The Intercultural Adaptation as an Anthropological Experiment

Intercultural adaptations focus on the cultural changes necessary in this process of adaptation, in which a source text is adapted into a film or any other medium, or even the same one, recreating a narrative. Researchers from Adaptation Studies have stated that they are the combination of familiarity and novelty (Hutcheon, 2006); so, in this paper, we argue that the analysis of an intercultural adaptation could benefit from the perspective of Interpretive Anthropology, of thinking the adapter as in the role of an anthropologist who needs to observe the otherness in the source text and make it familiar to the audience. In order to do so, we adopt as support to our thesis authors from Adaptation Studies, such as Hutcheon (2006), Interpretive Anthropology, as Geertz (1973), and Cultural Studies, as Eagleton (2000). To demonstrate our proposition, we provide an illustrative case study of Julieta (2016), a film by Almodóvar that is an adaptation of three short stories by Munro from the book Runaway (2005), also known as “Triptych Juliet”. We use a methodology proposed by Silva (2012) but incorporating the Interpretive Anthropology perspective and adding a new element of analysis: thematic crossovers. This way, we believe that studies of adaptations could avoid value judgment and comparisons of fidelity, because culture is understood as the main motivation in the process of adaptation, maintaining a dialogue between source text and adaptation, but also with all intertextual texts within the fabrication of cultural meaning. Thus, we make sense of our lives and reality through the aesthetic symbols of art, creating individual and collective identity as humanity by observing the other and ourselves in the anthropological experiment we consider to be the intercultural adaptation.