Anthropology: Finding Films/Videos

Thematic areas include: language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, and sex, gender, and family roles.

This is the only academic collection in the world to offer such a comprehensive resource of documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
Content partners include: preeminent artists like Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Samoan ethnographer Galumalemana Steven Percival, native Hawaiian director Eddie Kamae, and First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin; distributors such as Vision Maker Media; and organizations like the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the Indigenous Film Archive of Nepal, the Mexican Film Institute, and the National Film Board of Canada.

Additionally, volume IV unlocks access to rich repositories of previously difficult-to-discover content. Visual anthropology programs at over a dozen universities and institutions around the world house repositories of student and faculty field recordings and edited films. These visual records make significant contributions to cultural and scholarly dialogues, but are otherwise difficult to access. Volume IV will bring such resources together in one place.
Volume IV contains the full catalog of anthropology films from Berkeley Media, formerly known as the University of California’s Extension Center for Media. In addition to dozens of award-winning titles released within the last 5 years, the archive also makes the classic ethnographic works of David and Judith MacDougall available for the first time in streaming format, including The Wedding Camels, Lorang’s Way and A Wife Among Wives. This volume also contains the full archive of films created within the last decade at the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, one of the first universities in the world to offer a course of study in visual anthropology.