This course has two goals:
1. to introduce students to the central subject of cultural anthropology: cultures of the world; and,
2. To explore one of the central issues confronting cultural anthropologists today: the problem of how to adequately represent one culture to another.
Ethnographic film and the Internet will be the media through which we will pursue both goals and explore the nature of human culture.
We are, now, predominantly learning about the world around us through the visual media. At the same time, the visual media (especially film, television, photography and graphic arts) are becoming sophisticated and powerful means of conveying information. And, although visual and printed media have many similarities, they each have unique potentials for portraying a people's culture. The emphasis in this course will be on visual representations of other cultures, but we will also use written ethnography (and lectures) as a supplemental, and sometimes contrastive, background.
Although the problems of understanding and representing other cultures are long- standing ones for professional anthropologists and teachers of anthropology, they are also becoming increasingly consequential ones for all American citizens as their economy and culture expand globally, and, at the same time, as their own country faces an identity crisis brought about by increased immigration and ethnic diversity.
In this course we will focus on two cultures, the !Kung of Southern Africa and the civilization of India. The two cultures are strikingly different from one another in their traditional life styles, modes of subsistence, their size and internal diversity, and, today, the way they have confronted the globalization of cultures and economy. The course will look at the way these two cultures have been depicted in the West through film over the past four decades by both anthropologists and documentary film-makers.
The first part of the course -- up to the mid-term exam -- will emphasize the development of visual media as anthropological tools for recording and representing so- called 'primitive' cultures. Our primary example will the !Kung. Our focus will be on the problem of 'capturing' what is significant in the lives of people whose cultures are different from our own.
The second part of the course will confront the problems of representation. Our example will be Indian culture, at times a rich and always an extremely varied civilization, which has spread far beyond the confines of the Indian subcontinent. Our focus will be on the way both Indians and Westerners portray Indian culture and the significant aspects of people's lives in documentary films.