The Circle of Life
Before reading further, press play and immediately come back to this page.

Okay, that's better. This post needs that certain special something. The uplifting sounds of World Music. The powerfully spiritual whole-earthiness and oneness that unites us within the notes.

Geography used to fire the imagination. Descriptions of new and wondrous exotic places inspired literal adventure and literary exploration. Think of Speke & Richard Burton, Stanley & Livingstone, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, and the tales of Rudyard Kipling. Even cinematically, this sense was brought to screen in figures such as O'Toole's dashing Lawrence of Arabia and the fictional globe-trotting adventurer Indiana Jones. There is a richness to these ingredients. Unfamiliar sights, sounds, places, and people.

Somewhere along the way all this got tossed aside. These depictions were artifacts of colonialism, ethnocentrism, and stereotype. The romanticized figures and places of geography: Ghurkas, Bantus, Zulus, pygmies, the Congo, Borneo, the Amazon have instead been replaced by antiseptic discussions of cultures, diversity, environments, and ecosystems. Ah yes, gripping stuff!

Indeed, the shift in view may be all well and good in a values sense, but it certainly has eroded the imaginative. In its place we're offered up a sort of theme park celebration of geographic exotica: Disney movies of boy lions, grooving emperors, Hakuna Matada, and culturally empowered warrior princesses. Episodes of Survivor replete with carved wooden tikis, smiling grass-skirted villagers and "Circle of Life" style soundtracks. When it comes to the world scene, I like Bono and all, and the attention to Africa that he raises. But Bono is no Burton. Burton is, afterall, the figure who raised the western world's attention to the exotic and sensual delights of the Kama Sutra. I think it is safe to say that Bono's awareness raising of third world debt relief doesn't exactly compare.

This leads one to ask, Has the world become boring? Has everything about the planet become familiarized to the point where all we can do is talk about it in scientific terms: cultures, climates, biomes, ecosystems, environments? Has all the world's richness been watered down to the where all that remains for the imagination is the appreciation of World Music, batik prints, and the animated figures of Timon and Phumba?