Journal 4: Film and the Ancestral Environment

While reading Bormann's Holding onto Reality, I was stuck by his images concerning the 'Ancestral Environment' and the ways in which we picture this world where signs and things, knowledge and information were intimately related. This rudimentary world of natural information was one in which ancient peoples "found it necessary to realize information in some tangible and permanent way". Borgmann gives the example of how early native peoples knew information about their environment through various signs that they had learned to recognize. Borgmann sees this as a world in which there was great pleasure in being connected to reality in this intimate way.
I have traveled much to the American West, and grown up around stories and movies about Native Americans and their lifestyles. One such movie comes to mind, Dances With Wolves, which has examples of native peoples living off the land and being threatened by the inevitable coming of the white man to their territory. Many of the images in my mind when I think about Native Americans comes from films such as these. No matter how historically accurate they are, however, they remain imitations of a reality I have never seen nor experienced. To me, it seems ironic that there is a serious attempt at portraying this natural world with the highest technology of film at the time (1990).
We have moved into a world so distant from the natural setting, so that although we may know what an authentic buffalo hunt looks like on film, we will never know the reality and information being presented to us if we were on a horse, trying to avoiding being trampled...we would never know the sheer trepidation and thrill of that moment; what it means to provide for your family with such unrefined means and methods. In a sense, although we see an authentic representation on television, we cannot experience the pleasure of what it must have been like to experience the real thing years ago, when the movie camera didn't even exist.
Borgmann's frame of mind is an interesting one that provides the reader with many issues to ponder and consider.