Journal of Film and Video

Jay Ruby
A Future for Ethnographic Film?
Journal of Film and Video - Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 5-14

University of Illinois Press

Project MUSE - Journal of Film and Video - A Future for Ethnographic Film? Project MUSE Journals Journal of Film and Video Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2008 A Future for Ethnographic Film? Journal of Film and Video Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2008 E-ISSN: 1934-6018 Print ISSN: 0742-4671 DOI: 10.1353/jfv.0.0005 A Future for Ethnographic Film? Jay Ruby Ethnographic film is a contested genre, not unlike the documentary. The majority opinion is that an ethnographic film is any documentary that focuses on non-Western people (see Heider). The adjective "ethnographic" is used in a very loose manner, similar to the way psychological or historical is applied to a film. Few people expect a psychological film to be a serious rendering of the constructs of psychology or for the maker of the film to be a professionally trained psychologist. As a consequence, many films screened at places such as the American Anthropological Association or the Margaret Mead festival are documentaries made by professional filmmakers who have little or no training in anthropology. I have argued for a more restricted approach -- one that confines the genre to the work of academic anthropologists. In my book Picturing Culture, I articulated a fantasy version of this position. To begin . . . a moral tale for anthropologists, a fantasy in which an anthropological cinema exists -- not documentaries about "anthropological" subjects, but films designed by anthropologists to communicate...