Archive and Authenticity: Cinematic Tourism in <i>El abrazo de la serpiente</i> (2015) by Ciro Guerra
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The film El abrazo de la serpiente (2015) by Colombian director Ciro Guerra has been praised for its decolonial and ecological aesthetics. In this article I problematize these readings by arguing that the film, through its references to the archive of Amazonian photography and writing, works to satisfy touristic desires for contact with an ‘authentic’ Other, expressed most clearly in the indigenous shaman character, Karamakate. The film’s touristic aesthetic culminates in the final scenes, in which Karamakate bestows his shamanic knowledge on a white traveller character. This act not only heightens the sense of profound contact with the Other but also constructs a fantasy of reconciliation with indigenous peoples over the violence of colonialism. In this way, the film attempts to assuage guilt over colonial wrongdoings while doing little to model new and better ways of relating with indigenous peoples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".