Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture / Edition 1

by Alison Griffiths

Overview

The ethical and ideological implications of cross-cultural image-making continue to stir debate among anthropologists, film scholars, and museum professionals. This innovative book focuses on the contested origins of ethnographic film from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, vividly depicting the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, the book examines museums of natural history, world's fairs, scientific and popular photography, and the early filmmaking efforts of anthropologists and commercial producers to investigate how cinema came to assume the role of mediator of cultural difference at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231116978
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2002
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor of film and media studies at Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her Columbia University Press books are Carceal Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Twentieth-Century America (2016) and Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008).

Table of Contents

Part I: Precinema and Ethnographic Representation
1. Life Groups and the Modern Museum Spectator
2. Science and Spectacle: Visualizing the Other at the World's Fair
3. Knowledge and Visuality in Nineteenth-Century Anthropology
Part II: Early Ethnographic Film in Science and Popular Culture
4. The Ethnographic Cinema of Alfred Cort Haddon and Walter Baldwin Spencer
5. "The World Within Your Reach'': Popular Cinema and Ethnographic Representation
Part III: First Steps: The Museum and Early Filmmakers
6. Early Ethnographic Film at the American Museum of Natural History
7. Finding a Home for Cinema in Ethnography: The First Generation of Anthropologist-Filmmakers in America
8. Conclusion: The Legacy of Early Ethnographic Film

What People are Saying About This

Tom Gunning

With originality and depth of research, Wondrous Difference supplies the missing prehistory of the ethnographic documentary. The story this book tells is a dynamic one, of interest to anyone involved with cultural history, particularly anthropologists and film historians.

— Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

Dana Polan

This is a fine, fascinating study, a groundbreaking history of the emergence and evolution of the early ethnographic film. Employing a sharp attention to detail and manifesting an impressive grasp of the complexities of meaning in historically and geographically distant cultures, Alison Griffiths contributes in rich and important ways to ongoing thought and research about cinema.

— Dana Polan, professor of critical studies, University of Southern California

Jay Ruby

An invaluable addition to our understanding of the history and development of ethnographic film prior to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.... offers a new and insightful understanding of the relationship between visual culture, museums, ethnographic film, the popular world of commercial film, and anthropology from the 1890s to the 1920s.

— Jay Ruby, Temple University

Editorial Reviews

With fascinating examples and illustrations culled from a number of international archives,Wondrous Difference is an invaluable resource for cinema historians, anthropologists, archivists, and museum professionals.... Griffiths is working within a new tradition of scholars approaching visuality with a historically integrated and culturally critical perspective.... The masterful way in which Griffiths navigates and reveals the complexity of these relationships sets a standard for others to follow.

Film Quarterly - Amy J. Staples

A significant contribution to knowledge about methods of recording and presenting visual culture of non-Western peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Choice

Wondrous Difference will make an excellent... textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in both visual anthropology and the history of anthropology.

— Deborah Poole

Current Anthropology

With fascinating examples and illustrations culled from a number of international archives, Wondrous Difference is an invaluable resource for cinema historians, anthropologists, archivists, and museum professionals.... Griffiths is working within a new tradition of scholars approaching visuality with a historically integrated and culturally critical perspective.... The masterful way in which Griffiths navigates and reveals the complexity of these relationships sets a standard for others to follow.

— Amy J. Staples

Film Quarterly

Wondrous Difference will make an excellent... textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in both visual anthropology and the history of anthropology.

Current Anthropology - Deborah Poole