Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

who visits the United States so he can learn about
American culture and return home with useful lessons. The
movie’s humor turns on the apparent differences between Borat’s
culture, on the one hand, and that of his audience and the people
he meets, on the other. His values, beliefs, and norms deeply
offend the Americans he encounters. Because Borat is capable of
seeing the world only from his own cultural viewpoint, the movie
at one level is a story of ethnocentrism gone mad.
Borat is anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, and sexist, but he directs
many of our biggest laughs against Americans. At one point,
he secures the agreement of a rodeo organizer to let him sing
the national anthem before the show begins. Borat first makes
a speech: “My name Borat, I come from Kazakhstan.
Can I say
first, we support your war of terror. (The audience applauds.) May
we show our support to our boys in Iraq. (The audience cheers.)
May US and A kill every single terrorist! (The audience roars.) May
George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and
child of Iraq! May you destroy their country so that for the next
1,000 years not even a single lizard will survive in their desert!”
(The audience goes wild.) After thus demonstrating the inhumanity
of his audience, Borat sings the Kazakh national anthem in
English to the tune of the United States national anthem:
Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world.
All other countries are run by little girls.
Kazakhstan is number one exporter of potassium.
Other Central Asian countries have inferior potassium.
Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world.
All other countries is the home of the gays.
To the suggestion that another country exceeds the United States
in glory, the audience responds with jeers and boos that grow so
loud, one fears for Borat’s life. In this and other scenes, the movie
forces us to conclude that American culture is as biased in its
own way as Kazakh culture allegedly is.
Is Borat just a rant against Americans, Jews, blacks, gays, women,
and so on? Some people think so. But that opinion is not credible for
two reasons. First, it is inconsistent with who Sacha Baron Cohen is:
a well-educated liberal who completed a degree in history at Cambridge
and wrote his thesis on the civil rights movement in the United
States, and a Jew who strongly identifies with his ethnic heritage.
(One of the movie’s biggest jokes is that Borat speaks mostly Hebrew
to his sidekick, Azamat Bagatov [Ken Davitian].)Borat certainly is a long and funny rant, but the real objects of
its satire are the world’s racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes,
regardless of their race, creed, or national origin. The
deeper message of Borat is anything but ethnocentric: Respect
for human dignity is a value that rises above all cultures, and
people who think otherwise deserve to be laughed at.
Critical Thinking
1. Does Borat help you see the prejudices of other people more
clearly?
2. Does Borat help you see your own prejudices more clearly?
3. Borat talks and acts like a bigot from the opening title to the
closing credits. Do you think that the expression of bigotry
is inherently offensive and should always be avoided? Or do
you believe that the satirical expression of bigotry can usefully
reveal hidden prejudices?
Source: Excerpt from Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious
Nation Of Kazakhstan © 2006, Twentieth Century Fox. Story by Sacha
Baron Cohen, Peter Baynham, Anthony Hines, and Todd Phillips. Screenplay by
Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Dan Mazer. All rights
reserved.
consumption. And they represent an important source of protein as well as a livelihood
for members of low-ranking castes, who have the right to dispose of the bodies of dead
cattle. These “untouchables” eat beef and form the workforce of India’s large leather craft
industry. The protection of cows by means of cow worship is thus a perfectly sensible and
efficient economic practice. It seems irrational only when judged by Western standards.
Harris’s analysis of cow worship in rural India is interesting for two reasons. First,
it illustrates how functionalist theory can illuminate otherwise mysterious social practices.
Harris uncovers a range of latent functions performed by cow worship, thus showing
how a particular social practice has unintended and non obvious consequences that
make social order possible. Second, we can draw an important lesson about ethnocentrism
from Harris’s analysis. If you refrain from judging other societies by the standards
of your own, and understand practices in cultural context, you will have taken an important
first step toward developing a sociological understanding of culture.