On cultural relativity and/or cultural equality:
There is a common debate to be made regarding stories like Avatar, The Help, and, going back a bit, Dances with Wolves. These films each depict a figure from one culture learning from and ultimately saving the peoples of a different, "less sophisticated" culture. This is an age-old mythological archetype but it becomes problematic in today's world where we value diversity and promote the idea of global cultural equality.
The "hero from without" narrative paradigm presents a set of phisophical-political problems which storytellers of old would not have had to face.
We might refer to this narrative paradigm as the Christopher Columbus narrative archetype. Some of the questions that arise here relate to:
- ...whether or not the "native" culture is actually less sophisticated than the dominant/hero culture...
- ...whether or not the dominant culture can be seen merely to provide a figure that saves the "natives" from harm inflicted by that dominant culture and so actually indicts itself and the salvationary figure as participating in "evil" (narratively speaking)...
- ...how stories which implicitly claim to support cultural equality none-the-less present a set of assumptions which undermine that claim...
(As a side note, it is interesting to me to think about how Mel Gibson, a man berated very publicly for a bigoted attitude, has made two films which serve as a great counter-point to the philosophical-political problems of the Christopher Columbus myth. His films Braveheart and Apocalypto each present stories featuring a "hero from within" mythical archetype, fully avoiding issues of implied cultural bias, judgement, etc.)
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