The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘home’ as: “a refuge, a sanctuary; a place or region to which one naturally belongs or where one feels at ease. Also without article or possessive”. This indicates that a home is not just a house, and to the Na’vi people of Pandora, this is clearly the case. Globalisation causes multiple effects on cultures, one being that it has the potential to destroy cultures (Mohammed 158). Many iconic scenes within the film depict this, as the human race aim to ‘invade’ and disrupt the Na’vi people for resources. The world that Avatar portrays is juxtaposed against our own, where the mythical and mystical moon of Pandora depicts a world of non-globalisation. Our globalised world becomes, in a sense, too globalised, to the point that humans attempt to interact and further expand this ‘globalisation’ to Pandora. Inhabited by the Na’vi people, Pandora is portrayed as a utopian society, where it represents an embedded unity. Globalisation attempts to disrupt this utopian society, and in doing so, evokes the notion of ‘home’. The destruction of the home relates to Heise’s argument of deterritorialisation. Ursula Heise, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, defines …show more content…
The idea of home is explored throughout the film, and the way in which the film does so evokes many questions regarding how the context of globalisation affects it. The destruction of not only planet Earth, but also of Pandora and its native inhabitants are only a fraction of the greater problems which are explored throughout the film. Heise’s work comments on how deterritorialisation is a product of globalisation, and that eco-cosmopolitan is a product of deterritorialisation. We, as humans, are a part of a network which co-exists with many other beings, and what the film explores is something other than what we are accustomed to. Pandora is the opposite of Earth: it is prosperous, the balance is in perfect harmony, and it is a utopian society where the inhabitants are interconnected to form one unite. In terms of production value, the cyberspace which Pandora exemplifies, is “something that exists only inside a computer” (Palekar 6 Oct. 2014). The world of Avatar is very much different to our own, and Pandora itself is a distant moon which is the only place to find the energy source which Earth desperately needs. Sully’s meeting with the Na’vi people was only possible due to globalisation, and the perceptions of what ‘home’ truly is, is reliant upon globalisation. On a larger scale,