Anthropology Beyond the Pale : Reviewing Secrets of the Tribe 清大魏捷茲老師 Watching the Jose Padilha directed film Secrets of the Tribe (2010) is deeply troubling. Secrets of the Tribe is about professional anthropological misconduct and its consequences for the Yanomami (also called Ya̧nomamö or Yanomama). Although extent professional association and university investigations have so far passed no final judgment on…
Lancit,Matthew. Funeral season (la saison des funérailles): marking death in Cameroon. DVD, English subtitles, 2010 Matthew Lancit is a young Canadian filmmaker who went to Cameroon to be with his French girlfriend. She was working in the Bamileke town of Dschang, and as it happens their flat was next door to the morgue. One thing led to another and the…
Peter Calde Unsensational, intimate and quietly passionate, March’s meticulously observed examination of the crisis facing the small atoll of Takuu is an object lesson in patient documentary film-making . March’s first documentary feature, the excellent Allie Eagle and Me, traced the pioneering feminist artist’s journey from lesbian separatist to fundamentalist Christian. For this film, she made two trips to the atoll,…
Hu Tai-Li (Festival President, TIEFF 2009) Launched in 2001, the biennial Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF) is holding its fifth installment this year. Previous festivals explored the themes of Island Odyssey, Migration Story, Family Variation, and Indigenous Voices, while TIEFF 2009 will delve into the central theme of Body and Soul. This year’s festival director and I have both…
Lin Wen-ling (Director, TIEFF 2009) Reflections on body and soul Over the past 20 years, the body has shifted from a fairly peripheral social fact to a core idea in the fields of anthropology and sociology. Knowledge and discourse pertaining to health and healing have come to hold an increasingly significant standing. In the past, sociologists and anthropologists theorized the…