When documentary filmmaker Cevin Soling was in seventh grade, his
social studies teacher passed out a copy of an essay by Lewis
Thomas titled “The Iks“. It referred to a small tribe in northern
Uganda that might have been called “the Ickies” based on what
Thomas wrote:
The message of the book [anthropologist Colin Turnbull's "The
Mountain People"] is that the Iks have transformed themselves into
an irreversibly disagreeable collection of unattached, brutish
creatures, totally selfish and loveless, in response to the
dismantling of their traditional culture. Moreover, this is what
the rest of us are like in our inner selves, and we will all turn
into Iks when the structure of our society comes all unhinged.
They breed without love or even casual regard. They defecate on
each other’s doorsteps. They watch their neighbors for signs of
misfortune, and only then do they laugh. In the book they do a lot
of laughing, having so much bad luck. Several times they even
laughed at the anthropologist, who found this especially repellent
(one senses, between the lines, that the scholar is not himself
the world’s luckiest man). Worse, they took him into the family,
snatched his food, defecated on his doorstep, and hooted dislike
at him. They gave him two bad years.
Three decades later, Soling decided to travel to Ik territory and
meet the people who were either maligned by Turnbull or lived up
(or down) to the portrait. The chronicle of that voyage is in the
marvelous documentary “Ickland” that closed yesterday at the Quad
Cinema in New York City but can be ordered from the film’s
website. As someone who has followed controversies in academic
anthropology for the better part of two decades, I can say that
this film should be required viewing in anthropology classes
everywhere. It is a singular lesson in how the social scientist
can impose their own worldview on an innocent people in a manner
that dovetails with their country of origin’s colonial
relationship to countries like Uganda, a former colony of Britain,
Turnbull’s country of origin.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/ikland/
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