Cristina Rocha: colonialism is alive and well on television
Sunday Night on Channel Seven portrayed white people meeting an allegedly “lost tribe” living in the “stone age”. In fact, the tribe had been contacted in the early 1980s and live in a reserve managed by the Brazilian government.
In true 16th century first-contact fashion, the journalists gave the Suruwaha Amazonian Indians trinkets and mirrors, mesmerising them with technology. Like centuries-old colonialists, they claimed this “primitive” tribe killed their own disabled children, and so they were the “worst human rights violators in the world”. The audience could almost hear them ruling: “They have no soul!”
Long ago, anthropologists did a mea culpa for their work with colonial empires. But some TV journalists and adventurers can’t get enough of the “barbarian savage”. This is not simply harmless fun – television is serious business, just as the former colonials empires were.
As a Brazilian anthropologist who has lived in Australia for the past 15 years, I can see parallels between how Europeans have dealt with Indigenous Brazilians and Indigenous Australians. The strategies of removing Indigenous children, cultural assimilation, expelling traditional owners from their land to open it for agriculture and mining, are common in both contexts.
Why did Channel Seven not consult anthropologists who have studied this tribe? Why not use what professional researchers have written in putting together the story? The likely answer is the one reached by Survival International and now the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma): racism.
As much of the western world start to acknowledge the value of traditional indigenous cultures, Channel Seven has drawn on tired stereotypes of savagery. It is comforting that Acma has decided it is not acceptable to denigrate other cultures so blatantly any more.
Cristina Rocha is an associate professor and ARC future fellow at the religion and society research centre, University of Western Sydney
From the Guardian – Read the full story here