Savage Minds » Film

Notes and Queries in Anthropology

https://savageminds.org/2013/11/03/the-digital-revolution-and-anthropological-film/

In describing the subject of our film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! we often tell people that the situation of India’s Denotified Tribes (DNTs) is very similar to the kind of profiling that hap...

https://savageminds.org/2013/02/16/on-profiling-in-india-and-the-us/

Zero Dark Thirty begins with a statement that it is “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” And then the screen goes black; you hear voices from the World Trade Center only.  The th...

https://savageminds.org/2013/02/04/moral-affect-the-war-on-terror-and-the-posthuman-symbolism-of-zero-dark-thirty/

The second in a guest series about the “Mayan Apocalypse” predicted for Dec. 21, 2012.  The first post is here. Last summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Penn Museum exhibit “M...

https://savageminds.org/2012/12/11/2012-the-movie-we-love-to-hate/

Someone asked me for a list of five documentary films for an online anthropology publication, but the piece never got published so I’m sharing it here. I decided to choose is a list of five fil...

https://savageminds.org/2012/12/03/5-documentary-films-from-taiwan/

Our final prompt in this series asks about the possible virtues that emerge from the necessities … Continue reading Attention Deficit Ethnography →

https://savageminds.org/2012/07/23/attention-deficit-ethnography/

I’ve never been one for visual anthropology, and I’m totally uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘ethnography’. As a fieldworker, I’m fascinated by the micro-dyna...

https://savageminds.org/2012/03/24/captains/

The NY Times has an article about how corporate executives and government officials leave their laptops behind when they go to China or Russia, for fear that corporate or government secrets might...

https://savageminds.org/2012/02/13/protecting-informants-in-a-time-of-digital-thievery/

Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, “Move bits, not atoms.” Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and m...

https://savageminds.org/2012/01/11/digital-money-mobile-media-and-the-consequences-of-granularity/

A favorite topic on the blogosphere is whether or not Seediq Bale is an historically accurate take on the Wushe Incident. Some details, at least, are inaccurate, and people have some questions fo...

https://savageminds.org/2012/01/04/seediq-bale-as-history/

Commentary on the film Seediq Bale often relates it to Taiwan identity. Leaping the fifty years from the Wushe Incident (1930) to Taiwan nationalism (1980s) might seem like a non sequitur or ana...

https://savageminds.org/2012/01/01/mona-rudaos-scars/

The epic film Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow Bridge is of particular interest to translators because it’s in the Taiwanese aboriginal language Seediq. As a Chinese-English literary trans...

https://savageminds.org/2011/12/31/the-translation-of-seediq-bale/

Seediq Bale is the biggest Taiwan film ever and the story of an indigenous resistance (against the Japanese in central Taiwan in 1930). As such, it reminds one of Avatar. Having spent many childh...

https://savageminds.org/2011/12/29/seediq-bale-as-a-primitivist-film/

In Taiwan’s first indigenous film, Finding Sayun, there are two casting assistant/cameraman characters from Beijing, as well as a director from Beijing. The director from Beijing never appears...

https://savageminds.org/2011/12/15/the-chinese-connection/

In an article on the recent Orchid Island film Waiting for the Flying Fish, which is about but not by Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, Prof. Anita Wen-hsin Chang called for funding for local films ...

https://savageminds.org/2011/12/15/taiwans-first-indigenous-film/