• Wondrous Difference
1 0

Wondrous Difference

$40.00
$0.00 $40.00
Sold out
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 c...
Read More
  • 06 March 2002
View Product Details
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.
files/i.png Icon
Price: $40.00
Pages: 528
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Film and Culture Series
Publication Date: 06 March 2002
ISBN: 9780231116978
Format: Paperback
BISACs: PERFORMING ARTS / Film / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General
REVIEWS Icon
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.

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

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

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