ABSTRACT
Collapse lies at an interface between academic research and popular culture; it is a subject for serious analysis by archaeologists, historians, and academics in other fields, as well as for entertainment, sermonizing, and spectacle. It has become a boom industry, with many authors, magazines, and documentary and feature film makers “cranking out collapse porn,” as Phillips puts it. Collapse makes good material for television documentary makers too, who can combine academic talking heads with dramatic and exotic shots of jungle or desert and dramatic historical reconstructions. Diamond’s book inspired a National Geographic film, Collapse, which portrays future archaeologists of the twenty-third century picking over the ruins of lost American cities – “the greatest civilization in history.” Those growing up in and influenced by “the Western tradition” are socialized into particular views of collapse from stories that have long been embedded in the western culture and worldview.
