by Matthew Reed

Created on: May 22, 2008

Disney's 1967 animated film, The Jungle Book, is an artifact from a past cultural period in the United States. As with many cultures, the particular expressions, including deviance, of society are articulated through art. By using The Jungle Book as an art artifact, a cultural anthropologist may be able to discern certain details of past American society. Within the cinematic experience, the viewer can glimpse biases and social mores that are no longer pieces of the dominant paradigm. Race, class, and gender are displayed prominently in The Jungle Book in a manner to reinforce established values and taboos.

Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book is loosely based on a series of Nineteenth Century tales written by British author Rudyard Kipling. However, the similarities are surface and the two stories share little of their cultural perspectives. Both legends are based on the character of Mowgli, a human child raised in the jungles of India by wolves. Other characters that appear as part of both stories are Bagheera the panther, Baloo the sloth bear, Shere Khan the tiger, and Kaa the python. Both relate Mowgli's travel to a human village, but from this point the stories diverge sufficiently to abandon comparison to Kipling's creation and focus only on the American cultural elements of Disney's movie.

One of the defining characteristics of The Jungle Book is the embedded xenophobia in the story. The use of foreign accents, for example, reveals a cultural anxiety regarding people of foreign origins. In general, the characters all speak in a well-modulated intonation, perhaps an eastern North American, educated accent. However, those individuals, such as Shere Khan and Colonel Hathi, which require a singular status to build on social biases are given an even more pronounced accent. By distinguishing between types of animals by establishing an accent, in this case British, ethnocentrism can be renewed. In both cases, also, the accent provides a buffer against validating alternate cultural points of view.

A specific element of American xenophobia is racial discrimination. A major theme of The Jungle Book is the implied conflict between man and the animals of the jungle. Bagheera repeats the phrase "bird of a feather must flock together" as an idiom to explain why Mowgli must leave the jungle and join human society. The character uses the phrase most prominently in a conversation with Baloo the bear. When Baloo protests Mowgli returning to the "man-village" and

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