I'm starting this blog more as practice for grad school than anything. At a "Success in grad school" panel I was more or less forced to attend, there was one good piece of advice that we should sit down and try to write 750 words a day to learn how to write quickly and concisely. I've always had a terrible time communicating - great at ranting, but not so good at actually communicating. Thus, I hope to communicate a small point well in every post on this blog. Because I hope to be a social scientist, I will be discussing various points in human sociality and will be using to space to engage with the social sciences on a more personal, rather than professional, level.
As you might have noticed, I entitled this blog "How tasty was my little Frenchman" at the behest of a very erudite friend of mine. In doing, I am obviously indexing the Brazilian classic film of the same name (Portuguese: como era gostoso o meu francês). I wanted to draw attention to this film for its particular, and perhaps singular, portrayal of the Tupinamba and in particular of cultural cannibalism. What really struck me about the movie is just the stellar attention to detail. Any piece of popular culture discussing Amerindians almost inevitably falls into one of two traps (or both). One tendency is to highly dramatize everything and present a totally unrealistic, essentially show-tunes version of Amerindian cultures. The other is to present them as these ridiculous proto-hippies who do nothing more than run around and hug trees and get tricked by colonists because of their own naïveté. This film really avoids both of those pitfalls and really animates what these kinds of things really looked like. The complexity and melodrama of the rituals found in ethnographic accounts of cultural cannibalism is perfectly on display in this film. I've read so many descriptions of these sorts of practices, but watching the film felt like doing fieldwork. It's just so closely detailed! I highly recommend this film if you can find it. The movie is not graphic at all (unless you're offended by the incredibly accurate fashion sense of the Tupinamba), and the worst part is that old movie style soundtrack that caused me to mute the movie a few times during long scenes without dialogue.
I should be back tomorrow when I hope to discuss a phenomenon I refer to as "linguistic fetishism"
Until then, até logo!
