Page 159 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

150 Shea Esterling

government agreement, and hence should be regarded as a serious
contributor to public discourse.

INTRODUCTION
1

Popular culture ―tends to crystallise most commonly in print media,
popular music, film and television‖ [Thornton, p. 6]. One academic has
provided an analysis of these films as an Arthurian narrative that traces the
development of Indiana Jones through the typical chivalric ―vita‖ while many
others have analyzed the trilogy as ―Reaganite entertainment‖ which involves
an effort to restore the faith of individuals in America as a ―promised land‖
entitled to intervene in the affairs of others as a result of moral superiority and
divine mission [Aronstein, p. 3]. Legal and cultural research share a common
interest in the illicit trafficking in cultural objects from source to market states,
2
that ultimately generates demands for the repatriation of these objects.
Cultural analysis can questionthe legal discipline‘s resistance to the use of
popular culture for fear of its corrupting influence. As Margaret Thornton
states: ―These terms are amorphous, however, and have merged haphazardly
into one another. They do not lend themselves to the clear lines and neat
classifications beloved of lawyers. Indeed, the pervasiveness and accessibility
of pop culture, particularly the mass media that is consumed by intellectuals
and the uneducated alike, puts paid to the idea that there are discrete popular
and high cultures‖ [Thornton, p.4]. It can be demonstrated how legal
arguments benefit from engaging with popular culture as a source by use of
suitable methods, in this case semiotic, that reveal parallels in subject matter in
the two domains. The apparently divided discourse, between law and culture,
stymies progress in legal research in an area like illicit trafficking and
repatriation of cultural objects, and at worst may even contribute to the
problem.

1
This chapter has received supplementary assistance by the volume‘s editor.
2
In source states, the supply of cultural objects exceeds internal demand. Among others, source
states include Mexico, Egypt and Greece. Furthermore, the individuals in these states also
are referred to as source peoples in much of the relevant literature. By contrast, in market
states the demand for cultural objects exceeds the supply. States here include the United
States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland among others. However, these
classifications are deceptively neat. States can be both source and market nations such as
the United States and Canada; both are sources of many North American Indian artifacts as
well as destinations for many other artifacts worldwide [Merryman, p. 832].