This was a period of tentative beginnings, sporadic activity and blurred genres. The half-century running from the mid-1890s, when moving image camera technology was first developed, to the period of the Second World War in the 1940s constitutes over a third of the total time-span of ethnographic film-making. These films were primarily made forĭocumentation purposes but some anticipated the forms of ethnographicĭocumentary film-making developed after the Second World War. Margaret Mead, who, in collaboration with Gregory Bateson, shot a number ofįilms in Bali and New Guinea. In theġ930s, academic anthropologists in the USA began to make films, notably The Americas, the Soviet Union and Australia were also very active. Initially particularly by German-speaking anthropologists and, after theįirst World War, by French-speaking film-makers associated with museumsĪnd/or with the French imperial project.

Itĭescribes how after initial enthusiasm, film-making among BritishĮthnographers declined markedly though elsewhere it was actively pursued, Made for academic research, museums or state-funded educational purposes. Rare, though many had ethnographic qualities. Such intrinsic contradiction and ambiguity, here claimed as an inextricable constituent of Ruwund symbolism, far from revealing a loose and baffled thought are of a structuring nature and conceal a coherence the tenacity of which cannot be easily tamed to fit models of analysis of a dichotomous and classificatory nature.Before the Second World War, ethnographic films such as we know today were It is a journey through an ideological and symbolic thought in which mythical heroines are sterile mothers, at once the king’s mothers and his spouses where the sovereign is proclaimed both a foreigner and a native, the son and the father, a kin and an affine, at once different and identical where power is seen to have been usurped as well as founded with the connivance of insiders and where kingship is construed as a system which, generating from within, can only conceive of itself by resorting to an element coming from outside. This book is about symbolic paradoxes, logical disruptions and mythical conundrums.

Objects by Luc De Heusch