Comparative Cultural Studies

Kris Rutten, Stefaan Blancke, Ronald Soetaert

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781612495224
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Edited by Kris Rutten, Stefaan Blancke, and Ronald Soetaert, Perspectives on Science and Culture explores the intersection between scientific understanding and cultural representation from an interdisciplinary perspective. Contributors to the volume analyze representations of science and scientific discourse from the perspectives of rhetorical criticism, comparative cultural studies, narratology, educational studies, discourse analysis, naturalized epistemology, and the cognitive sciences. The main objective of the volume is to explore how particular cognitive predispositions and cultural representations both shape and distort the public debate about scientific controversies, the teaching and learning of science, and the development of science itself. The theoretical background of the articles in the volume integrates C. P. Snow's concept of the two cultures (science and the humanities) and Jerome Bruner's confrontation between narrative and logico-scientific modes of thinking (i.e., the cognitive and the evolutionary approaches to human cognition).

Part 1

Narrative and Rhetorical Perspectives

The application of rhetorical and narrative approaches to science have been used to analyze the discourse of popular culture and how it relates to complex social phenomena such as the proliferation of pseudoscience or antipsychiatry. The rhetoric of science studies how scientists—as part of a discursive community—frame and communicate their knowledge; what they argue about and how; how scientists present their findings; and what genres, formats, and media they use to communicate those findings. Despite the growing body of scholarship on the rhetoric of science, there is a need for further development of rhetoric as a framework for the public understanding of science, specifically given the increasingly mediatized public debate in an expert-dominated society. A rhetorical approach to scientific discourse studies how particular framings of scientific findings and developments influence the socio-ethical debate, how this relates to science policy, and how an awareness of the rhetorical dimensions of science is important for scientific as well as nonscientific audiences and what the educational dimensions are of such a rhetorical and narrative awareness.

In part 1, this volume brings together new work on the public understanding of science from the perspective of literature, narratology, cultural studies, anthropology, and rhetoric.

Chapter 1

Experiencing Nature through Cable Television

David J. Tietge

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relationship between cable television representations of nature and biology and the influence they wield over public understanding of environmental networks. The metaphors, delivery, content, and orientation of such programming are driven by what Kenneth Burke calls an “occupational psychosis,” a collective orientation that mirrors the economic principles of the culture in which such “edutainment” has been produced. More specifically, the author is interested in how cable nature programming leaves us with nature entertainment as a product—a distinctly commercialized thing to be consumed, a franchise to be capitalized on and expanded. Just as Disney did before them, the anthropocentric nature programs discussed in this essay reflect an ideal that giving the audience what it wants—by tapping into the ideological orientations like war, conflict, and competition they already possess—is more profitable than representing nature from the stodgy seat of orthodox biological science. Moreover, the chapter addresses the outcomes of representing nature as a product and how this affects public attitudes about nature and the environment.

The nature documentary, as a genre, has a long mass media history and has taken on a range of forms, from the anthropomorphized Disney wildlife film shorts of the of the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century cable animal serials that represent what I like to call the “Savannah Gladiatorial Games.” In between, there are many subgenres, each with its own signature and each employing some greater or lesser degree of scientific authority, depending on the intended audience and purpose of the program. Consequently, each generic form conveys a particular set of rhetorical messages, some more exacting in the rigors of production than others, but all geared toward an attempt to bring us closer to nature in some vicarious way. In our high-tech, largely urban and suburban culture, the natural world is seen as something remote and uncommon, and this sense of remoteness contributes to the public’s inability to understand nature in terms that aren’t corrupted by this orientation. While some nature documentaries try very hard to act as a corrective to this alienation from nature, others perpetuate the myth that nature is ours to conquer, control, and transform into a human image. Yet other programs seem orchestrated strictly for their entertainment value, a kind of reality TV for the wilderness, while still others are written for political, scientific, or educational purposes. All such programs carry ideological assumptions that, when critically unpacked, reveal some very important motives and objectives on the part of the producers, directors, and players in these natural dramas, and provide a fascinating cross section of the American mind-set concerning the natural world and our relationship to it.

While there are seemingly countless cable programs dedicated to animals, there are just as many dedicated to natural phenomena like severe weather and natural disasters. One show, Whale Wars, is less about whales per se, and more about the personalities of the ecological soldiers who protect them from the ravages of whale poaching. The Deadliest Catch, likewise, tells us virtually nothing about the Alaskan king crab or its behavior (except that it is a difficult species to fish for) but all about the dangers to humans while fishing for them in the Bering Sea under extremely cold and hazardous weather conditions. In both of these shows, the focus is on the drama among the humans—not the animal that has gathered them together towards a common goal. The narrative revolves around such questions as: Will the new deck hand work out? Should we board the whaler or merely try to scare the ship off? Will we reach the catch quota and make a profit? There are other programs that focus on the human theatrics of being in an unfortunate “natural” situation, be it severe weather, an inhospitable environment, or a confrontation with wild animals. This category of programs is one that is not strictly anthropomorphic (assigning to nature human attributes), but anthropocentric, that is, centers on human individual and social troubles in wild environments or under extreme conditions and, most significantly, maps our behaviors and expectations onto natural contexts.

To help theoretically frame this idea of how we receive representations of nature relates to how we, as members of a capitalistic, technological society, tend to also frame the world within terms that reflect the interests of production and consumption. In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke borrows John Dewey’s notion of “occupational psychosis” to explain this concept, noting that “the term corresponds to the Marxian doctrine that a society’s environment in the historical sense is synonymous with the society’s methods of production” (38). In its most primitive form, occupational psychosis reveals itself through a preoccupation with the main source of food for a self-contained group (Burke uses the example of “tribes”), such that this form of sustenance manifests itself symbolically and conceptually in everything the tribe does. If fish are a staple for a given tribe, fish and fishing become a major—even central—topic of concern running through the culture: art, religion, music, dress, and so on. In more developed civilizations, the occupational psychosis becomes more complex and abstracted, such that members of society are often unaware of the origins of their worldview, despite the fact that they voice that worldview symbolically through their language all the time. If wealth, technology, and ownership are central to our economy, we will routinely express ourselves in terms that reflect these interests, including in our choice of entertainment.

Therefore, it is theoretically important for this essay to notice how the two most dominating American orientations of science and capitalism are philosophically couched in a common assumption about the materiality of the world; both are concerned with the physical, objective “reality” of human existence, and therefore, how nature can be understood and manipulated for physical ends. Nature programming, then, must submit to certain epistemological “truths” that shape how such knowledge is presented in a media venue tethered to an economic imperative that forces nature programming into generic categories for prescribed viewers. Such attitudes have political and educational ramifications for how the general public perceives debates that concern the natural world, how we understand the science behind these debates, and the policies we make to address our most pressing environmental problems.

With the increasing popularity of so-called reality TV in the last decade or more, we can expect that most educationally oriented cable stations like Discovery, The Learning Channel, NatGeo, the Science Channel, and others would have to submit to the demographics that drive cable ratings for all channels. America’s occupational psychosis determines the framing of the content for these education channels, which have been pressured to conform to an “edutainment” format that meets the needs and preferences of today’s television viewer. The nature shows that air regularly on these stations reflect a conformity to “intense,” “extreme,” and “ultimate” themes, identifying superlative characteristics in animals, environments, weather, or natural disasters that provide the dramatic backdrop for the program’s content. A rather curious example of this kind of framing is a program shown on the History Channel called Serial Killer Earth, which is a clear case of an anthropocentric structure pitting humans against nature in a kind of planetary dragnet, such that it represents an anthropomorphizing of the earth itself and all the forces it can summon for human destruction. We need only look at the show’s title to see that calling the earth a “serial killer” is bizarrely inappropriate, but is deliberately geared to attracting an audience segment increasingly obsessed with murderers, serial killers, and other social deviants. Strangely, this trend in cable formatting indicates a regression to some of America’s earliest attitudes about nature, a time when the first American settlers from Europe saw the frontier as uninviting, hostile, dangerous, and even freakish.

A quick glance at the episode titles and descriptions bears this out further. The episode “Death by Dust Storm” features “apocalyptic dust storms” that “suffocate cities around the globe”; it also features “a tornado chasing a family, nearly crushing them with their truck” and further mayhem as “Mother Nature continues to wreak havoc,” as though she were a criminal still at large. In “Mudslide Massacre,” a twister “targets” a truck driver in Oklahoma and a volcano “smothers” Indonesian citizens. The verbs used to describe these natural occurrences assign willful actions and motivated intent, but it is difficult to tell just how metaphorically the audience is supposed to take such narrative accounts. Even if viewers see the language only as a metaphorical shorthand, such a framing device elicits a sense of victimhood and helplessness at the hands of a sentient force, thus distorting the true unpredictability of climactic and geological events. While scientists look to climate change as one factor in more frequently severe weather, the cessation of global greenhouse emissions and other environmental measures will never eradicate catastrophic storms, tornados, or earthquakes entirely. The negative personification of physical phenomena promotes an odd association with the natural world as something to be feared and ultimately as something that cannot be stopped. Perhaps the strangest episode title is “When Lakes Attack,” conjuring images of lakes becoming animated through a supernatural transformation and striking out against enemy humans in some Lord of the Rings epic. The idea that we are at war with nature is implied in “Tornado vs. Airport,” as though there has been a deliberate battle arranged to determine a conclusive victor between these two “combatants.” The notion that the earth is conscious—and malevolent—seems misplaced in the twenty-first century, harkening back to a time when superstition about natural forces ruled human attitudes about its relationship to us. But of course the most basic aim of such tactics is to increase ratings by attempting to quench American entertainment bloodlust and our fixation on all things violent and “extreme.” From a production and time slot perspective, shows like Serial Killer Earth must compete with other cable programming that adopts the same base attitude about what it is we want in our entertainment, so nature is transformed into an entity of ruthless evil. In a word, such programming becomes simple product, packaged to conform to the collective associations triggered by our culture of nationalism, ownership, law and order, and war.

The themes of attack, war, and battle reveal the colonial side of our occupational psychosis: Americans’ tendency to think in militaristic metaphors. We have wars on everything—drugs, crime, women, poverty, Christmas, even God—and cable TV nature documentarians seem to be tapping into this cultural orientation. Some TV documentaries, such as NatGeo Wild’s Caught in the Act, are reminiscent of gladiatorial games. The animals are usually exotic (giraffes, hippos, tigers, lions, rhinos) and large, pitted against one another in incongruous ways (a giraffe attacking a rhino, for example). Crossing the generic boundary between nature documentary and high-contact, extreme sports, there is an ancient Roman quality to the spectacle, with its focus on the exotic, the spectacular, and the violent. We are a society that loves to see a fight, and what could be more exhilarating than witnessing two large, wild animals go after one another? Showcased in these episodes are themes like “Clash of the Cheetahs,” “Elephant Battleground,” “Wild Dog Attack,” and “Cannibal Octopus.” Most of the footage is provided by amateur photographers who serendipitously happened to be in a prime spot to capture an unusual shot, but often it is of poor quality and compensated for by jerky, quick-cut editing and supplemental footage spliced in. Most episodes are not overly sensationalized, however, and many of the situations that have been “caught” on film are truly unusual or unexpected, like the video of a pride of lions attacking an adult mother hippo and, eventually, its calf (there is another example where a “coalition” of three cheetahs perform a similar assault on a wildebeest). It is uncomfortable to watch, and the narrative accompanying the video is supplied almost entirely by the person shooting the footage (in this case an amateur naturalist photographer living in South Africa) and generally avoids the temptation to moralize. For this series, then, there is an incongruity between interpretive vantage points. Whereas the photographer’s narration stresses how unusual just such a spectacle is (lions normally do not attack full-grown hippos) and how surprised he was to have been able to capture it on film, the production mantra for the whole series, according to its website, is that it “teaches us that nature doesn’t always play by the rules.”

Or consider the footage of a lion attacking a mongoose, a creature perhaps one-fiftieth the size of the lion. The mongoose, caught helplessly in the claws of the lion (which appears to be playing with it more than attempting to eat it), fights back viciously in its terror and takes the lion by surprise. When the mongoose escapes the big cat’s clutch, the smaller animal lunges at it until it finds an opening and scurries heroically down a tunnel. The narrating photographer is amazed at the mongoose’s tenacity, and declares that “nature always teaches me something new.” Amazing as the footage is, again the lesson is consistent with the defining rule of survival—in this case, which was more threatened and which had the most to lose. This should not strike one as particularly “new.” For the lion, the mongoose was little more than a morsel, and its casual toying with the small creature indicated its lack of commitment to such a modest meal, as it could have crushed it with its jaws or ripped it open with its claws any time it wanted. For the mongoose, it was a mortal battle for its own existence, and it unleashed a fury borne of the desperation to save its own life. While it is indeed surprising that it escaped, the evolutionary law of the jungle remains unbroken—survive any way you can.

Assigning such rules to the wild is one way of engaging our occupational psychosis, since it reflects our desire to superimpose moral order onto a system that is intrinsically amoral. Steven Jay Gould, in an essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” argues that this is a conceptual mistake, since it reflects more about our need to impose ethical meaning onto nature than it does any scientific reality...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Perspectives on Science and Culture
• Part 1: Narrative and Rhetorical Perspectives
• Part 2: Cognitive Perspectives
• Part 3: Epistemological Perspectives
• Part 4: Thematic Bibliography
• Index