Natives on Film

Instructor:  Professor Matthew H. Amster
                 Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Have you ever watched a fictional film depicting native peoples and wondered how accurate it is? This Seminar is devoted to exploring how indigenous people are represented in full-length feature films and applying anthropological understandings to analyzing these works. The course is global in scope, including films about Native Americans (American Indians, Arctic cultures, and people of the Amazon rainforest), Africa, the Asia/Pacific region (Maori of New Zealand, Australian Aborigines, and peoples of Borneo), as well as depictions of pre-historic populations in Europe (Cro-Magnon and Neandertal). We also look at key examples of films by indigenous filmmakers about their own cultures and explore a range of issues raised by people working in visual anthropology.