Cultural Globalization and Transnational Cinema: On Intersectionality and Ethnoscapes in Hermine Huntgeburth’s Die weiße Massai

Abstract

This article is an interdisciplinary critique of Hermine Huntgeburth’s Die weiße Massai (The White Masai; 2005)—a transnational film—as a text that enables a reflection on the peculiarity of North-South cultural globalization. The juxtaposition of Swiss and Masai cultures in this film using marriage as a space of global encounter, it is argued, uniquely gives agency to the significance of cultural incompatibility as a requisite binder in a globalized world. In this process I use cultural intersectionality and ethnoscapes theories to rethink the volatility of transnational cultural units. I also use a visual anthropological methodological and theoretical basis in its semiotic critique of the film’s narrative arc of cultural dispersion. The article proposes the utility of cultural incongruity in rethinking sustainable cultural units in a globalized context.