Avatar, global warming and the ‘original affluent society’

By now most of us would have seen James Cameron’s new blockbuster, Avatar the one with the plucky blue hunter-gatherers on an alternate earth called Pandora. Now I am not going to talk about whether the film was good or not, I leave that up to everybody else. What I do want to talk about, are some of the themes raised in the movie and its relevance with our species current peception of the planet we live on.

The themes of the film are fairly standard fare for Sci-Fi movies of this kind i.e. industrialisation, capatalism etc. However, it takes a novell approach as it creates an alternate setting and time period for European expansion and Colonisation of North America, Africa and Asia etc. Many people have rightly indicated that the local indigenous folk is at best an idealised version of Native-Americans/Paleo-Indians or just the perception of what hunter-gatherers ought to be like. However, the biggest poblem is that two conflicting ideas are presented: that of the ‘noble savage’ and that of the ‘original affluent society’. The Noble Savage is best understood within the iconography of the 16th, 17th and to some extent the 18th century. On the other hand the ‘original affluent society’ is clearly rooted within 1950s and 1960s anthropological research.

So what is the message of the film? That idustrialisation is bad? That hunter-gatherers are free of internal and external strife, no wars, no resources stress? That the pursuit of more and more resources will ultimately lead to the downfall of our species/global warming/wars etc.

So I pose this question. How does every emerging economy in the world play catch up with the rest without industrialisation?