The Ethnological View

The news of his Niger­ian father’s death catch­es Jar­reth Merz off guard. Now living and work­ing as a the­ater actor in Los Ange­les, his par­ents had orig­i­nal­ly met in Nige­ria. … read more

Cameroon, 2005. A man is seized, dragged to a seclud­ed loca­tion, tied to a tree, and left to suffer a tor­tur­ous death by star­va­tion accord­ing to the pre­cepts of local vil­lage jus­tice. The unwrit­ten charges against him include: invo­ca­tion of evil spir­its, prac­tic­ing black magic against other vil­lagers and social­ly unac­cept­able behav­iour. Who is the pros­e­cu­tor and who is the judge? In his barely 10-minute-long depic­tion of this com­plex sit­u­a­tion, the film’s direc­tor leaves many ques­tions unan­swered, includ­ing some that leave his own behav­iour oppo­site the events open to crit­i­cism. Film­ing a soci­etal outcast’s last hours of life, accept­ing the unjust demise of anoth­er indi­vid­ual with­out attempt­ing to inter­vene, and then offer­ing these filmed images to the public – such actions can only lead to heated debate, and right­ful­ly so. 

When our own image becomes the image of oth­er­ness: Ama­zo­nia, 1980. Imag­ine: Deep in the jungle, images of every­day life in Ger­many appear out of the dark­ness – images of … read more

What do anthro­pol­o­gists mean when they claim to study the cul­tur­al tra­di­tions of others by par­tic­i­pat­ing in them? This film fol­lows the Dutch anthro­pol­o­gist Ton Otto, who has been adopt­ed … read more

Asen Balik­ci and Visual Ethnography A por­trait of this clas­sic figure in visual anthro­pol­o­gy, taking us into the worlds inhab­it­ed by Cana­di­an Inuit, Afghan nomads, vil­lagers in Bul­gar­ia and in … read more