Paul Hockings | |
---|---|
Born | Hertford, England | February 23, 1935
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Anthropologist |
Known for | Ethnographic documentaries |
Awards | Nilgiris Lifetime Achievement Award (2015) |
Academic background | |
Education | Doctor of Philosophy |
Alma mater | University of Sydney University of California, Berkeley |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology |
Sub-discipline | Social anthropology Visual anthropology Medical anthropology |
Institutions | Former dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of United International College,China |
Notable works | The Man Hunters (documentary) The Village (documentary) |
Paul Hockings (born February 23,1935) is an anthropologist whose prime areas of focus are the Dravidian languages,social,visual and medical anthropology. [1]
He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Sydney,the University of California,Berkeley,and at the universities in Chicago,Stanford and Toronto. He taught anthropology at the University of California,Los Angeles and the University of Illinois at Chicago,and he has been the dean of United International College's Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. He is the current editor-in-chief of Visual Anthropology .
Hockings was born on February 23,1935,at Hertford and was raised in Hampshire,England. [2] [3] [4] At the age of ten years,he developed interest in prehistory and museums. His father Arthur Hockings,a Londoner,was a cricketer and an engineer,who worked as a personal assistant for Henry Royce. Later,he helped design landing-craft for D-Day. In 1952,Paul migrated to Australia with his parents. [4]
Hockings studied Near-Eastern archaeology at the University of Sydney,and completed two majors in the subjects of archaeology and anthropology at that university. In 1962,after receiving a grant for field studies from American Institute of Indian Studies,he moved to the Nilgiris in India and did research on the Badagas of the Nilgiris,completing a Ph.D. on this subject in 1965. [4] [5] He also studied anthropology at the universities of Chicago,Stanford,Toronto,and at the University of California,Berkeley. [6]
Hockings made the first film in the style of Observational Cinema,named,The Village. [6] In 1969,he was signed as an anthropologist by the MGM Studios for making a film on mankind's origins,titled "The Man Hunters",for NBC television which drew a large North American audience. [4] He was then working as a research director for MGM Documentary Dept. [7] About the same time he served as the last research assistant for Ruth St. Denis,and was on an expedition to India with the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. He was the editor-in-chief of Visual Anthropology for a third of a century;and the University of Oslo has described him as "a pioneer in the fields of ethnographic film and visual anthropology". [8]
Hockings is a professor emeritus of anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. [1] He worked at the University of California,Berkeley as a research assistant for David G. Mandelbaum,while also studying with Aldous Huxley and others;and then taught anthropology at the University of California,Los Angeles,before moving to Chicago. For a brief period he worked at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia,and as a script writer,journalist and librarian in New Zealand. [4] He served in China as the dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at the United International College in Zhuhai,and in Chicago as a Field Museum of Natural History's adjunct curator of anthropology. [4] [2]
He has studied the cultures of South India, [9] [4] and has been working with the Badagas for more than 50 years. [6] [10] He has researched their medical anthropology,culture and language. [4]
In 2015,he was awarded the Nilgiris Lifetime Achievement Award by the Nilgiri Documentation Centre; [2] and in 2016,a Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Visual Anthropology. [11]
Hockings made several documentaries and published about 20 books and more than 200 papers. [10]
The Badagas are an ethno-linguistic community living in the Nilgiris district in Tamil Nadu, India. Throughout the district the Badugas live in nearly 400 villages, called Hattis. The Badagas speak a language called Badaga.
Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K. Le Guin.
Toda people are a Dravidian ethnic group who live in the State of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Before the 18th century and British colonisation, the Toda coexisted locally with other ethnic communities, including the Kota, Badaga and Kurumba. During the 20th century, the Toda population has hovered in the range 700 to 900. Although an insignificant fraction of the large population of India, since the early 19th century the Toda have attracted "a most disproportionate amount of attention from anthropologists and other scholars because of their ethnological aberrancy" and "their unlikeness to their neighbours in appearance, manners, and customs". The study of their culture by anthropologists and linguists proved significant in developing the fields of social anthropology and ethnomusicology.
The Nilgiris district is one of the 38 districts in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Nilgiri is the name given to a range of mountains spread across the borders among the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The Nilgiri Hills are part of a larger mountain chain known as the Western Ghats. Their highest point is the mountain of Doddabetta, height 2,637 m. The district is contained mainly within the Nilgiri Mountains range. The administrative headquarters is located at Ooty. The district is bounded by Coimbatore to the south, Erode to the east, and Chamarajnagar district of Karnataka and Wayanad district of Kerala to the north. As it is located at the junction of three states, namely, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, significant Malayali and Kannadiga populations reside in the district. Nilgiris district is known for natural mines of Gold, which is also seen in the other parts of Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve extended in the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Kerala too.
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.
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.
The USC Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) is a center located at the University of Southern California. It is dedicated to the field of visual anthropology, incorporating visual modes of expression in the academic discipline of anthropology. It does so in conjunction with faculty in the anthropology department through five types of activities: training, research and analysis of visual culture, production of visual projects, archiving and collecting, and the sponsorship of conferences and film festivals. It offers a B.A. and an MVA in Visual Anthropology.
Kotas, also Kothar or Kov by self-designation, are an ethnic group who are indigenous to the Nilgiri Mountains range in Tamil Nadu, India. They are one of the many tribal people indigenous to the region.. Todas and Kotas have been subject to intense anthropological, linguistic and genetic analysis since the early 19th century. Study of Todas and Kotas has also been influential in the development of the field of anthropology. Numerically Kotas have always been a small group, not exceeding 1,500 individuals spread over seven villages for the last 160 years. They have maintained a lifestyle as jacks-of-all-trades such as potters, agriculturalist, leather workers, carpenters, and blacksmiths, and as musicians for other groups. Since the British colonial period they have had greater educational opportunities. This has improved their socio-economic status and they no longer depend on providing their traditional services to make a living. Some anthropologists have considered them to be a specialised caste as opposed to a tribe or an ethnic group.
David Goodman Mandelbaum was an American anthropologist.
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An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films.
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Stephen Fuchs was an Austrian Catholic priest, missionary, and anthropologist who researched the ethnology and prehistory of India. After obtaining a Ph.D. in ethnology and Indology from the University of Vienna in 1950, Fuchs moved to India where he assisted in founding the Department of Anthropology at St. Xavier's College in Bombay. After a brief imprisonment for being misidentified as a German missionary by the British government during World War II, Fuchs founded the Indian Branch of the Anthropos Institute, later renamed the Institute of Indian Culture. Fuchs, because of health concerns, moved to Austria in 1996 and died at the age of 91 in Mödling, Austria.
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Paul Hockings, an anthropologist who had earlier made THE VILLAGE, and who taught at the UCLA film school, was hired by MGM Documentary as research director.
Paul Hockings has a long history of research among various groups in south India, including most importantly the Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills in Tamilnadu.