Conversation between Jean Rouch and Professor Enrico Fulchignoni

The text of an interview recorded on video in August 1980 to serve as an introduction and commentary to a retrospective presentation of films by Jean Rouch. The published text appears in: Jean Rouch: une rétrospective. Paris: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères— Animation audio‐visuelle/SERDDAV‐CNRS, 1981, pp. 7–29. Translation by Anny Ewing and Steven Feld. The editor and the translators wish to thank the Comité du Film Ethnographique, Enrico Fulchignoni, and Jean Rouch for their kind permission to publish this interview in English.     

The Anthropology of Authenticity: Everyman His Own Anthropologist

Anthropology, the contributors to the recent volume Reinventing Anthropology tell us, is suffering from severe hardening of the intellectual arteries. In order for it to be revitalized, they say, the discipline must be de-professionalized and de-institutionalized, made more personal and existential. This involves a rejection of the pose of "objectivity" and "value-free" inquiry and an open admission of the inherently ideological nature of the discipline. In a word, anthropology will have to become politically and morally partisan. This essay explores some of the implications of the recommendations made by the reinventors of anthropology. The stance taken in Reinventing Anthropology, this paper contends, would not only undermine anthropology as a systematic field of inquiry but would also negate whatever "relevance" the discipline might have to the contemporary world.     

From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic Filmmaking in Africa before Jean Rouch

This article offers an overview of the very substantial body of films of ethnographic interest produced by French filmmakers working in Africa before Jean Rouch arrived on the scene. It identifies a number of genres. For the first two decades this work largely took the form of short films of reportage, mostly shot in North and West Africa by anonymous operators working for newsreel agencies. Then, in the 1920s, longer and technically more complex films based on transregional and even transcontinental expeditions began to appear. Films offering an inventory of cultural traditions in particular French colonies also emerged in this decade. Also to be considered are films based on extended field research, from the 1930s onwards. We conclude with a brief analysis of the originality of Jean Rouch as he developed a new form of ethnographic filmmaking in the late 1940s.     

Franz Boas 1858–1942: An Illustrated Biography; Margaret Mead: The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future

Franz Boas 1858–1942: An Illustrated Biography. Norman Francis Boas. Mystic, CT: Seaport Autographs Press, 2004. 312 pp.
Margaret Mead: The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future. Robert B. Textor, ed. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. 348 pp.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa

Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and. Writer Encounter Africa. Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. 348 pp.