in James Cameron’s recent film Avatar. It’s a fairly derivative plot, featuring a conflict between a heavily stereo-typed military-industrial complex and a fairly contrived native society (which incidentally, is also the central conflict in Martian Cycles, but hopefully with more depth).  In any case, people have brought up the issue of White Guilt and subtle racism. Now, I’m not disagreeing with these articles, exactly. I just think they’re kind of missing the point. (continue reading…)

One of my most interesting teachers in university was anthropologist David Turner. After bringing convocation hall to order with a Didgeridoo, he and three other teachers began the first day of my first year anthropology class, describing the four branches of anthropological science (physical, linguistic, archaeology, and socio-cultural). Later that year, Turner taught the socio-cultural portion and I think for the first time in my life I realized that indigenous people really don’t think like us “civilized” folk at all. I mean, like night and day.  As someone who has been dissatisfied with the conventional thinking of Western Civilization all of his life—well, I took that realization to be a sign that there may, in fact, be some intelligent life still left on Earth. (continue reading…)