Reading National Geographic

by Jane L. Collins and Catherine A. Lutz

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226497240
• ISBN13: 9780226497242
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great introduction to critical reading

This is a great introduction to critical reading of the media, and to the way an Orientalist and colonial gaze continue to structure the western world. Not for those who wish to continue to passively consume media.

Ethnocentrism gleamed from the pages of National Geographic

I found this book to be thorough in its research of the geographic as an American institution. It presupposes that the reader is well aquainted with Gramsci's notion of mass media and the Frankfurt school borne out of this belief of hegemony perpectuated by a controlling elite. The author also takes liberty that the reader is aquainted with research methods using coding to differentiate subjects responses to pictures portrayed. Lastly, the author's use of interviewing technics and the subsequent interpretation of those responses enables the reader the opportunity to realize how the geographic and social background of the readers influence the perceptions people have when encountering this quasi-scientific journal. As an anthropological study this book illuminates the ethnocentric idealations of the Geographic's demographic readership, that is upper middle and middle class white euroamericans.

anthropology schmanthropology

In this book, Lutz and Collins deconstruct the system of misrepresentation in which National Geographic functions as purveyor of cultural/historical fact. The authors problematize NG's systematic misrepresentation of the non-West and examine how those misrepresenations resonate with its 'American' audience through reinforcing the self-other binary. NG encodes a white, middle-class, male (straight) worldview, and as such, tells us more about the standardized/naturalized/anesthetized 'American' culture than about those it 'studies.' Through analyzing photographs and their captions and interviewing NG staff, the authors reveal the racism and paternalism that are at the heart of the National Geographic gaze.

Very informative and interesting.

Great read for an anthropology class of the late 90s. "The West" and "the rest" are examined well in terms of race and gender.