Ten Canoes

Radio Australia had a nice feature about the film Ten Canoes last week (unfortunately, I can’t find the program online). It is the first feature film made entirely in an indigenous Australian language. The film is based in large part on the work of Donald Thomson and the program I heard included relatively long readings of Thomson’s ethnography. Ten Canoes won a special jury prize last year at Cannes and is Australia’s entry for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Academy Awards this year.

The producers maintain a pretty cool website here. The site includes interactive media, press, and background materials that are interesting. I haven’t seen the film but I really look forward to doing so.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.