#avatar: a confidential report on the biological and social history of pandora

[tailsrevane]

[book review] avatar: an activist survival guide by maria wilhelm & dirk mathison (2009)

yeah, i’m pretty much always a sucker for these “nonfiction”-style books about franchises i like. i devoured all the star wars essential guides back in the day, and a lot of the star trek equivalents.

i do have two substantial complaints, though. first, the book repeatedly mentions “overpopulation” on earth, and it’s just… look, i know you’ve heard this a bunch of times if you read much of my writing, but i’m gonna say it again: it’s not a thing. it’s just not. and this is what happens when people without a solid grounding in dialectical materialism and political theory try to do environmentalism. much of the blame is rightly placed on big corporations, but you’re still swallowing wholesale their incredibly racist and misanthropic explanations for environmental degradation and making it a “personal responsibility” thing.

this doesn’t just come up in the parts of the book that specifically refer to earth, by the way. the book says that part of why the na’vi are more “in balance” with nature is because they have a nearly equal birthrate and deathrate, and just… no, guys. that’s not how this works. that’s not how any of this works.

my second major complaint is that there is just so much binary gender essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality on display in this book’s presentation of na’vi culture. it strains credulity that a culture like the na’vi would include either of these features.

this is actually not the most surprising thing to me, though, because it’s extremely similar to some of the things i’ve run into as a baby witch/neopagan. what cameron & co are doing in creating the na’vi doesn’t seem all that dissimilar to me to what a lot of neopagan pioneers did in constructing the various mainstream branches of neopaganism. it is a bit counterintuitive and frustrating to see such obvious reproductions of the wrong thinking that these people absorbed from white, western, largely christian culture in people and groups that are intentionally trying to break with that culture, but at least they’re trying i guess? but you still see these sorts of ridiculously rigid, binarist ideas about “natural” gender in a lot of the most popular and well-known neopagan groups.

i love, love, love the detail that some lifeforms on pandora have characteristics of both plants and animals, and that biologists and botanists “must reassess their preconceptions about the mechanics of life.” a book more solidly grounded in theory would likely add that this speaks to the fact that many “scientific,” “natural” categorizations that are often taken for granted are themselves socially constructed, informed by the ideologies of the cultures that develop them.

this is less a criticism, and more just an amused observation, but it’s kind of hilarious that this book decries the commoditization of na’vi culture and then goes on to describe basically exactly what you can find at the gift shop in pandora: the world of avatar? and i know it’s different when you’re not talking about an actual culture, but the na’vi are so similar to so many actual earth cultures in a lot of ways, so i still feel deeply uncomfortable about the idea of buying like… probably a good 75% of the goods on offer at those giftshops. and, again, this does remind me an awful lot of how i feel sometimes in new age/neopagan shops/etc (though in that case it’s even worse because it is explicitly white people making money off of the appropriation of actual, existing cultures on earth).

you might think i’m asking for a lot from a silly movie tie-in book, and you’re probably right, but this is a franchise that’s trying to appeal to people not just as a big, dumb action/scifi franchise, but also as a franchise that wants to Say Stuff, so i don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask it to do better if that’s the road it wants to travel down.

i’ve spent a lot of time talking about this book’s shortcomings even though they are pretty nitpicky at the end of the day, because there just happens to be a lot more to say about them? like, i do really like this book, honestly! it’s just, all there there really is to say about that is that it’s a really cool book about a really cool world. i like the way it’s formatted, as already mentioned i love these “nonfiction”-style supplemental books about scifi worlds, and i really do like the world of avatar. so this book really is right up my alley.

b-rank