The Danger of the Dominant Gaze: A Case Study

The portrayal of Indigenous Culture in 

The Gods Must be Crazy

Marx describes dominant ideology as when one ideology is deemed paramount over another through inherent social/ power relations. When these ideologies make their way into mainstream media they are cast into a broader consciousness and redistributed as truths. The identities of the indigenous subjects of The Gods Must be Crazy are reconstructed through the dominant lens of the Western, white subject and give way to a false narrative that supports a specific power structure. Namely, the San people are cast as backward, ignorant and undeveloped.

The film was directed by James Uys, a Caucasian South African filmmaker in 1980, during the heat of the anti-apartheid movement. The film follows a member of the San tribe of the Kalahari desert on his journey to return a mysterious Coke Bottle that fell from the sky back to its rightful owners, “the gods”.

The anthropomorphic style of filming automatically positions the subject as the other, and the viewer as an outsider looking in from the dominant perspective. In this case, the Western/colonial perspective represents the dominant gaze. The cultural differences of the San are explained as deficiencies in social and technological progress. The subject has no agency, and no control over the formulation of his/her identity.

The denial of coeavalness found in mainstream films depicting indigenous cultures from a Western perspective exemplifies how this binary opposition of power is out of touch with the material processes of history. Coeavalness is a Fabian term describing the mistake of cultural differences for differences in time and space. In reality, the dominant gaze of the Western world in the film is integral to a propaganda campaign to do exactly this, deny coeavelness. The film peddles its own brand of reality where the indigenous people are cast as backward, out of touch and unaware of the “real-world” socioeconomic processes of the dominant West.

Richard Lee outlines these solutions to intercultural and international communication in his article “The Gods Must Be Crazy”: The Challenge of the Intercultural. He advocates the necessary recognition of the instability and ambiguity of cross-cultural signifiers. Culture is a changing construct, not a fixed boundary of identity. It must be understood as a plurality and mixture of spatiotemporal realities. Ultimately, cross-cultural communication must be understood as dialogic.

References

Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

"Coca-Cola Bushmen: Social Politics." 2010. YouTube. Retrieved 15 May 2013.

Kolker, Robert. Film, Form and Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999. Print.

Lee, Richard. “The Gods must be Crazy.” Reviews. June 1985. Web. 15 May 2013.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen. Autumn 1975. Web. 15 May 2013.