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Culture In The Emerald Forest

Decent Essays

Although a fictionalized Hollywood movie, John Boorman’s film, “The Emerald Forest,” adopts as a dramatization principle of a mystical environmental anthropology. It gives insight to the destructive juxtaposition of indigenous cultures and the effects of a modern mechanized society on these cultures. The film poses questions as to how modern societies affect indigenous cultures and if they can coexist or if sacrifices are needed for one culture to supersede. The modern society detailed in “The Emerald Forest” experiences the effects of ethnocentrism, having a distinct set of cultural norms and customs. Therefore, viewing traditions and practices used by the ‘Invisible People,’ and the other indigenous cultures depicted in the film, as inferior, odd, or abnormal. Furthermore, the modern society illustrated in “The Emerald Forest,” essentially makes false assumptions of the indigenous …show more content…

For a behavior to be considered cultural it must be shared extra genetically; that is, it must be taught. Furthermore, cultural behavior is a complication of behaviors exhibited by humans (and, some would argue, by other species as well, though to a much lesser degree) that is extrasomatic or extragenetic—in other words, learned. Therefore, an individual can in fact acculturate to a different way of life and is not constrained by the culture they may have been born into. For instance, the when Tommy is abducted by the ‘Invisible People’ and raised in a hunter, gatherer environment, as one of their own. I believe that culture is nurture based and this does not necessarily indicate that one culture's inability to adapt to another is an argument for culture being inbred. Humans do adapt, particularly young humans that haven’t been imprinted over time with habit. Tommy’s father implements how much more difficult assimilation is for an established adult, despite being equally welcomed into the

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