Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 10:13:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: National Geographic and the cold war


Why has the National Geographic focused so relentlessly on 
photographs and text that set up and explore a contrast between the 
traditional and the modern, particularly in the post-Worl War II 
period? While we will return to this question in more depth later, we 
can begin here to consider how these pictures play a role in dealing 
with the changing national identity of the American state in the same 
period. Increasingly it is correlated with capitalism and contrasted to 
other economic systems. When Geographic photographers and writers 
talk about their travels as trips through time, the main signpost is often 
the commodity. When Thomas Ambercrombie describes his decades of 
work in the Middle East, he writes that:

"what makes the Middle East a joy is the time warp...Often I find 
[people] living out what seemed chapters in the history of mankind. 
Over dusty tracks or down four-lane expressways, a Land-Rover 
became my time machine. I drove across the centuries, from Stone 
Age Bedouin in the sand mountains of Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter 
to the old walled cities of Oman; then back to the computerized 
refineries of Algeria's Sahara, the Rolls Royce traffic of Bahrain's 
financial district, or the boutiques of war-torn Beirut."

The center and the commodity stand for the future, the simple 
periphery for the past, and the contrast builds an American 
identification of both itself, and its market system with the world's 
future.

Wolf suggests how contrast pictures might have functioned in the 
context of cold war conflict between the superpowers. He notes that the 
distinctions between a traditional, developing, and modern world 
"became intellectual instruments in the prosecution of the Cold War... 
[with] communism a 'disease of modernization.' The therapeutic 
model could then be to push the third world toward the Western model 
of modernity, even to the point of saturation bombing of the 
countryside in Vietnam to advance, according to one political scientist, 
"urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in 
question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can 
help to generate sufficient strength to come to power." The contrast 
between traditional and modern also allows readers to model the 
melting-pot imperative for immigrants to the United States. The 
traditional immigrant, these contrast pictures say, is not a threat but 
simply a stage on the way to full Americanization.

(From "Reading the National Geographic")


Louis Proyect


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