Documentary Educational Resources (DER), originally called the Center for Documentary Anthropology, is a US non-profit producer and distributor of film and video in anthropology and ethnology. [1] It has been described by the Harvard Film Archive as "one of the most historically important resources of ethnographic film in the world today". [2]
It was founded in 1968 by independent filmmakers John Marshall and Timothy Asch and is based in Watertown, Massachusetts. Its mission is "to promote thought-provoking documentary film and media for learning about the people and cultures of the world.". [3]
In 2008 it donated 700 films to the Harvard Film Archive. [2]
The San peoples, or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Their recent ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American-Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.
Peter Louis Galison is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University.
Johan van der Keuken was a Dutch documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. In a career that spanned 42 years, Van der Keuken produced 55 documentary films, six of which won eight awards. He also wrote nine books on photography and films, his field of interest. For all his efforts, he received seven awards for his life work, and one other for photography.
The Hamar people are a community inhabiting southwestern Ethiopia. They live in Hamer woreda, a fertile part of the Omo River valley, in the Debub Omo Zone of the former South Ethiopia Regional State (SERS). They are largely pastoralists, so their culture places a high value on cattle.
Timothy Asch was an American anthropologist, photographer, and ethnographic filmmaker. Along with John Marshall and Robert Gardner, Asch played an important role in the development of visual anthropology. He is particularly known for his film The Ax Fight and his role with the USC Center for Visual Anthropology.
Robert Grosvenor Gardner was an American academic, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker who was the Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University from 1956 to 1997. Gardner is known for his work in the field of visual anthropology and films like the National Film Registry inductee Dead Birds and Forest of Bliss. In 2011, a retrospective of his work was held at Film Forum, New York.
Lina Fruzzetti is an American cultural anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Since 1975, she has been a professor of anthropology at Brown University in the United States. Apart from having published ethnographic studies about rural communities and gender relations in East Africa, India and Tanzania, she is the author of several ethnographic films. These films were written and co-directed with her husband, Ákos Östör, cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wesleyan University. Since 2016 Fruzzetti is also a Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru University Institute for Advanced Studies (JNIAS) in New Delhi, India.
Laura Boulton was an American ethnomusicologist. She is known for the many field recordings, films and photographs of traditional music and its performances and practitioners from Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika. Boulton also collected traditional musical instruments around the world. In her work with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) during the Second World War, she is recognized as being a pioneer for women who work in the film industry.
John Kennedy Marshall was an American anthropologist and acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his work in Namibia recording the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi.
The Hunters is a 1957 ethnographic film that documents the efforts of four !Kung men to hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The footage was shot by John Marshall during a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored expedition in 1952–53. In addition to the giraffe hunt, the film shows other aspects of !Kung life at that time, including family relationships, socializing and storytelling, and the hard work of gathering plant foods and hunting for small game.
Fiona Caroline Graham was an Australian anthropologist working as a geisha in Japan. She made her debut as a geisha (trainee) in 2007 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo under the name Sayuki (紗幸) as a part of her anthropological study, and as of 2021 was working in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo.
The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University is an interdisciplinary center for the making of anthropologically informed works of media that combine aesthetics and ethnography. Production courses associated with the SEL are offered through Anthropology, Visual and Environmental Studies, and the Graduate School of Design.
Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá is an ethnographic film . Jeff Himpele and Quetzil E. Castañeda, filmmakers and producers. Production 1995 and 1997. Postproduction release: 1997.
Mainak Bhaumik is a Bengali film director, documentary filmmaker and editor. He made his directorial debut with 2006 Bengali film Aamra.In 2012, he made another Bengali film Bedroom, a dark ensemble film about the new generation of young Indians. His critically and commercially successful movies are Maach Mishti & More, Bibaho Diaries, Generation Ami, Cheeni, Ekannoborti.
John Melville Bishop is a contemporary, U.S., documentary filmmaker known for the breadth of his collaborations, primarily in the fields of anthropology and folklore. He has worked with Alan Lomax, John Marshall, and extensively with the Human Studies Film Archive at the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology.
Roxanne Varzi is an Iranian-born American cultural anthropologist, filmmaker, sound artist, writer, playwright, and educator. She is a full professor of anthropology and film and media studies at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Varzi is known for her various works in media, including books, film documentaries, sound performances, and theatrical plays.
Robert Perkins is an American artist, filmmaker and writer.