The Archives of the Planet reading following our class discussion on Tuesday with Brian Jacobson sparked some interesting ideas about people's relationship between nature and technology in the 19th-century. Melies confronted the idea between man and technology in his ‘science fiction’ films, which Jacobson argued could be read as him wrestling with the technology of his time rather than pondering future technological feats. Melies underscored films' inherent relationship to technology by building his studio in which he attempted to control the environment with technology in order to produce films. Melies and Khan are both part of a narrative of humans manipulating their environments by using technology. For better or for worse the results of these attempts are subjects for anthropological study, as Jean-Francois Werner explains in his essay.

The “Around the World Circle” attempted to use photographic and cinematic technology to produce an “Archive of the Planet” to understand and document diverse human societies before their “unavoidable disappearance” from the world. They believed with the ongoing globalization process these societies would inevitably die out, and their interest was in capturing them before this happened. Through the lense of Ecocriticism, this can be read as 19th-century western elites' interest in documenting and confirming the natural process of more primitive societies' disappearance in the wake of human advancement, resource collection, and the modernization of the globe. These actions are in harmony with the New Wave French thinking that all the world would soon convert to French practices and values because they were universally good for mankind. An interesting question then arises: why were western societies so fixed on capturing diverse cultures before this believed transition into a modern global world? Was it to confirm their belief that these cultures were more primitive and unsustainable? Was it intrigue? I’m not sure if one answer is discernible. What I do know is that not only are the visual data the Circle collects important to anthropologists today, but also the actions of the Circle and their motivations for capturing their environment by use of technology is important to anthropological studies.