“He wants to know how all those people got in there”: Surveying The Gods Must Be Crazy through a post- and neo-colonial telescope
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The popular film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) remains, despite its age, the primary reference point for Westerners with regard to the San people of southern Africa (commonly known outside Africa as the Bushmen). It is a catalyst for tourist interest in the people since many tourists, as this paper demonstrates, credulously accept the mythology that the San people live now as (and where) they do in the film. Indeed, a Lonely Planet ‘coffee-table’ publication of 2010 cites the film as mandatory viewing for tourists prior to visiting Botswana. The San’s lifestyle is depicted in the film as one of Garden-of-Eden tranquility, although the landscape is somewhat more arid than the Genesis idyll. The San had been driven out of the Kalahari by the Botswana government in the interests of diamond mining, big-game hunting and high-end tourism. Meanwhile, tourist ephemera in-country extols the lifestyle of the Bushmen esoterically, producing imagery that suggests they are still living as they did for millennia, omitting any mention of their modern realities and perpetuating a lie about their ongoing relationship with lands to which they no longer have access. The film is explored here via some thematic distinctions of Spurr (1993). This paper transcribes these distinctions (or tropes) of colonialist thought and action as neo-colonialist which are ubiquitously in operation within the modern tourism industry, perpetuating disempowerment to a significant extent
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".