Jay Ruby:
Towards an anthropological cinema - Abstract

In the paper, I propose a radical departure from how we perceive ethnographic film and suggest an alternative path for the production of moving images by anthropologists. I argue that anthropologists should relinquish the term "ethnographic film" to documentary filmmakers and embrace the term "Anthropological Cinema" to distinguish their attempts to visualize ethnography from the realist images of the "exotic other" produced by documentarians. In addition, along with Biella and others, I suggest that the production of digital multimedia ethnographies may be a way out of the limits that are possibly inherent in tradition filmic discourse. I illustrate this variety of "new" ethnography with my own recent work.

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