Before I do that, however, I’d like to take a moment to point readers to Carole McGranahan’s 2012 post “What Makes Something Ethnographic?” There she provides a list of nine features generated by her class. One of the points of she makes is that these features are constantly changing and evolving. This is why, in defining ethnographic film, I chose to dodge the bullet by avoiding the question altogether! Letting others deal with that problem is the easy way out, I don’t deny it; but it also allows me to articulate a definition that can change along with the discipline. Looking back at previous attempts to define ethnographic film, many of them strike me as having been dated before the ink even dried on the paper. Hopefully this more flexible approach can avoid that fate.

And now on to the list! If you feel I missed an important feature, or overlooked something, please let me know in the comments.

1st Dimension: Discipline

This dimension includes features that connect ethnographic films to the discipline of anthropology.

Films made by anthropologists.

• Obviously, not all films made by anthropologists are ethnographic films. Home movies, or even research footage are not inherently ethnographic just because they were made by an anthropologist. But (as explained in the last two posts) when combined with the other features listed here, this feature gains newfound importance.

Films made in collaboration with an anthropologist.

• The nature of this collaboration matters a lot. Some anthropologists work closely with a filmmaker, while others are just “consulted” to bolster a film’s credentials. But anthropologists need not be behind the camera to help ensure that a film is ethnographic.

Films based on or inspired by anthropological research.

• To the extent that anthropologists write for a wider public, we should also hope and expect for this wider public to read and understand our work. Thus, it makes sense to place films inspired by such an engagement on the same level as those made by the so-called experts. (And similar to such works, they need to be evaluated by the full list of features associated with each film.)

2nd Dimension: Norms

This dimension includes features related to the norms and practices of ethnographic research.

Films made with an “ethnographic intent.”

• When anthropologists or their collaborators are working with the intension of making an ethnographic film, it is very likely that they will succeed – at least to the extent that they have the necessary skills and training to follow up on their intentions.

Films made in accordance with visual research ethics.

• I think a lot of anthropologists would agree that films made with the consultation and cooperation of the film’s subjects often are able to provide much more complex and nuanced ethnographic insight. The norms of research ethics are one area where ethnographic films have changed a lot in the past few decades, but it is also precisely because of these changes that classic works like Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” have been given newfound attention by visual anthropologists.

Films made following ethnographic methods.

• Intending to make an ethnography, and doing so ethically, doesn’t really count for much if you don’t know what you are doing. Some understanding of the tools of the trade is necessary, but still may not be essential if the film is not made by a professional anthropologist. But it is perfectly possible for amateur ethnographers to exceed the professionals in their grasp of these skills.

3rd Dimension: Subject

This dimension includes features related to the topics and peoples discussed in the anthropological literature.

Films about topics anthropologists study.

• This is a tough one, because today there is virtually no subject outside of the realm of anthropology. Still, there are definitely some subjects, such as kinship or magic, which anthropologists have claimed as their own. These include both classic subjects taught in intro courses, as well as hot new topics like the “Anthropocene” which are featured at recent anthropology conferences.

Films made in collaboration with people from groups that have historical been the subjects of anthropological research .

• Precisely because of the colonial history of anthropology, films about indigenous or nomadic peoples have long been a staple of the discipline. For this very reason, films made in collaboration with such subjects serves as an important commentary and perhaps even a critique of previous ethnographic films.

Films made by people from groups that have been subjects of anthropological research.

• While films made by indigenous or nomadic peoples are no more necessarily ethnographic than films made by anthropologists, the same thing said about anthropologists holds for them as well: when combined with other features on the list the fact that the films were made by members of such groups can become an important consideration. In my last post I brought up the case of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which is a narrative feature film made by indigenous filmmakers. I would argue that despite being a narrative feature film, it shares many of the features listed here, including collaborating with the community, following the practices of ethnographic research, and abiding by the ethical norms of the discipline, etc. For this reason I don’t have much difficulty listing it as an ethnographic film.

4th Dimension: Genre

This dimension includes features related to the various styles associated with the genre of ethnographic film.

Films made in an established ethnographic style.

• There are a wide variety of styles that mark the genre of ethnographic film: observational, reflexive, sensory, etc. Not all of these styles are exclusive to ethnographic film, but some films are clearly marked as ethnographic by their stylistic choices.

Films made using multiple ethnographic styles.

• A film needn’t be restricted to one particular style, and some directors combine multiple styles or approaches into a single film.

Films that seek to comment on or subvert the genre.

• Films that are in dialog with the genre are ethnographic even if they deliberately avoid replicating aspects of ethnographic style. A great example of such a film is Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Reassemblage which seeks to comment upon and undermine the norms of ethnographic cinema.

• Discipline: features related to the discipline of anthropology (e.g. films made by anthropologists)
• Norms: features related to the norms and practices of ethnographic research (e.g. research ethics)
• Subject: features related to the topics and peoples discussed in the anthropological literature (e.g. films by or about nomadic peoples)
• Genre: features related to the various styles associated with the genre of ethnographic film (e.g. “reflexivity”)

If I were to graph films using this approach it would look like what is known as a “spider (or radar) chart” with films rated along multiple axes, each representing a different dimension. Like this graph comparing monster trucks and drag racers along five axes:

Rather than sharing the full list of sub-features today, I’ll save that for my next post. Instead, I’d like to use these four dimensions to explicate how such an approach to defining ethnographic films might work in practice. Doing so will help avoid confusion over how the full list is meant to be used, and will also serve to highlight the strength and limitations of this approach.

Let’s start by comparing the films The Gods Must be Crazy and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Both are fiction films by non-anthropologists and so would be excluded from traditional definitions of “ethnographic film.” Would they both be accepted under this new definition, since they both deal with indigenous peoples that have been much studied by anthropologists? Not necessarily. If that was all it took this approach to defining ethnographic film wouldn’t be of much use. For one thing, it doesn’t really conform to our own practices as anthropologists: Atanarjuat has been shown at ethnographic film festivals, but (to my knowledge) The Gods Must be Crazy has not. And secondly, if we left it at that, nearly every film ever made could be included as “ethnographic.”

The solution lies in the fact a film generally must contain features in more than one dimension in order to be considered ethnographic. A home movie of a child’s birthday party is not ethnographic even if it is made by a famous anthropologist. And a film like The Gods Must be Crazy is not ethnographic just because it is about the San. Without getting into a big discussion (see here and here if you’d like to know more), I will simply assert here that Atanarjuat also ranks highly along the second dimension of “films made in line with the norms and practices of ethnographic research” but The Gods Must be Crazy does not. It is for this reason, and not because of the subject matter, that we accept Atanarjuat as having ethnographic qualities, but reject The Gods Must be Crazy.

It is also worth mentioning that the way we evaluate each of these dimensions is constantly evolving. The discipline, along with its norms, subjects, and styles are very different today from the sixties. For this reason even though Dead Birds is one of the most celebrated ethnographic films of all time, a new film made in the same way today would probably be rejected by many festivals. (See discussed by Jay Ruby’s article on Robert Gardner if you’d like to get a sense of why that would be.) Similarly, contemporary ethnographic film festivals are more likely to include “sensory ethnographies” or films about the “the Anthropocene” than festivals organized by the same people just a few years ago.

Before wrapping up I’d like to point out one limitation of thinking of these four dimensions in terms of a spider graph (like that pictured above). Namely, we tend to rank these dimensions hierarchically, but this hierarchy isn’t well represented by the graph. To compensate for this oversight we could weight each of the dimensions differently. But this still isn’t good enough, because a weighting used to evaluate one movie might not be appropriate for another. For instance, I might not weight stylistic features as strongly for film by an academic as I would in considering a film by an artist. And I might not hold a journalist to the same exacting disciplinary norms as I would for an anthropologist. But what we want to avoid is making any single dimension definitive, for doing so would saddle us the kind of “closed” definition we’ve been trying to avoid. While it may not be ideal, the idea of adding weights to each of the dimensions on a case-by-case basis seems to be the best way to capture how anthropologists actually go about evaluating the suitability of any particular film for an ethnographic film festival.

In my next post I will elaborate in depth on each of these dimensions — breaking them down into their constituent features, but I hope that I have managed to make the case for the utility of this approach to defining ethnographic film and given readers a sense of how it would work in practice.

The best I could offer was “I know one when I see one” but this definition cost me dearly. We had over 1,500 entries for the festival, and it took a lot of work to weed out which of those films would go on to the judges and which would not. In the end about two thirds of the films were rejected in the first round. In many cases we only needed to read the film description or watch a few minutes to know that it wasn’t right for the festival. In other cases I ended up watching the whole film before deciding. It was a lot of work.

To be honest, I don’t know if a better definition would really have helped. Festival submissions are free¹ and a lot of filmmakers don’t bother to read the rules before submitting. Many of the rejected films didn’t even meet the most basic entry requirements listed on the submissions page, and hundreds of them were clearly scripted dramas with no claims to being the slightest bit anthropological or ethnographic. Still, the whole process got me thinking about how I would go about trying to define ethnographic film. Here’s what I came up with. I’m posting this in two parts. Today I’ll set out my goals for such a definition, including my overall approach. In a later post I plan to actually sketch out what such a definition might look like.

Previous definitions of ethnographic film seem to fall into two camps: On the one hand there are “open” definitions that tautologically define anything anthropologists like to watch or talk about as an ethnographic film. On the other hand, there are “closed” definitions that try to very narrowly define ethnographic film in terms of some kind of ideal which would effectively exclude most films shown at ethnographic film festivals. (For a good overview, see Matthew Durington’s Oxford Bibliography entry for “Ethnographic Film.” It’s paywalled, but the relevant section is right there in the preview.) Neither of these are very useful for actually running an ethnographic film festival. Too open a definition and we run the risk of becoming just another documentary film festival, one of dozens held in Taiwan each year. Too narrow a definition and we end up with a bunch of boring films by anthropologists that nobody (not even most anthropologists) wants to see. So what to do?

I think it is useful to start by grouping films into three categories. At one end are films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom which everyone agrees is most certainly not an ethnographic documentary. Which isn’t to say that Indian Jones couldn’t be used by anthropologists in the classroom, or as a tool to study American popular culture in the 1980s, but that doesn’t make it an “ethnographic film.” At the other end of the spectrum are films that nobody doubts are ethnographic. These are the films that we now consider to be part of the ethnographic film canon. Films like Trobriand Cricket, or Dead Birds that have been seen by generations of students taking anthropology 101. But while these films may be uncontroversially ethnographic, a film made in 2017 that was just like Trobriand Cricket or Dead Birds might not be accepted into an ethnographic film festival. Changes in the discipline as well as in the medium have changed our expectations of what ethnographic films can and should look like. But this means that there is an increasingly large grey zone between those films we know to be ethnographic and those we know are not. A good definition will never eliminate this grey zone, but it should give us some signposts so that we can better navigate our way through it.

To do this I find it helpful to draw on the model Umberto Eco used to articulate his famous definition of “fascism” (which Matt blogged about in 2013). This approach was itself drawn from Wittgenstein’s “notion of a game.” Rather than listing a set of proscriptive features, such definitions rely instead upon a “family of resemblances.” One unique feature of this approach is that while an item might be excluded from a strict definition for lacking even a single required feature Wittgenstein allows two items to be included in the group even if they share no features in common — as long as they share features with other intermediate elements in the series. Confused? Eco describes it better than I can. He asks us to “consider the following sequence”:

[a b c], [b c d], [c d e], [d e f]

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features [a b c], group two by the features [b c d], and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

This is perfect for “ethnographic film” which includes wildly disparate types of works: films by anthropologists, films made in collaboration with anthropologists, films by indigenous filmmakers, films made in collaboration with indigenous filmmakers, films about subjects traditionally considered the domain of anthropology, films made by non-specialists that have an anthropological sensitivity, etc. Not to mention films made in very different styles: reflexive, observational, experimental, sensory, ethno-fiction, etc. We need a way to include all of these films together while simultaneously excluding the vast majority of documentary and fiction films which are not ethnographic. And we need to do it in a way which isn’t overly restrictive so that we can actually have a film festival and not just restrict ourselves to watching The Wedding Camels over and over again. It would certainly be impossible if we tried to adopt a closed or proscriptive approach, but I feel confident that something along the lines of a “family of resemblances” might actually work. Later on I hope to finish working out a draft of what such a definition might look like and share it in a follow-up post. In the meantime, feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments!

On the one hand, Boas seemed to champion empathy when acknowledging that the ‘‘needs of anthropological research have led many investigators to adapt themselves as thoroughly as may be to the ways of thinking of foreign tribes and peoples . . .” And yet, on the other hand, Boas remained decidedly suspicious of such empathetically based approximations of other lifeworlds, given his views on . . . the problems inherent in inferring similarities based on observed likenesses in outwardly perceptible behaviors and effects.

Another way of putting this might be to say that a little empathy aids in interpretive understanding, but too much empathy gets in the way of rational explanation. Maybe this is the case. I certainly think that studies of nonhuman animals tend to suffer from either a total lack of empathy or a surfeit of anthropologizing that refuses to recognize difference. I’m less certain how important it is to insist on recognizing difference when dealing with other humans. Talal Asad famously criticized Ernest Gellner for his insistence on difference in his article on “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” in the book Writing Culture. In that essay Asad points out that the refusal of empathy insisted upon by Gellner takes place in the context of a history of unequal power relationships between the two sides. But to the extent that we take “the culture concept” seriously, surely we must be wary of the potential of empathy to erase the differences we wish to explain?

Maybe not. At least, not in situations where the lack of empathy has precluded the possibility of explanation in the first place. I think that, even among anthropologists, there are groups of people or certain behaviors that many of us unthinkingly write off as irrational. In such cases empathy is a vital first step towards explanation because without it we would not even consider the group or behavior in question capable of explanation. Empathy breaks down the barrier that makes anthropology otherwise impossible. In such cases I think the fears that empathy might preclude explanation are unfounded.

In his book Transcultural Cinema, David MacDougall argues that film is uniquely suited to developing an empathetic bond. This happens, says MacDougall, because of the ways in which “my body which perceives the body of another person, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world.” Thus, “filming others celebrates the common experience of consciousness, including the very differences between us.” To be honest, I am skeptical that film is somehow uniquely posed to do this, after all there is some evidence that reading fiction can make you more empathetic. Nonetheless, I think it is true that some films do this very well, and perhaps do it in a way that is different from how written texts might accomplish the same goal. Following MacDougall we might say that novels achieve this feat by giving us a view of the subjects interiority, while film does so by exploring their physicality.

Regardless of whether such an argument holds water, I will take up this discussion in a future posts (or possibly multiple posts depending on how much I end up having to say on the topic) that will look at specific films and how they deal with empathy. In doing so I will not necessarily deal with “ethnographic film” or even limit myself to “documentary film” but will instead look at films that deal with empathy in particularly interesting ways. I want to focus on films that seek to provoke empathy for subjects which most viewers have no interest in empathizing with. I think that such films should be of interest to anthropologists precisely because our work often seeks to cut against the grain in this fashion and we can perhaps learn something about the methods and limits of building empathy from such films.

Fiction, for me, like ethnography, has always melded with a deep desire to understand and explain the world around me. As an eight-year old in Iran I wrote stories to either escape or explain the Revolution that had turned my country into an Islamic Republic and had turned my single identity as a dorageh, or two-veined Iranian, into half-American, half-Iranian, forcing me to either choose one identity or to stay in-between. Writing helped me to make sense of the in-between, to make sense of my new life while holding on to the one that was already becoming a dream — unreal.

The past was a place where “Bombs were flying through the air, the sky was ablaze, there was no night.” My American high school teacher read this opening of one of my stories and said, “Write what you know.” She smiled at me and told me to try again. I explained that I had seen bombs and that the sky was ablaze and night or not I couldn’t sleep for days as a child because I was so scared about what was happening in the streets. At least that’s how I remembered it.   I came to see early on that we cannot fully replicate reality—even and especially in ethnography—in film, text or sound (the mediums I work in), nor is fiction purely a figment of its writer’s imagination. Was I writing fiction or ethnography and did the distinction really matter?

After college I returned to Iran for a year and then spent the following year back in the States writing about it. To live meant to write about it. Sometimes if I didn’t write about it, it was as if the event had not happened, or was somehow unreal and unbelievable, like ethnographic notes jotted down a few hours too late.   I thought I was writing a memoir, but it was really something in-between fiction and ethnography (which I knew little about but gravitated toward instinctively). It was 1994 and the onslaught of memoirs of Iranian returnees, and of Iranian women in particular had not yet arrived. There were few publishers interested in non-dramatic narratives from Iran, especially one like mine that had no near-escapes, imprisonments or beatings. My account concentrated on the quotidian, which I thought offered a downright exotic view of Iran compared to the American news coverage: angry raised fists and anti-American slogans.

A Booker prize novelist who read some of my work told me I was shifting between literary non-fiction and fiction and suggested I choose a genre and stick with it. Had I listened to her, that book may have been published as a whole rather than as essays in some venues, short stories in others (including Anthropology and Humanism, which gave it a prize) and parts of my ethnography Warring Souls.

After the ultimately fragmented memoir, my next project was my dissertation on Iran where I experienced a very new and intense form of writer’s block, which was really self-censorship in disguise. The writing was no longer about me, which meant I had the enormous responsibility all anthropologists have of faithfully and respectfully writing the intimate lives we are privy to. This was coupled by the responsibility of being the first anthropologist of my generation to do fieldwork in Iran, a state with all sorts of rules about what one can and cannot talk about. If I messed this up, the door would close for others. I wanted to continue to work in Iran, and to protect my family and my anonymous interlocutors and future researchers. The parts of my work that I found the most difficult to write about were the lives of people whose worldview was so different than my own and so contested, especially those men who wanted to martyr themselves for the State.

I was advised to “just write” which I was attempting to do in my little carrel on the roof of Butler Library at Columbia University on September 11, 2001 when further downtown two planes flew into the World Trade Center. The world again felt unreal and so I turned to fiction. Fiction allowed me to bring the tone, the feelings, the atmosphere of the Iran-Iraq war and what it was like for those who fought it to the fore without making any judgments about their project or what it meant in light of my current situation as a Middle-Eastern American living and writing in New York City. In the end, one of my mentors encouraged me to leave the fiction in the dissertation, which I did while secretly bemoaning the destruction of my budding war novel. Next time, I promised myself, I’ll write a novel.

As I found out, the choice wasn’t mine. My ethnographic material demanded a particular genre: a film, when I was working on visual war culture in Iran and a sound project, when I was working on international war photography.  Despite the change in mediums, what remained the same were the hours of research and even more hours of writing. As my five year-old would let you know, without research I wouldn’t have a story to tell because I’m just not any good at making them up or at refraining from analyzing and educating alongside narrating. In my latest eight-year long attempt at writing a novel based on fieldwork on underground theater, I couldn’t bear not to throw in my analysis and theorize or to stick to an omniscient narrative. I finally broke down at year six and explicitly added the ethnographic back in to the novel through the addition of a first person voice which analyzes and theorizes the ethnographic material. I simply stopped trying to choose between a novel and ethnography and embraced the in-between: a novel or neo-ethnography.

This latest ethnography on Iranian theater is akin to Italian neorealism, in which real people played themselves with lines scripted by a writer toward the goal of creating social change, a new reality. Whether I’m writing the script or writing about the play, what I’m doing or trying to do is to play with ethnography in a very serious way. I believe ethnography is the genre that is most malleable, most inspiring, most in-between. It gives my loose meanderings a purpose, it gives just living a vocation, it gives gossip and nosiness legitimacy. Ethnography makes me feel twice alive, in person and then on the page. It allows me to analyze, to overthink, to take refuge in that place where I feel that everything is explainable and controllable … and then it explodes. My ethnographic notes are a dictionary, a book of short stories, a litany of mistakes and misunderstandings. My ethnographic writings are soon filled with the opposite of ethnography, and yet are still filled with life and then when life needs protection, needs cover, needs space to breathe and to change, there is fiction. Fiction allows me to write about Iran uncensored, allows me to play and to change the ending. The thing about ethnography is there isn’t an ending. No one writes The End at the end of an ethnography. Instead it’s the beginning of discussion, of thought, of change and it’s where as a writer I’ve found my home, my identity.

Many independent filmmakers register as either an S-Corporation² or an LCC (a limited liability company) in order to protect themselves if they get sued³ by the subjects of their films. (Or from someone who claims to be harmed by the film or by the process of making the film.) Having a company helps protect your personal assets, such as your house or retirement savings, etc. from being seized if you were to loose the suit. Many independent filmmakers even set up separate LLCs for each film. Doing so, however, is a lot of work, and not without its downsides.

Besides protecting your assets, having a company can allow you to write off some of your expenses. For instance, if you have a home office you can calculate how much space your office takes and deduct a similar portion of your rent and utilities. However, since you are reading this you are probably not the kind of filmmaker who will make any money from your films and the IRS does not look kindly on companies that don’t make a profit within three to five years. You may find yourself forced to reclassify your business as a “hobby” or even be subject to an audit. For this reason many academics never bother to incorporate. But, being married to a filmmaker I’ve learned that things are never so simple:

The primary determinant is your ability to make a profit at what you are doing. If your efforts result in a profit in three out of five consecutive years, your activity is presumed not to be a hobby by the IRS. If you don’t meet the three-out-of-five years profit rule, is all lost? Not necessarily, if you can prove to the IRS’s satisfaction that you have made a genuine effort to earn a profit and that the reason you are not successful is related to special circumstances, the IRS might agree that your art is, in fact, a business. This is often true for individuals engaged in the arts, where profits and successes are difficult to achieve. To increase your chance of gaining the IRS’s recognition of your business, I recommend that you run your activity in a professional, businesslike manner. Doing such things as having business cards and stationery printed, maintaining a separate business checking account and telephone number, keeping accurate records of the time you put in, and carefully documenting all business-related expenses. The Internal Revenue Service places great credence on computerized accounting records as evidence of the artist’s “businesslike” intent. Keep records of all show entries (even including ones that you don’t get into) and all gallery activity. In short anything related to attempts to sell your artwork.

(Also see here for more on the filmmaking as business vs. hobby distinction.) In the end, no matter what kind of company you set up, it is possible that any tax write-offs you get might be erased by the increased costs associated with hiring a professional to hire your taxes. Nonetheless, it still might be worthwhile incorporating simply to protect your assets, especially if you make a film that might someday be on television or in the theaters where it will attract a lot of attention. And if you make a lot of films, you may find that a lot of your expenses are film related perhaps making the extra costs and hassles associated with incorporation worth your while.

UPDATE: Clarified that subjects of the film aren’t the only people who might sue the filmmakers.

The filmmakers behind one of my favorite ethnographic films from last year, ManDove, are not professional anthropologists, but you’d never know that from watching this insightful, sensitive portrait of Indonesia’s National Perkutut Championship — a singing competition for doves. In fact, Kian Tjong, who made the film with his partner Jim de Sève, calls himself “a self-taught anthropologist and sociologist” and so it is only the lack of some institutional stamp of approval which prevents me from referring to him as a “professional” anthropologist…

The official synopsis for ManDove does a good job of setting up the story:

To be a real man, one must have a wife, a house, a horse, a dagger and a singing dove. – Javanese traditional wisdom

When General Zainuri annouunces the National Perkutut Championship, thousands of Muslim men arrive at the grounds. Seven hundred poles stand in the center. Men hoist their doves – perkutut – seven meters up and dangle them in a sea of colorful cages. A team of judges passes through the forest of tall posts straining to discern the birds’ magical coos. If the judges are impressed they score a bird’s song by tacking a small flag to the pole. After three hours a winner is declared. Winning perkutut sell for tens of millions rupiahs – tens of thousands of dollars.

The subject itself is inherently interesting and would have made for a great documentary, but what makes this film particularly enjoyable are de Sève and Tjong’s humor and cinematic eye. Apart from some engaging interviews, the film is mostly observational, but it isn’t your typical fly-on-the-wall cinema verité… One of the things I liked most about this film was how it frequently breaks the fourth wall in creative and interesting ways. In one scene we see a contestant buying a ticket but the subtitles inform us that he is saying “I’m actually not in today’s event. I just want to be in the film. Let me pretend to buy a ticket and then give me my money back.” (Or something to that effect, it has been a while since I saw the film.) In another scene a contestant gets angry with the filmmakers, blaming them for his bird’s poor performance, saying the camera (which they had hoisted in a bird cage along with the other birds) looked like a cat and scared his bird.

There are also scenes that are pure observation, but which offer up a kind of cinematic pleasure that is too often missing from observational documentaries. The filmmakers have a keen eye for capturing interesting details that lesser filmmakers would overlook. In short, not only is this a good film for anyone interested in the subject matter, it is also a good piece for teaching the craft of documentary filmmaking.

Winner of the SVA’s Jean Rouch Award in 2012, Stori Tumbuna is the only ethnographic film I can think of for which one has to watch out for “spoilers.” Indeed, what starts off as a seemingly generic ethnographic film soon turns into a Blair Witch-esque horror film. Despite the title of this post, I don’t intend to write any spoilers —I really don’t want to ruin for anyone the pleasure I felt watching this film the first time — but there really is only so much I can say about the film without giving too much away… The story is so well crafted and shifts gears so subtly from ethnography to horror that the discerning and suspicious viewer will likely find themselves caught up in the excitement without even noticing the switch.

What is worth saying, however, is that this film is made with the utmost respect for the community and that it is a truly collaborative production. As the film’s webpage says: “Stori Tumbuna: Ancestors’ Tales was conceived as an opportunity for the Lak to tell their stories in their way.” And the DER website has this quote by anthropologist Michael Jackson:

“I know of no more successful or ingenious film that draws the viewer into another life-world while keeping faith with the tenor of its traditional narratives and respecting the lived experience of his/her interlocutors.”

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that it is the most successful film to do these things…, but it certainly does them well. For this reason I think this film is perfectly suited to any introductory anthropology class, or classes focusing on ethnography or narrative form.

(Please don’t post any spoilers in the comments!)

In the first of what I hope to be several reviews of ethnographic and documentary films, I want to write about Hu Tai-li’s excellent film Returning Souls. This film will be of interest to anyone teaching about museum anthropology, repatriation, and indigenous rights. Filmed over eight years, the story it covers goes back forty years to a typhoon in 1958 which destroyed an indigenous ancestral house in the Amis village of Tafalong, about forty minutes south of where I live in Taiwan.

While Amis are generally egalitarian, the owners of this house, the Kakita’an family, had a special place in the village, and their house “is the only recorded structure with carved pillars” among the Amis (from the study guide – PDF). While aristocratic families and carved pillars are common among the Paiwan, they are not otherwise known among the Amis.

From the study guide:

With carvings depicting dramatic tales of a big flood, a glowing girl, marriage between siblings, shaman’s descending to earth, patricide, and the origins of headhunting, the Kakita’an house became the most famous, most intriguing example of Amis architecture.

In the past, the Kakita’an family had rights to the land in Tafalong and was responsible for holding rituals to venerate heads they had hunted as well as their ancestors. …While the heir of the Kakita’an family of the matrilineal Ami tribe was a woman, her brother presided over the rituals performed in the house. The uniqueness of the Kakita’an house made it a focus of the Japanese colonial government (1895 – 1945), which was determined to stamp out all indigenous headhunting and related rituals. The government pushed the Kakita’an family out of the house and gave the rights to both house and land to a public foundation. In 1935, the house was named a historic site, provisions were made for its maintenance, and it was turned into an exhibit. The structure was the only traditional Amis ancestral house that had not been demolished, so to the Amis, it had unique cultural significance.

When the house was destroyed by typhoon the ancestral pillar was taken to the Institute of Ethnography (IOE) at Academia Sinica, where Dr. Hu now works. [Full disclosure: although I am not affiliated with IOE, I do work with her as a member of the Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography, which she founded.] The pillars stayed at IOE without incident until 2003, when an elementary school teacher in Tafalong wrote a letter requesting that the pillar be returned to the village. As the film documents, however, that’s not what happened…

From a magazine article about the film (emphasis added):

With the help of the village shaman, Kating Hongay, they soon decided that the panels would be better protected at the institute, but also that the Kakita’an family would bring home the souls of their ancestors believed to be living in the panels by rebuilding the ancestral house on its original site and carving new panels.

This decision began the reconstruction project, and Hu’s documentary, which follows the steps of the restoration, intertwined with narratives of Amis legends and the history of the Kakita’an family.

As the project unfolded, the Amis specialty of communicating with their ancestors through a shaman was also resurrected.

This process of returning the souls living in the pillar, rather than the artifact itself, as well as the restoration project, constitute the bulk of the film. It would be interesting enough if it ended there, but there film also documents internal divisions within the village regarding land use, the role of the Kakita’an family, and the threat posted to the community by the dead souls of their ancestors. The film provides a rich and sensitive look at a long and messy process, doing exactly the kind of thing that ethnographic film does best.