Reading National Geographic
Reading National Geographic
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阅读国家地理
DOI：
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发表时间：
1993
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Jane Lou Collins
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Catherine Lutz;Jane Lou Collins
对于数以百万计的读者来说，《国家地理》长期以来一直是了解异国风情和异国风情的世界的窗口。在这本对美国机构的引人入胜的描述中，凯瑟琳·A·卢茨和简·L·柯林斯探讨了该杂志的可能性，即该杂志旨在向我们传授遥远的文化，实际上告诉我们更多关于我们自己的文化。卢茨和柯林斯带我们走进国家地理学会，调查其摄影师、编辑和设计师如何选择图像和文本来呈现第三世界文化。通过对编辑们的采访，他们将这一过程描述为“平衡”和“客观”、信息内容和视觉美感的谈判标准之一。然后，在仔细阅读了大约六百张照片后，他们通过分析非西方民族在表现中使用的颜色、姿势、取景和有利位置等方式，审视了种族、性别、特权、进步和现代性等问题。最后，通过对读者的广泛采访，作者评估了该杂志的文化叙事如何被接受和解释，并确定了了解其他民族及其生活方式的愿望与验证美国中产阶级价值观的愿望之间的紧张关系。其结果是对一个机构及其在促进一种承认普世价值观和庆祝多样性的保守人文主义中所发挥的作用的复杂描绘，同时它允许读者将非西方民族置于进步的早期阶段。我们将杂志和协会视为美国品味、财富和权力的关键中庸仲裁者，我们对美国中产阶级文化以及它给我们纸上谈兵的世界探索带来的所有愿望、假设和恐惧有了清晰的了解。
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.