Meeting the Other

When cultures with completely different value systems crash, conflict often arises from a deep lack of understanding, rooted sometimes in a willingness to see and judge the other only under our own discourse and language. The filmmaker Werner Herzog has brought to the screen in several of his films these conflicts of understanding and communication between different cultures. His 1983 film Wo die Grünen Amaisen Träumen (Where the Green Ants Dream), Herzog shows the conflict between the Australian aborigines and a mining corporation looking for uranium in their lands where the aborigines have lived for 40,000 years. The aborigines object to the mining operations and try to stop the digging to protect the land where the green ants dream. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Herzog also brings to the screen the meeting of two very different worlds; the Spanish conquistadors and the Natives of the Amazon. In their quest of El Dorado, the knowledge, value system and weaponry of the Spaniards seems out of place in the jungle.
The inability of one culture to understand another is mainly grounded in language. As humans we are constraint by language, the medium through which we construct, define, and explain reality. How can we know the other, when the same words can mean different things for different cultures? As Ludwig Wittgenstein explains on “The Nature of Philosophy”, “the goal of philosophy is to build a wall where language comes to an end.” Thus, philosophy must be defined as a mechanism needed to liberate people’s views and comprehension from the limits and traps of language, in other words, the limits created by looking at the world from a fixed point of view, ideology or discourse. As Wittgenstein says “[Humans] cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety of associations which hold them prisoner.”
No other situation illustrates the limits of language than the meeting of two different cultures. Where the Green Ants Dream, the value system and rituals of the Australian aborigines seem just simply bizarre to the white Australian engineers. For the aborigines, land is not understood in terms of property, or as something to exploit and profit from. Their language cannot define land in such terms, simply because for them such terms are unknown, foreign to their culture. The films opens with an aerial shot of the mining fields where the drilling had left small white sand pyramids, resembling ant hills, which had been blown apart by a tornado. Then we see the heavy machinery working its way through the land. The tornado becomes a metaphor for the West and its technological potential that can destroys the land and everything on its way like a tornado. A geologist, Lance Hackett is in charge of supervising the drilling and excavations, but he is confronted by the aborigines who refuse to leave the sacred land of their ancestors where the green ants dream. The destruction of the ants, they fear, will cause a natural catastrophe or a cosmic disaster.
The mining company tries to bribe the aborigines with money and 10% of the profits if the mine is productive, but the aborigines cannot accept this; for them the land of the ants is sacred, thus it cannot be sold or destroyed. For the aborigines the Land Act of the Commonwealth has no significance, they land had been theirs for 40,000 years, why should they accept laws that were not part of their history and ancestry? As one of the elders tells Hackett: “You don’t understand. How would you like it if someone drove a bulldozer over your church?” Hackett, unlike his executive bosses and the workers, is desperately trying to understand the aborigines by talking to an ethnologist, who has rejected civilization for the desert; and a scientist who is fascinated by the ants. Finally, after so much resistance from the aborigines, the mining corporation takes conflict to justice. The aborigines are taken to court, where they are judged under British Common Law, which is a system of law unknown to them, their culture, and understanding of the world. The judge unfairly rules against the aborigines, who must leave their lands to mining company. The scene in the court room is almost ludicrous, the aborigines are brought into a world to which they do not belong, and are judged under a value system that is unable to understand who they are.
In Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Herzog shows how the value system and technical knowledge of one culture becomes inefficient in a different environment that is more appropriate for native cultures. Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the story of a Spanish expedition in the Amazon River in the 16th century. The events are narrated by the priest, Carvajal, who is recording in his diary their odyssey in the jungle. Although Carvajal is narrating and describing what happens, the point of view of the camera is completely independent of him. The film opens with an aerial shot of the expedition descending from the Andes, covered by clouds as if they were descending from heaven. The technology of the Spaniards, their armor, weapons, horses seem useless in this terrain. As the soldiers navigate on a raft, the natives shoot arrows at them; they shoot their cannon into the jungle without any success, trying to kill an invisible enemy. In the film the natives are almost absent, except when a groups of natives, who refused conversion to Christianity, are killed. The Spanish soldiers are all killed one by one or die from hunger. As they agonize, they hallucinate, which is very ironic because all throughout the expedition their perception of reality had been altered by greed for gold. The culture, religion, and weapons of the Spanish ultimately fail to save them from their death in the Amazon jungle. Even thought they considered their culture to be superior to that of the natives, under a different environment their knowledge and technology seem utterly powerless.
The understanding of the other is complicated by limitation in our language, through which we communicate and make sense of what we see and experience. For the aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream, the language of the capitalist West is totally incomprehensible, while the West cannot understand the beliefs of the aborigines, which they reject as superstition. For a complete agreement to take place, both sides would have to liberate themselves from the constraints of their language, only there can a solution be found. On the other hand, no understanding can exist between cultures if one tries to impose its values on the other and vise versa. The Spanish soldiers in Aguirre, the Wrath of God ultimately fail to know the other, whom is considered to lack a real culture of their own, thus, in need of conversion by the colonial master.