Tearful SojournsandTribal Wives: Primitivism, kinship, suffering, and salvation on Japanese and British reality television

Abstract

The Japanese and British reality television programs Tearful Sojourns and Tribal Wives both feature protagonists’ adventures and residence in “tribal societies.” Each program constructs different primitivist images through distinct tropes of kinship; Tearful Sojourns fetishizes filiation and consanguinity, while Tribal Wives fetishizes marriage and affinity. The emphasis on descent and affinity reflects and contributes to cultural kinship crises—the breakdown of filial piety in Japan and of marriage in the United Kingdom—felt among their viewers. The shows subtly manipulate images of kinship, the primitive, and suffering to generate a globally mediatized primitivist discourse that purports to therapeutically help audiences find in the primitive Other something they have lost, providing a path to redemption. This discourse contributes in turn to popular perceptions of anthropology. [primitivism, kinship, reality television, media, United Kingdom, Japan] 日本のテレビ番組ウルルン滞在記とイギリスの番組Tribal Wivesでは主要登場人物の「原始的社会」における生活風景が描写されるが、この二つの番組におけるプリミティヴィズムの構築の仕方には親族関係の修辞において違いがある。ウルルンにおいては血族的系統に、Tribal Wives においては婚姻による婚戚関係に重点が置かれている。こうした修辞は、それぞれの社会において広く認識されている家族を巡る文化的危機 – 日本における孝行やイギリスにおける婚姻にまつわる危機の言説 – を反映している。親族関係や「原始的なもの」、苦難といったテーマの番組中の細かな演出は、グローバルな規模で媒介されるプリミティヴィズムの言説を喚起し、近代社会の喪失を「原始的」他者の中に投影する癒し救済の手解きとしてその視聴者に提供される。一方、こういった言説は人類学そのものの社会一般における理解にも影響を与える。[プリミティヴィズム、親族関係、リアリティ番組、メディア、イギリス、日本]

Let There Be Light: Wauja People and the Practice of Photographic Primitivism in Sebastião Salgado's Genesis

“…Primitivist representation of Wauja, of other Amazonians, as well as many other indigenous and fourth world peoples continues to be a booming site of global media (Ball and Nozawa ; Stasch ). The logistical conditions under which such representations are made contribute much to their affects and aesthetic interpretations.…”

“…Primitivist realism relies, as Lutz and Collins () say of National Geographic photos, not on Cartier‐Bresson's decisive moment in time, but on an abstracted any and every time. Primitivist realism also becomes part of a therapeutic ritual process, and its presence in mass media such as reality television (Ball and Nozawa ) can be a powerful way for viewers to “find themselves” through depictions of primitive others.…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…For instance, in 2016, authors used care (6) to index varying topics, from rituals of elderly care in Thailand (Aulino ), to kinship ideology in domestic violence counseling in India (Kowalski ), to sex work in Japan (G. Koch ), although with labor and precarity among its keywords, the latter article does fit the economy and neoliberalism cluster. Likewise, media (7 in 2016; 4 in 2017) refers to mass media as well as digital and popular media in very different contexts, indexing topics that may or may not fit the main themes (Ball and Nozawa ; Dent ; Fisher ; Gray ; Holmes 2016; Jusionyte ; N. Evans ; Shipley ; Stankiewicz ). Other frequently recurring words in 2016 include ethnography (6), food (5), gender (5), kinship (5), performance (5), violence (5), anthropology (4), love (4), and NGOs (4); of these, only gender reappears in each of the Table columns for the following three years, but it is surpassed by anthropology in the final count shown in Table , discussed below.…”

And There Was Light: Sebastião Salgado's Genesis and (Ethno)Primitivist Realism

“…Crossing space and time, a modern voyager is allowed privileged entrée into a past and distant world wherein ancient techne prefigures modern materialism. We viewers are invited along as co‐travelers, looking for something we have lost in the other, and to accomplish this goal we fashion an interstitial world of encounter, a primitivist cosmos (Ball and Nozawa ; Stasch ).…”