Reading National Geographic Research Articles

American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination Sigrid Anderson Cordell American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination. By Stephanie Hawkins. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 264 pp. $55.00, $22.50. It is not surprising that the place of National Geographic in political, cultural, and print history has been the focus of much critical attention in recent years. The magazine sheds light on the history of photography and ethnography, the ways in which American identity was constructed in relation to ideas of the exotic, and the mainstream packaging of foreign cultures. Scholarly interest in National Geographic also coincides with interest in U.S. imperialism, critical race and gender studies, and the history of periodicals. Stephanie Hawkins’ American Iconographic thus enters an established field of scholarly work on the magazine that includes Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’ Reading National Geographic (1993) and Tamar Rothenberg’s Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888–1945 (2007). Hawkins’ work builds on previous studies by examining both the archive of unpublished readers’ letters to the magazine and the ways in which it was parodied throughout popular culture, an approach that illuminates the slippage between National Geographic’s message and how readers responded to it by resisting, endorsing, and/or reworking it. Overall, this is a useful study, and it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ways in which National Geographic became both a staple in American homes and a target of critique and parody. Hawkins begins her analysis of the magazine’s place in American culture by unpacking its iconic status, paying particular attention to the ways in which its visual icons circulate across borders, commodifying images while inviting global activism. For Hawkins, the haunting cover photograph of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl shown on the cover in 1985 and “found” again by a National Geographic team in 2002, is a key moment for understanding how these images enter the “mediascape,” inviting sympathy and allowing readers to participate in a global civic culture. In Hawkins’ reading, National Geographic is both a creator of icons and an icon of its own. In tracing the history of how the magazine came to play a central role in creating iconic images, Hawkins points to its first photograph in 1896, “Zulu Bride and Bridegroom.” Through this image and others like it, Hawkins places [End Page 216] National Geographic in the context of American pedagogical theory as educators sought to teach Americans how to read visual images. Locating the Zulu bride and bridegroom in a “universal” discourse of marriage and the family, the magazine used images such as this one to “domesticate the more estranging aspects of cultural and racial difference” (28). In this way, National Geographic used images to inaugurate its educational mission, and Hawkins traces how this mission was in line with a progressive educational shift toward using visual imagery in the classroom. This discussion of how the magazine participated in educating its readers usefully sets up Hawkins’ subsequent analysis of how later generations of readers read back against the magazine’s more obviously propagandistic and nationalistic images, as when it endorsed Fascist nationalism. Hawkins does not view the magazine’s readers as passive consumers but rather examines how they responded to, resisted, and appropriated the magazine’s text and images. As Hawkins demonstrates, readers of National Geographic have been extremely savvy about identifying and critiquing the magazine’s political and nationalist biases, even as the magazine sought to balance its interest in patriotism with its emphasis on fostering a global cosmopolitanism. As Hawkins points out, readers saw through these attempts at the “manufacture of consent” much more than was previously assumed, and her examination of the archive of readers’ letters is particularly useful in demonstrating how readers recognized and objected to the magazine’s polemical leanings. One of the most compelling sections in Hawkins’ work comes in her analysis of what she terms the “jungle housekeeping” motif in the magazine. Hawkins here refers to accounts that appeared periodically in the magazine detailing a married couple’s attempts to set up house in an exotic, undeveloped landscape, most frequently an out...

The Changing Faces of Canada: Images of Canada in National Geographic

National Geographic's Canada is a place we are all familiar with. Whether through a subscription of our own, or issues found in a school library, or perhaps flipping through magazine in a doctor's waiting room, most of us have seen Canada in its pages. And many amongst us would confess a guilty secret: that when we read National Geographic, we really only look at pictures. This essay takes such reading as its subject. Rather than dismissing magazine because it is known primarily for its photographic content, this essay takes a serious look at pictorial representation of Canada in National Geographic. (1) It examines how this influential magazine portrayed Canada in 1960s--the decade of Canada's centenary--and compares this image to that of past decade--the 1990s. By seeking to freeze picture of Canada in two separate decades, this method allows for identification and quantification of distinct themes. And this, in turn, raises all-important question of cultural as sumptions of National Geographic's editors, as they made decisions about which photographs best conveyed Canada's distinct identity. At a deeper level, this essay is about American perceptions of Canada, and how these perceptions have changed in second half of twentieth century. Recent developments in history of popular culture indicate that National Geographic, precisely because of its enormous popularity, is perhaps one of most important sources of information on Canada available to American public. Because of National Geographic Society's stature as a research institution, it is easy to assume that Society's magazine somehow presents an accurate, scientific portrayal of America's giant neighbor to north. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, in Reading National Geographic, demonstrated how--through editorial policy, choice of themes, use of color, and photo composition--the editors have presented a certain culturally constructed view of third world countries. The challenge, they argue, has been for National Geographic to make a distant culture seem at once strange and familiar to American audiences. But how has this formidable institution treated Canada? Canada, for most part, is a country that Americans don't think about a lot. When they do, th ey tend to think of it as America's back yard--as a kind of bigger, emptier, more natural and more polite version of United States, peopled by lumberjacks, Mounties, ballerinas, hockey players and smiling Inuit. And Canada, a large, North American country whose inhabitants are mainly of European descent, is like United States in many ways. So challenge for National Geographic has been to convince Americans of Canada's unique, i.e. non-American identity. (2) Lutz and Collins argue that editors of National Geographic were concerned that third world societies come across as different, but not so exotic as to be too different. They describe many ways in which editorial policy determined that images of the other be just sufficiently and aesthetically pleasing, to appeal to American audiences, and to project the ideal of happy life. (3) ft is main contention of this paper that when it came to characterizing Canadian society, editors faced opposite challenge: concern that Canadian society might come across as too similar to United States. Theirs, then, was not an attempt to familiarize exotic, but an attempt to exoticize familiar. (4) Ironically, same strategies that Lutz and Collins identified that served to familiarize exotic could also serve to exoticize familiar. This essay will examine how National Geographic exoticized Canada in 1 960s, and compare this to how it exoticized Canada in th e 1990s. In doing so, we shall reveal how editors' assumptions about Canada's evolving identity have changed in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. …

Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture

Postcolonial Representation of Aboriginal Australian Culture

Reading National Geographic

Reading National Geographic. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Chicago, IL: University nof Chicago Press, 1993. xvii. 309 pp., figures, photographs, appendix, references, index.

Ethnoporn, Lesbian Childhood, and Native Maternal Culture: Reading National Geographic with Elizabeth Bishop

Ethnoporn, Lesbian Childhood, and Native Maternal Culture: Reading National Geographic with Elizabeth Bishop

Images of the exotic other and reflections of the civilized self

Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. xi + 275 pp. including chapter references and index. 160 illustrations. $35.00 cloth. Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvii + 309 pp. including references and index. 11 figures, 1 table, 40 illustrations. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Imaging and Imagining the Geographic Other

Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvii. 309 pp.

Visions and Voices of Donsin: How Farmers of Burkina Faso Participate as Photographers

Few technologies have been as misused as cameras in the encounter with the "other." Photography has provided travelers, journalists, and, indeed, anthropologists with a tool to bring distant cultures and landscapes closer to home audiences. Entailing a process of selective framing and focusing, it has enabled practitioners to construct views of "exotic" people and worlds, building upon preconceived ideas about what they are like and how they differ from us, by stressing either the "picturesque" or the "pathetic" according to what feelings the images were meant to arouse. These are often shaped by the larger context of ideology and politics surrounding our relationship with such groups, as Jane Collins and Catherine Lutz (Reading National Geographic. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993) show in their seminal and spirited critique of the National Geographic. But are reifying or alienating the subject inherent effects of photographic practice? Not necessarily. Parallel to conventional photography that uses indigenous people as mere objects of representation, there have been some notable efforts by visual anthropologists and communication specialists to directly involve minorities and marginal populations in producing images of themselves, their social and physical landscapes, and in using photography for bolstering their status and their claims in society.

Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toiling in the Fields of Sensational Science

Recently, anthropologists Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins have studied representations in that respectable staple of the doctor's waiting room--the National Geographic. In Reading National Geographic, they persuasively argue the role of the magazine in constructing for Americans the ubiquitous category of the Other, and show cultural discriminations of difference grounded and conveyed in its representations of sexuality. In tone and style, the Notional Geographic's middle-brow intellectuality rejects, for example, the obvious prurience of overheated Hollywood constructions of frenzied sensuality in native dance and ritual in favor of representations for the cooler, and more 'adult' eye. No matter its pretensions: some time ago, Richard Pryor got to the heart of the matter; the National Geographic, he quipped, was the black man's Playboy (McMillen A10). For its white middle-class readers, the magazine intellectualized prurience and borrowed the unflappable scientizing eye of the professional to underwrite its status of popular respectability. At the same time, however, this collapse of the professional and the popular also suggests a continuum of concerns and representation embedded historically in the development of ethnography and anthropology. While the National Geographic is often taken as a mid-twentieth-century icon, its character has a longer, traceable lineage. This strain of 'prurient science'--managed as a matter of 'tone' in which fascination with the body of the Other is legitimized in service of enlightened knowledge (and superiority)--largely originates in the compelling nineteenth-century interest in sexualizing cultural difference. Nowhere is this charged mixture more evident, or more problematic, than in the self-constituted exemplar linking progressive knowledge and empire, Victorian Britain. More modest efforts at late-century empire building by the United States helped solidify an Anglo-American point of view in the professionalization of the emergent human sciences. However, as late entrants to the aims of empire, and under a British view of innate American gaucherie, Americans would struggle to overcome what was seen as a fit subservience in their professional contributions; yet their enthusiastic embrace of the British model would allow for some jostling for position within the hierarchy of a European tradition identified with the scientized eye. By the end of the century, Imperial Britain was nearing its peak, yet the nation's pride in its extensive empire was not free of anxieties, a circumstance grounding a curiously gendered paradox: justifying the venture as a civilizing mission--a mission long felt as woman's special moral province--Britain could point to vast reaches of the globe where now a woman might walk; at the same time, however, its domestic ideology had prompted Victorian England to restrict and thus 'protect' its women. With the fit between domestic and imperial ideology patently incoherent, women at the end of the century seized a new opportunity, however ambivalently extended, and the ranks of 'lady explorers' swelled. This new breed of traveler would see, and calmly report on what had been, in earlier missionaries' reticent ethnographies, tantalizingly omitted (but spotlighted) as 'practices too disgusting to mention.'(1) At the time when anthropology as a nascent discipline was forming itself, the coincident entree of women created a very public moment in which issues of gender, sexuality, and professionalization would intersect. It is this moment that I want to elaborate by looking, first, at the state of ethnographic study at the end of the century, and then, at the reception in England of two women travelers in the 1890s: an American, May French Sheldon, and England's Mary Kingsley.(2) One measure of women's new presence as explorers, especially given the sluggishness of institutions to acknowledge new realities, is the prolonged Royal Geographical Society debate in the 1890s over extending membership to notable women travelers. …

The Perils of Reading National Geographic

For the past century, millions of Americans have glimpsed the farthest reaches of the earth through the eyes of National Geographic. Although popular since the turn of the century, the magazine's subscription base skyrocketed after World War Il, reaching 10 million by the 1980s, figure that does not begin to include those who skimmed the magazine in dentists' offices and beauty salons. The longstanding quest to fascinate its readers led the magazine's editors to respond to popular tastes as well as political realities, making the magazine an important, though relatively unrecognized, source of American cultural history. In Reading National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, trained respectively in anthropology and sociology, attempt to unpack the cultural meanings of the magazine's photography during the Cold War. Ultimately, however, the history of the National Geographic Society and its monthly is more complicated than they allow. The authors confess both personal and political reasons for their interest in National Geographic. Both have rich childhood memories from the early 1960s of poring over the magazine's seductive representations of the third world (p. xi). Coming of age during the Vietnam War, the authors learned the power of photography not just to please, but to shock, educate, and motivate political change. To Lutz and Collins, the war highlighted the growing importance of the photograph in American society, which today constitutes a central feature of contemporary life (p. 4). The rise of images over print, they argue, was one of two crucial cultural shifts affecting National Geographic in the postwar era, one that transformed the medium of recording history and produced the genre of photojournalism that the magazine mastered so well. This new power of the visual, coupled with the publication's massive circulation figures, gave it exceptional influence over American perceptions of the world. But, as the authors rightly point out, any form of cultural production is itself result of historical conditions, and therefore they carefully examine the

Reading National Geographic.

Reading National Geographic.

What's Wrong with This Picture: Reflections on Reading National Geographic. A Review Article

Robert Kincaid, the hero of Robert James Waller's mammoth best seller, The Bridges of Madison County, makes his living as a free-lance photographer for National Geographic magazine. When not taking pictures of the covered bridges of Iowa and falling into a steamy romance with a bored Italian-born farm wife, Kincaid treks across the globe photographing exotic landscapes and cultures, developing in the course of his travels an utterly Byronic persona-solitary, intrepid, larger than life, deeply and mystically passionate about his craft and about the eternal verities of human and sub-human exis-

Reading National Geographic

Reading National Geographic

Reading National Geographic, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993

As I write this, I have just received an advertisement from the National Geographic Society, saying that as a member, I have the opportunity to be one of the fIrst to purchase a volume on the greatest photographs ever published in the National Geographic. Like many others, especially anthropologists (I suspect), I grew up reading National Geographic, had access to,National Geographic publications, and probably got my fIrst images of different cultures and peoples from the magazine. How accurate a picture do we get? What does it attempt to portray and why?<br /><br />The burgeoning field of visual anthropology examines images and films and attempts to under­ stand them within their social context. How do photographs communicate or evoke ideas? What is the social framework in which they are produced-"the historical and cultural context that gives the photograph and its elements their meaning and significance"? What is the role of such images in our society, and do they play a major role in enculturation?

Reading National Geographic

Reading National Geographic. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvii. 309 pp. 40 halftones, appendices, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. 309 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.

(1994). Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. 309 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95. American Journalism: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 286-287.

Reading National Geographic

For its millions of readers, the National Geographic has long been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us much more about our own. Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures. Through interviews with the editors, they describe the process as one of negotiating standards of balance and objectivity, informational content and visual beauty. Then, in a close reading of some six hundred photographs, they examine issues of race, gender, privilege, progress, and modernity through an analysis of the way such things as color, pose, framing, and vantage point are used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, through extensive interviews with readers, the authors assess how the cultural narratives of the magazine are received and interpreted, and identify a tension between the desire to know about other peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class American values. The result is a complex portrait of an institution and its role in promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We see the magazine and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of taste, wealth, and power in America, and we get a telling glimpse into middle-class American culture and all the wishes, assumptions, and fears it brings to bear on our armchair explorations of the world.