2015 AAA Session: THE PAST AS PROLOGUE

THE LEGACY OF THE SMITHSONIAN’S HUMAN STUDIES FILM ARCHIVE
On May 1, 1975 Margaret Mead spoke at the formal opening of the National Anthropological Film Center (NAFC) at the Smithsonian Institution. In closing her remarks, she exhorted her colleagues to action with the statement that “the last man in Roratonga has not yet been filmed,” suggesting that filmmaking was a way of both popularizing anthropology and preserving disappearing worlds. A mere six years later, near the end of what we might consider the classic era of ethnographic filmmaking, the NAFC became the Human Studies Film Archives, a part of the National Anthropological Archives. With over eight million feet of film the HSFA is one of the premier archives devoted to the preservation anthropological film. As a repository for the works of Tim Asch, John Marshall, David and Judith MacDougall, Jorge Preloran, Colin Turnbull and others, the HSFA contains unique documents of humanity’s shared history and of the discipline’s visual development and thinking. While filmmaking has shifted to digital technologies, challenges continue to beset the HSFA around its significant analog holdings as well as how to best serve archival demands of the 21st century media practices. Participants in this roundtable will reflect on what the legacy of the HSFA means for anthropology as well as the role that film and video have played (and continues to play) in make anthropology more accessible to the public, pushing the boundaries of anthropological ways of knowing and making ‘the strange’ familiar and ‘the familiar’ strange.
History of Anthropology, Visual Anthropology and filmmaking