Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture edited by Joshua A. Bell, Alison K. Brown, and Robert J. Gordon (review)

I want to begin my review of Bell, Brown, and Gordon’s Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture by drawing out an observation made by John Homiak in his evocative Foreword to the text. Homiak reminds us that “the trope of ‘first contact’ has been incredibly resilient” (xi). He goes on to mention a recent CBS broadcast in which an anthropologist and a journalist discuss indigenous groups in Brazil. “Speaking over an aerial shot taken from a helicopter as they looked down upon people in an Amazonian village, the journalist informed his viewers that ‘there are sixty-eight uncontacted tribes still believed to be in Brazil’“ (xi). I was immediately struck by the similarity to another recent version of this trope that also aired on television. In this case, however, the familiar paradigm of the bearded, somewhat disheveled, white, male anthropologist, narrating into a documentary camera while the hum of aircraft engines forces his voice into a kind of continual, monotonous shout, was adopted by advertisers selling the advantages of Xfinity On Demand over satellite dish technology to receive television and other media. In this particular spot, the anthropologist flies over a dense forest and circles a clearing in which a strange isolated bit of modern suburbia—complete with minivans and soccer moms—exists. While looking down with a mixture of pity and fascination, the anthropologist marvels at these “primitive” people’s complete lack of awareness that the “modern” technology of Xfinity On Demand even exists. Meanwhile, the sonorous tones of a television documentary voice-over inform us that “the world was recently shocked to discover an isolated group of people, totally cut off from the latest advances in modern technology.” The comic use of the first contact (and disappearing tribe trope) in this commercial play easily upon a general awareness that such moments are, or at least were, a part of the anthropological sciences and the age of discovery. But more than this, the ad—as well as Homiak’s example taken from an actual documentary—draws upon a range of themes that are wonderfully articulated in the Bell et al. volume. These themes include, for example, the idea that first contact necessarily implies the primitiveness of those contacted; the superiority (via technology) of those doing the contacting or discovering; the moral advancement of “modern” society, etc. The book also highlights the idea that the models for the visual representations under discussion here were already firmly established in popular literature produced throughout the colonial period. Indeed, the development of any “trope” in the popular representation of the sciences seems to be the result of the dissemination of widespread practices that yield both a certain kind of knowledge production and a kind of gloss of the scientific methodology that seeps into popular culture. This, in and of itself, reproduces a kind of truth-effect of the way science works and the kinds of things we can know from it.

The book is divided into 13 chapters in addition to the foreword mentioned above and an afterword by Henrika Kucklick. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, but center around the relationship between anthropology and related sciences (the naturalist, the botanist, etc.), popular culture and modern technology, and the broader issues of imperialism/colonialism and the positioning of Western identity in relation to perceived exemplars of the non-Western world. These relationships bear out in a variety of fascinating ways. On the one hand, Daniel Bradburd’s essay “Grass before Kong: ‘Natives’ in the Films of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack” compares the classic ethnographic film Grass to the Hollywood blockbuster King Kong—both made by Merian Cooper and both representing non-Western “natives.” Grass is a depiction of the life-ways of nomadic pastoralists in Iran whose connection to the filmmakers’ and white Europeans’ racial ancestry is highlighted and celebrated. King Kong...