Courses

This interdisciplinary course offers students an introduction to visual anthropology and socially concerned documentary with an emphasis on the ways in which forms of experimentation changed both anthropology and documentary practice, with some consideration given to the blurred genres of realist narrative film. It is intended as a supplement and enlargement of courses in ethnography (especially the core course V2005), offering a chance to think about what the camera, and the cinematic apparatus more generally, does for the discipline in its ambition to make the understanding of difference a means to self-critical social practice. For students from outside the discipline, and especially those interested in film, it provides the opportunity to interrogate the relationship between film history and changing conceptions of social forms and phenomena, as these have been mediated by anthropology. For both, it provides an opportunity to think about how the twin and sometimes conflicting tasks of representation and transformation are addressed through the use of different film forms.