Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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afterlife; atheists

animal rights (movement whose goals range

from environmental concerns to extension of

individual and human rights to non-human

species)

nature; pets

animals and the media

The construction of

nature,

wild and tame, speaks eloquently to changing beliefs

throughout American history.

Folklore

abounds with animal helpmates like Paul

Bunyan’s giant blue ox babe or the subversive

African American

trickster tales of Br’er

Rabbit outwitting his captors. Contemporary media build upon these images in popular

shows where intelligent, benevolent and witty animals—dolphins, horses, dogs, a rare cat

and overactive chimps—assist humans to develop their humanity. These overlap with

more documentary depictions that may nonetheless denature the wild. Yet, lurking

beyond these friendly figures is savage nature—unleashed, for example, in furious

attacks in

Them!

(1954) by giant ants,

Jurassic Park

(1993) or

Wolf

(1994).

Rin Tin Tin (1916–32) and Lassie (a helpful female family collie played by a male dog

with additional human actor sounds) provided gendered templates for domestic animals

in movies (1923–31 and 1943–50, respectively). Lassie’s television debut came in 1947

(ABC). He/she reappeared for the next three decades, including a cartoon version (1973–

5). Dog companions also help delineate major characters in movies and shows, including

comments on snobbery and affectation in the 1990s hit

Frazier,

or more heroic sidekick

roles (

Benji,

1974;

Turner and Hooch,

1990). Cats, despite their popularity as

pets,

prove

harder to work with, although they appear in

witchcraft

representations. Both cats and

dogs are frequently used in

advertising

Other media play on curiosity about mammals “closer” to humans (Flipper the dolphin

and various chimp shows and films). Some creatures, moreover, crossed the line through

animation or tricks, like the wise-cracking, talking horse of CBS’ sitcom

Mr Ed

(1961–

6). In all, one sees valued traits of American relationships and citizenship read across

species—loyalty independence—and an interesting continuing irony about humans.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 56

Disney’s

animated features, from

Mickey Mouse

Tarzan

(1999), have pushed this

interlocutor/mimic role even further.

Animal documentary traditions have also blurred relations of nature and culture. Early

television programs were especially linked to

zoos

and zookeepers creating bridges

between the wild and the familiar, including interactions with talk-show hosts.

ationa

Geographic,

America’s premier explorer of the exotic, has also produced more scientific

studies of animals ranging from whales to domestic cats. Meanwhile, Disney’s live-

action films and television (

Seal Island

(1948),

Jungle Cat

(1960), etc.) have created

characters and life narratives in the wild.

This immediacy and humanity of nature reaffirms both the meaning in wilderness and

its essential humanity, a charter for appropriation. Yet nature can also convey power and

uncertainty, as

horror, sci-fi

and disaster media suggest, and

Cujo

(1983) replaces

assie

. In the 1990s, videos of fighting and killing by wild animals are even marketed

alongside reality shows like “Cops.” Hence, representations of animals and nature, like

their manipulation in pets,

parks

and

food

production, provide multiple visions o

American identity

ee also:

nature

Further reading

Wilson, A. (1992)

The Culture of Nature,

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

McKibben, B. (1992)

The Age of Missing Information,

New York: Plume.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

animation

The use of drawings and photographs of three-dimensional objects to tell stories preceded

the technologies of film, television and computer with which they now coexist. Winsor

McKay’s pioneering

Little Nemo

(1908) and

Gertie, the Trained Dinosaur

(1909) and,

later, New York-

roduced characters, such as Felix the Cat, excited both audiences and

distributors. Yet, Walt

Disney’s

studio, style and sales have set the model for American

animation. Through Disney studios, animation has become a specialty for children and

families, relying on color and music, as well as personality and narrative. Many

competitors, in fact, have emerged from divisions within the Disney studio rather than

from alternative traditions. Technological innovations from the use of celluloid to live-

action modeling to computer-assisted design have changed the production and quality o

the medium itself, yet it remains within this general paradigm.

Entries A-Z 57

Disney set himself apart from early competitors by his awareness of the values o

character, narrative, sound and color, as well as the possibilities of linking onscreen

features to off-screen commercialism. With the introduction of sound in 1927, Disney

characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and works like

Silly Symphonies

commanded attention. In 1937, Disney gambled successfully on the lush musical feature

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,

which set the standard for the genre thereafter. By

inocchio

(1941) the level of animation multi-

laning and thematics became even more

complex, while

Fantasia,

a box-office failure at the time, wed classical music with

creative animation.

Other studios competed with Disney in short films that accompanied theatrical

features. In the 1940s, disgruntled Disney employees founded United Productions o

America, whose style in cartoons like John Hubley’s

Mr Magoo

offered a more “modern”

feel that would have an international impact.

Tom and Jerry

was created by William

Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Other competitors included Warner Brother’s

Looney Tunes

stable of aggressive, even violent cartoons, including Bugs Bunny (Chuck Jones) or

Tweety Pie and Sylvester (Fritz Freleng). These characters, and others, found new life on

Saturday morning children’s television.

American animation, even at Disney, declined in the 1960s and 1970s because of rising

costs and other production decisions. Computer animation and new Disney initiatives

sparked a 1980s renaissance with features like

The Little Mermaid

(1989),

Beauty and the

eas

(1991) and especially

The Lion King

(1994), which grossed over $300 million.

These not only took on attributes of musicals—stories, songs, even “star voices”—

reappeared as live productions on

Broadway

. Other competitors for this reborn market

include the Spielberg collaborators of Dreamworks, who produced

Prince of Egypt

(1998) and

The Road to El Dorado

(2000), and Warner Brothers’, who produced

The

ron Gian

(1999). The combination of animation and live action (as in

Mary Poppins,

1962) has again filled the screen since

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

(1988), including the

synergy of sports celebrity and cartoons of

Space Jam

(1996). By the end of the decade,

however, FOX closed its studios and Disney remained champion.

Both in creative features (using television showcases as well as theaters) and as

components of live-action films, animation continues to provide an alternative

imagination of reality, from

The Simpsons

South Park

to animated political cartooning.

Ralph Bakshi’s

Fritz the Cat

(1972), for example, raised issues of sexual adventure far

from Disney. While the possibilities of animation continue to excite independent

roducers, the sheer marketing and cultural permeation of the Disney feature and its

imitators continue to dominate the primary meanings and readings of this art form.

Animation techniques also continue to develop, especially through use of computer

animation that has already created a new look in hits like

Toy Story

(1995) and

Toy Story

I (1999)

. These techniques can also be used to add vivid imagery to live-action movies

Titanic

(1998) or

Gladiator

(2000). At the same time, live backgrounds have also

been incorporated into animated features, as in Disney’s

Dinosaur

(2000). These hybrid

creations suggest changing boundaries of genre, as as well as reminding us that animation

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 58

is not “just for kids.”

Further reading

Thomas, B. (1991)

Disney’s Art of Animation,

New York: World.

Thomas, F. and Johnston, O. (1984)

Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life,

New York:

Abbeville.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

anthropology

American anthropology studies the human condition across cultures in both the past and

resent, as well as considers the primate family in general. For most of the twentieth

century this “holistic perspective” fostered a “four-field approach,” including

archaeological, physical, linguistic and cultural anthropology. What held the four fields

together was the concept of “culture”—whether embodied in the material remains of past

human activity, the physical attributes of Homo sapiens, or their relatives and ancestors,

as a guide for human action or media of meaning and interpreting experience.

The four-field approach emerged from earlier natural histories that sought to catalogue

in genealogical relationships all observable elements of nature, including humans.

Anthropology concerned itself with non-western peoples, the “simple societies of the

primitive world,” while sociology became the study of “modern complex societies of the

West.” In America, the readily available nonwestern subjects were

American Indians,

while British and French anthropology examined social structure and meaning among

colonized peoples.

In recent years the four-field approach has become the source of heated debate, with

many academic departments abandoning it as an organizing principle. Increasing

specialization and cross-disciplinary ties have contributed to this. Perhaps most

significant to this fragmentation is a divide between those who embrace anthropology as

a “science” and those who link it to a challenge to Eurocentric meta-narratives that

include science itself as a subject of study.

Because of its cross-cultural, multi-temporal, relativist perspective, anthropologists

have always considered all phenomena on their own terms, whether employing the

comparative method or seeking universal or particular features. In the late 1960s and the

1970s other academic disciplines of study particularly the humanities, began to look to

anthropology for theoretical orientations that became pivotal in “de-centering”

conventions of study that refracted unequal relations of power, Euro- and ethnocentric.

Entries A-Z 59

Yet, the anthropological perspective did not play much of a role in the

“culture wars”

that followed (Rosaldo 1994).

American anthropology continues to reflect and shape social forms and practices in the

study of the human condition. Once holding the contradictory position as a handmaiden

of the European and American colonial enterprise while acting as advocate of non-

western peoples in the face of imperialism, anthropology now is a contested site in the

contemporary politics of identity. Local and global flows, displacements, and re-

integrations of populations which have produced ethnic politics as a site of contestation,

and a fragmented “social imaginary” (Appadurai 1996) are both the subjects o

contemporary anthropology and the cause of some of its recent theoretical and practical

reformations.

The face of American anthropology is increasingly female and increasingly

“other” (see Behar and Gordon 1995). Post-colonial theorists from what once were the

eripheries of the EuroAmerican core also have entered the anthropological enterprise.

Anthropology as a “science,” the notion of holism, the comparative method, the culture

concept, relativism, fieldwork, analytical and interpretative frameworks, and forms o

textual presentations have all come under attack as symptoms of an inequality in power

relations between western and non-western peoples, places and spaces.

This critique of anthropology often referred to as the “crisis of representation” (Marcus

and Fischer 1986) has led to ill-feeling among anthropologists. Contemporary American

anthropology is increasingly seen to be a cultural anthropology that often includes

linguistic anthropology, with archaeology and physical anthropology aligned with each

other or completely separated. Some archaeologists and physical anthropologists,

meanwhile, believe that cultural anthropology has lost its subject—culture—to other

disciplines, which has led to its demise as a subfield.

What relevance does anthropology have for contemporary American culture? More so

than ever before anthropologists, particularly cultural anthropologists, are engaging in

research here at “home.” Medical anthropology, practice anthropology and its problem-

solving orientation, urban ethnographies, film and media studies, a revitalized partnership

with

folklore

and folk-life studies, and an interest on the part of the corporate world in

anthropology have brought it closer to the surface of public culture.

Further reading

Appadurai, A. (1996)

Modernity at Large,

Minnesota: University of Minnesota.

Behar, R. and Gordon, D. (eds) (1995)

Women

Writing Culture,

California: University of

California.

Harris, M. (1968)

The Rise of Anthropological Theory,

New York: Harper & Row.

Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. (1986)

Anthropology as Cultural Critique,

Chicago:

University of Chicago.

Rosaldo, R. (1994) “Whose cultural studies?,”

American Anthropologist

96(3): 524–9.

STEVE FERZACCA

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 60

JANICE NEWBERRY

antiques/reproductions

American

middle

and

upper classes

live between ideologies of

mobility,

equality and

opportunity and expressions of status valuing that which is old, inherited or unique.

While elite collectors raided Europe over the past century (and eventually contributed to

museums

as rich store-houses of the global past), antiques as inherited and acquired

goods have wider domestic meanings. While memories and

family

histories may be

linked to humble objects from the past—quilts, furniture, books, paintings and

photographs—more extensive antique sales have also drained Europe and, increasingly,

the Third World in order to supply proof of connoisseurship, status and even ethnic

heritage. For offices,

hotels

and other institutions as well, antiques (or quality

reproductions) project status and sobriety. These evaluations, in turn, sustain an ever-

hotter market among serious collectors and museums for the best specimens of both

American and foreign production in the past.

This burgeoning market, ranging from flea markets, shops and decorators to elegant

auction houses, nonetheless limits the accessibility of the past while opening the door to

reproductions as cultural capital. Often sold through museum stores or high-end retailers,

these may be direct reproductions of jewelry artworks or furniture, but also entail

reproduction of motifs—indicating knowledge as much as copying—transposed to ties,

appointment books, children’s

toys,

etc.

Gentrification

and home-ownership have also

fostered markets for “antique” fixtures or adaptations of modern conveniences, while

hotels and offices have affirmed these tastes. Reproduction posters, dolls and collectibles

extend this marketing of the past into lower-end sales, generally without questioning the

heritage reproduced or the divisions embodied in both “authentic” and “fake”

appropriation.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

anti-technology

The “American Century” has been built on high technology, whether in images o

material progress, technological fixes for problems of the environment, health,

technology itself or the volatility of tech

stocks

and e-commerce at the turn of the

Entries A-Z 61

millennium. Nonetheless, technology has also met with resistance and rejection.

Motivated by values of a simpler life, for example, groups as diverse as

hippies

and the

Amish

have publicly rejected some technologies; extreme

survivalists

have also sought

to escape dependency on technology and its global connections. More often, resistance

seems embodied in everyday ignorance of how technology works: standard American

humor

about people’s inability to control a

computer,

VCR

or electronic device. This is

sometimes contrasted with the seemingly more comprehensible and remediable

automobiles

and machines of the 1950s, which evoked their own technological specters

at the time. Resistance also pits images of high tech

fashion

and design against history

and comfort, or highlights relations of

gender

and technology (where men are expected

to be fixers) and differences of age, as generations raised on computers and video games

replace skills valued by their elders.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Apartheid

Africa

Appalachia

The green hills and broad valleys of the Appalachian Mountains evoke profoundly

dichotomous meanings in American life. The largest chain in the East, these mountains

often have been portrayed as natural havens, escapes from coastal urbanization. At the

same time, the region has been characterized by isolation and poverty that symbolize for

policy-makers and media the failure of the American dream.

The Appalachian Mountains stretch across fourteen states, from Maine to Georgia;

they include ranges known locally as the Berkshires, Taconics, Lehighs, Shenandoahs

and Smokies. These relatively gentle slopes and broad valleys have influenced

generations of painters and writers; the Berkshires in Massachusetts, for example, harbor

artist colonies, while other ranges shelter elegant resorts and tourist development

(especially the Smokies and Virginia’s Shenandoahs). State and national

forests,

as well

as federal parks like Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee and North

Carolina now protect the beauty of the Appalachians. The 2,000 mile (3,200 km)

Appalachian trail, first developed by volunteers in the 1920s, traverses much of the East

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 62

Coast, a journey explored in Bill Bryson’s (1998)

A Walk in the Woods

Yet Appalachia’s natural beauty contrasts with another brutal image, which developed

after the Civil War, that portrayed its Southern ranges as a region of extreme

ackwardness and poverty In literature and film (476 movies between 1904 and 1929),

local residents or “hillbillies” came to denote ignorance, isolation and internecine

violence, even if they were occasionally championed as decadent heirs of an English

yeoman tradition. The problem of Appalachia was tackled with the

Tennessee Valley

Authority

and other development projects of the New Deal; in 1965, it became special

target in the

War on Poverty,

defended by politicians from West Virginia, Kentucky and

Tennessee. Yet, in 1999, Appalachia still figured in the itinerary when President Bill

Clinton

looked at American poverty.

Both images miss the complexity of Appalachian social ecology and history The

decline of farming and community for example, was linked to largescale outside

acquisitions of the land and the dangers of the coal mines that made the region a constant

source of emigration to the North. Moreover, Appalachian peoples have included

African Americans

and Native Americans, as well as diverse white populations—all o

whom “hillbilly” images ignore (a point underscored in John Sayle’s 1993 film

atewan

Compelling voices, nonetheless, have spoken from and for Appalachia, from John

Fox’s romantic turn-of-the-century portraits to Harry Caudill’s

Nï

ht Comes to the

Cumberland

(1963). Barbara Kopple’s compelling

Harlan County, USA

(1976)

chronicles the travails of coal miners and

unions

. Generations of bluegrass and

country

and western

musicians have conveyed the soul of Appalachia over local radio and

through recordings. Appalshop, a grassroots media cooperative, has also fought

stereotypes while preserving the complexity of local traditions and struggles.

ee also:

nature; rednecks; South

Further reading

Davis, D. (1999)

Where there are Mountains,

Athens: University of Georgia.

Turner, W. and Cabell, E. (eds) (1985)

Blacks in Appalachia,

Lexington: University

Press of Kentucky

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Apple computer

The story of two men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple in a garage in

Entries A-Z 63

the 1970s, and went on to challenge corporate behemoth

IBM

in the burgeoning personal

computer market is in one sense a retelling of the singularly American story of the self-

made person. Apple can also be seen as the next chapter of the 1960s counterculture,

when a generation that once disdained corporate culture came to embrace and transform

it into their own image. This aspect is emblematized by the informal, creative work

environment which Jobs fostered, and by the philanthropic efforts to which Wozniak

funneled his profits. The company’s most famous product, the Macintosh, became

popular in part as a symbol of the values that Apple embodied.

ROBERT ANDERSON

Arab Americans

Although “Arab” refers to members of a language group from the

Middle East

and North

Africa, the term has been muddled in the US by historical shifts, global Islamic politics

and widespread stereotypes of fanatic Muslim “others.” In fact, many Arab Americans

are Christians (90 percent of those who arrived before the Second World War) and long-

term citizens. Yet the 2–3 million Americans of Arab descent face continual possibilities

of discrimination, vividly depicted in the mass round-ups of the 1998 movie

The Siege,

which spurred vigorous Arab American protest. These representations belie Arabs’ long

presence in the States, their complexity and their integration into diverse settings.

Arab

immigration

began in the late nineteenth century with young males coming from

Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman empire), pursuing wandering mercantile careers in

North and South America; one is remembered as the “Persian” in the musical

Oklahoma

This brought family and friends over before 1920’s immigration curbs (perhaps a total o

100,000), and generally they became highly assimilated.

Immigration renewed after the Second World War with students and professionals

from Arab states (primarily Muslim). Christians and Muslims from Lebanon, Palestine,

Iraq, Egypt and other areas have also escaped traumatic local conditions, as well as

ursuing economic security. Men and families have led immigration rather than single

women—Arab American women have felt special strains between new social mores and

their roles within families and a variety of Arab/Muslim gender roles.

Most Arab Americans are urban, concentrated in

New York

City,

Los Angeles, CA,

Chicago

and

Detroit, MI

(200,000 citizens of Lebanese and Palestinian descent). They

belong to diverse Orthodox and

Roman Catholic

traditions, as well as Protestant faiths

established by missionaries, although most are now Muslim. Valuing education and

labor, they have established themselves in politics—senators James Abourezk (South

Dakota) and George Mitchell (Maine), and Clinton Health and Human Services Secretary

Donna Shalala, Wisconsin. They have also succeeded in mass media

(comedian/impresario Danny Thomas, actor F.Murray Abraham), although they are

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 64

sometimes typecast as other “ethnics.” Ralph

Nader,

consummate American crusader

and presidential candidate, is also of Arab descent.

Yet divisions in the contemporary Middle East continually reinforce American

prejudices. The Arab—Israeli war of 1967 became a watershed for Arab American

identity, and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. and the

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, among others, emerged in this era.

onetheless, in the 1990s, mass media caricatured Arabs as greedy merchants and

oppressed, but sensual females in

Disney

and

Star Wars,

while denigrating Arab cultural

and political claims as extremist in contrast with the moral values of Israeli lobbying.

Universities often treat Arabic as a dead language despite 246 million speakers

worldwide and 355,000 speakers in the US—more than Hindi, Russian or Yiddish. Thus,

Arab Americans are resisted within the melting-

ot despite strong claims of history and

participation.

Further reading

McCarus, E. (ed.) (1983)

The Development of ArabAmerican Identity,

Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan.

GARY McDONOGH

architecture

The International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 is

often cited as the beginning of

modernism

in America. Curated by Philip

Johnson

and

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the exhibition attempted to codify European trends alongside

examples of the modern style in America. This International Style—characterized by

white walls, flexible plans and a glass-and-steel industrial aesthetic—

ecame the

revailing architectural style in the United States following the Second World War.

Meanwhile, in prominent schools of architecture, European architects such as Ludwig

Mies van der Rohe,

Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius transformed American

architectural education into atelier-based institu-tions that embraced the tenets of the

European modernist tradition.

In the 1950s, glass box modernism became the preferred style for American

corporations, institutions and universities; examples include works by Eero Saarinen and

I.M.Pei. At the same time, American architects embraced brutalism, based on the later Le

Corbusier and the philosophical discourses of authenticity. This style is exemplified by

Louis I.

Kahn’s

Yale University Art Gallery (1951) and Paul Rudolph’s Art and

Architecture building at Yale (1964).

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