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. [1]
Established as a collaboration between Harvard’s departments of Anthropology and of Visual and Environmental Studies in 2006, the SEL provides technical facilities and support for Harvard's PhD in Media Anthropology, [2] set up in 2007 as part of the graduate program in Social Anthropology. It has been praised as an "innovative initiative" [3] at Harvard to integrate art-making within the cognitive life of the university, and was proposed as a model for future endeavors in the graduate curriculum by the Presidential Task Force on the Arts' Report in 2008. [4] The SEL is managed by musician, anthropologist, and phonographer Ernst Karel, and directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, ethnographic filmmaker of In and Out of Africa and Sweetgrass . [5] In the year-long core class, "Sensory Ethnography," students receive instruction in ethnographic media practices, and create a substantial work in video, still photography, hypermedia, or sound. Advanced graduate students are also provided with training and equipment to produce media ethnographies in conjunction with their written doctoral dissertations. [6] One example includes students working alongside Ernst Karel and visual artist Sharon Lockhart to produce "Sound Safari", a collaborative phonography project, in Bath, Maine. [7]
Josep Lluís Sert i López was a Catalan architect and city planner established in the USA after 1939.
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.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is the graduate school of design at Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.
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.
The Cinema Guild Inc. is an American film distribution company. It was established by Philip Hobel and Mary-Ann Hobel, producers known for their work in documentaries and features, including the film Tender Mercies.
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.
Aryo Danusiri is an Indonesian film director.
Sweetgrass is a 2009 documentary film that follows modern-day shepherds as they lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. It was directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, a Harvard anthropologist, and produced by his wife Ilisa Barbash. The title derives from Sweet Grass County, one of several in which the film was shot.
Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor is a British anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography.
Cyborg anthropology is a discipline that studies the interaction between humanity and technology from an anthropological perspective. The discipline offers novel insights on new technological advances and their effect on culture and society.
The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is a research center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The center's mission is to "advance teaching and research on ethical issues in public life." It is named for Edmond J. Safra and Lily Safra and is supported by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation. The Center for Ethics was the first interfaculty initiative at Harvard University.
Leviathan is a 2012 American documentary directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. It is a work about the North American fishing industry. The film was acquired for U.S. distribution by The Cinema Guild. The film-makers used GoPro cameras and worked twenty-hour shifts during the shooting of the film.
Véréna Paravel is a French anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography.
Ivan & Ivana is a documentary directed by Jeff Daniel Silva in 2011.
Sharon Jean Traweek is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies and History at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, which explores the social world of particle physicists, has been cited in thousands of books and articles relating to the sociology of science and translated into Chinese in 2003.
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.
David MacDougall is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India. For much of his career he co-produced and co-directed films with his wife, fellow filmmaker Judith MacDougall. In 1972, his first film, To Live with Herds was awarded the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the Venice Film Festival. He has lived in Australia since 1975, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at Australian National University.
The Doon School Quintet is a five-part ethnographic film series made by the American visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker David MacDougall, between 1997 and 2000, at The Doon School, an elite all-boys boarding school in India. For thirteen months over three years, MacDougall lived with the students and was given unprecedented access for filming inside the residential campus. By the end, MacDougall had more than 85 hours of material, which he edited into 5 parts, with a total duration of about 8 hours. The project ranks among MacDougall's most ambitious and longest works and is the only film series in his oeuvre.
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Brazil and Indonesia.
J.P. Sniadecki is an American filmmaker.