The Importance of Ethnographic Film/Video/Multimedia in the Development and Assessment of Anthropological Understanding

Abstract

This descriptive account of a project from 2002-2003 entitled ‘Visual technologies and their assessment in undergraduate teaching and learning’ originated as presentation to the IUAES conference at Manchester University, 5-10 Aug 2013, to the panel ‘Establishing academic standards of evaluation for non-literary forms of representation in anthropology’. It presents findings based on a range of practical experiences in teaching and research over the past thirty years. During that time, I have pondered questions such as whether or not we should define ethnographic film, and what the criteria for ethnographic as opposed to documentary and/or art film should be. This account draws on the website and other the results of funded research into the assessment of undergraduate video and multimedia projects to discuss these issues and to argue for the importance of including narrative video projects for undergraduate assessment as well as the now ubiquitous power-point presentations.