CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

In her speech before the National Press Club on NPR in November, 2000, producer/director Julie Taymor (The Lion King stage version, Titus, Frida) told about her experiences in Bali at the age of 21 where she discovered a highly-developed shadow puppet theatre culture. The flat, jointed, shadow puppets were manipulated behind a translucent scrim, illuminated from behind by Coleman lanterns, and while the action appeared only in silhouette, she was amazed that the puppets themselves were brightly painted in intricate detail. (The Greek "Karaghiozi" puppets are decorated in the same way and came from the East, possibly the same source.) The audience never sees the colors, merely shadows, but Taymor pointed out that the decorations were artistically important to the performers themselves, a concept she carried forward into her own career and designs.

I waited for her to make an anthropological error at that point, but, to my delight and her credit, Taymor did not. She explained that painting was not part of the Balinese culture until it was brought to Bali by the Dutch, but that the Balinese used the foreign medium to express their own culture. (That makes sense: my hammer was invented by Oogaluk Australopithecus and made by Stanley Tools but the stuff I build with it is all mine.) Recognizing the foreign influence on a culture under study was a good catch, making 21-year-old Julie Taymor a lot sharper in the cultural anthropology department than, let's say, 24-year-old cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.

In 1925, Mead left for a nine-month stay in Samoa, an island in the southwest central Pacific Ocean, to study adolescence and biological and cultural influences on behavior. Mead lived with the villagers during the day and at night, observing behavior and customs that otherwise would have remained unknowable to a person from the United States. She discovered that monogamy (marriage to one person) and jealousy were not valued or understood by the Samoans, and that divorce occurred simply by the husband or wife "going home." However, her most important work in Samoa was on courtship patterns in adolescents. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928 and based on her studies of adolescent behavior in a Polynesian society, became a best-seller and brought its author to the forefront of American anthropology where she would remain for half a century.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Mead was "snookered real good" by the crafty Samoans who felt that telling her what she wanted to hear was the way to please this foreign visitor. Basically, their stories of a liberal sex life among teens was total baloney and served to titillate millions around the world while eventually bringing discredit to Mead. Margaret Mead had fallen afoul of the classic "Schroedinger's Cat" in which the act of observing a phenomenon alters the phenomenon and even the Samoans, reading the popular Coming of Age in Samoa, apparently felt that their neighbors were having way too much fun and that they should get hip themselves. Samoan culture changed drastically.

Tomorrow I will continue with the second part of this story: "How I screwed up the culture of a simple village and hosed off future anthropologists. You can too!"

posted by C. J. # 4:15 PM