Northern Loss: Roz Mortimer’s ‘Invisible’

I have just returned home from a conference at Lancaster University in the UK called “Melancholic States.” The conference was themed around recent attempts to think about contemporary cultural politics and struggles through an analysis of melancholia, drawing principally on Freud’s famous essay “On Mourning and Melancholia.” A number of scholars working in feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies have found Freud’s account–and its contemporary re-working by folks such as David Eng, Judith Butler, and Ranjana Khanna–of unresolved grief or misrecognized loss useful for thinking about the ‘psychic life’ of modern social orders, including those that have emerged through varieties of violence, such as the violence of colonial government or everyday racism, sexism, and homophobia. Anthropologists need to be aware of the work of these scholars, and others working in this mode, because all of them draw, episodically and selectively, on the work of anthropologists. Anthropologists should also be aware of this work because there are many rich ideas in it worth exploring, refining, and critiquing.

The conference was largely ruled by a ‘cultural studies’ ethos, which meant that many of the papers focused on readings of texts, images, or other cultural artifacts (such as memorials) without much rigorous empirical research. Nevertheless, I found myself learning a lot about current directions in cultural studies and different ways that ‘affect’ is being incorporated into contemporary cultural analysis in potentially productive ways. I hope to write a few more posts about some of the excellent papers I heard.

A highlight of the conference for me was a screening of a film called “Invisible” by the London film-maker Roz Mortimer. The film is an artistic meditation on global pollution, and its case is the discovery of high levels of potentially dangerous chemicals in the mother’s milk of Inuit who live in northern Canada. The film, which features stunning visuals of the frozen north, as well as extended scenes of seal slaughter and touching interviews with Inuit mothers, is not unprovocative. I was hypnotized by its visuals. Yet, in dramatizing its narrative, the film works with certain tropes of indigenous peoples, in particular their putative ‘remoteness’ and their concomitant ‘purity,’ that critiques of ethnographic pastoralism have long called into question. At the same time, however, the film reflexively positions these exoticisms through the visual device of long shots of medieval maps, which represented the barbarous ends of the earth as populated by monsters and other frightening figures. So if the film reproduces a story about the loss of a kind of noble ‘elementary’ or ‘primitive’ existence through the spread of global pollution, it does so by asking the viewer to be explicit about the assumptions of that story. I think the film is ambivalent in this regard and I haven’t completely made up my mind as to what it’s doing; I will be curious to see how it is received. The film is a fascinating text exhibiting many contemporary anxieties: the fear that globalization will result in the loss of cultural diversity, the fear that the environment has been permanently polluted, the fear of loss of biodiversity. The isomorphic equation between the loss of traditions and loss of ‘nature’ is a provocative and fascinating aspect of contemporary zeitgeist. Yet, Mortimer is clear that her intention is not to make an ethnographic film. Below I append its trailer.

Savage Minds

Notes and Queries in Anthropology

Northern Loss: Roz Mortimer’s ‘Invisible’