In the class I teach on illness narratives, cancer comes after the plague. In the realm of representation and cultural memory, infectious diseases have a long visual and allegorical pedigree. Pestilence is always already more than an epidemiological reality. With cancer culture things are different. A cursory search for early modern images of cancer in the U.S. National Library of …
Tag Archives: Film
Fish
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile perch fillets for export to Europe and the seething, smoky, maggoty miasma where Tanzanian women, men, and children work to dry and fry fish carcasses. You may also recall your own sense …
A Home for Science: the Anthropology of Tropical and Arctic Field-Stations
While the AAAs were winding up in Chicago, participants in the workshop, A Home for Science: the Anthropology of Tropical and Arctic Field-Stations, started to make their way north to an even colder part of the world. Hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, co-organized by Wenzel Geissler, John Manton, Ann Kelly and Gro …
Off Label: a film by Michael Palmieri & Donal Mosher
I want to invite those attending this year’s American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago to view the screening of Off Label, a documentary film by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher released in 2012 (Saturday, the 23rd @ 5pm in PDR4 at the Chicago Hilton). The film captures, in a very effective and emotional way, how people come to …
The Afflictions Series: an Interview with Ethnographic Filmmaker Robert Lemelson
When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …