Related Guides
Find Films & Images
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices contains documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition contains a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
- Associated Press Images Collection This link opens in a new window Associated Press Images Collection is a searchable collection of recent and historical photos from the Associated Press, plus AP graphics, articles, and brief sound clips.
- ARTstor This link opens in a new window ARTstor is a database of images from museums, artists, libraries, colleges and universities, scholars, private collections, and photo archives available for teaching, education, and scholarship, with all images cleared for educational use.
Browse Films
- Buck (streaming, Swank) " ... a richly textured and visually stunning film, follows Buck Brannaman from his abusive childhood to his phenomenally successful approach to horses. A real-life 'horse-whisperer', he eschews the violence of his upbringing and teaches people to communicate with their horses through leadership and sensitivity, not punishment. Buck possesses near magical abilities as he dramatically transforms horses - and people - with his understanding, compassion and respect"-
- Blackfish (streaming, Kanopy) Using the tragic deaths of three people killed by SeaWorld bullorca Tilikum between 1991 and 2010 as a focus for exploring thepractice of holding killer whales in captivity, this sensitive documentary illustrates how their intelligence and sometimes friendly nature can operate as a deadly illusion. This film not only reviews the unfortunate circumstances of the Tilikum cases, but probes the moral issues connected to the employment of these animals for entertainment purposes.
- The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (streaming, Academic Video Online) The year is 1965. In a unique 10 week experiment, a fully-grown male bottle-nosed dolphin and a young woman begin living together 24/7 in a flooded house. The aim was to find out whether the dolphin could learn to speak English. But as the weeks progressed, the experiment turned into an experience far darker than anyone could have possibly imagined. This extraordinary film reveals the almost-unbelievable tale of one of the 1960's most controversial experiments into animal intelligence,
- Blue Planet channel (streaming, Academic Video Online) The Blue Planet is a British nature documentary series created and produced by the BBC. It premiered on 12 September 2001 in the United Kingdom. It is narrated by David Attenborough.
- Blue Planet II channel (Streaming, Academic Video Online) Blue Planet II is a 2017 British nature documentary series on marine life produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Like its predecessor, The Blue Planet (2001), it is narrated and presented by naturalist Sir David Attenborough, while the main music score was composed by Hans Zimmer.
- To Live with Herds (streaming, Academic Video Online) This classic, widely acclaimed film on the Jie of Uganda, produced by the renowned ethnographic filmmaking team of David and Judith MacDougall, examines the effects of nation building in pre-Amin Uganda on the seminomadic, pastoral Jie.
- Secrets of the Social World (streaming, Academic Video Online) Long-standing theories about how animals think are being overturned. Instead of simplistic attempts to rank animals through IQ, zoologists are exploring the animal mind on a much broader scale. This fascinating series explores these breakthroughs through three iconic creatures - dogs, birds and dolphins - and discovers how the origins and causes of animals' cognitive abilities lie in their environment.
- Maasai Women (streaming, Academic Video Online) The Masai are cattle herders living in the East African rift valley: they grow no crops and are proud of being a non-agricultural people. Cattle are the all-important source of wealth and social status, and Masai love their cattle, composing poems to them. However, it is the men who have exclusive control over rights to cattle, and women are dependent, throughout their lives, on a man – father, husband or son – for rights of access to property.
- Turkana Conversations series (Streaming, Academic Video Online) Lorang's Way, The Wedding Camels. A Wife Among Wives
- Wodaabe (streaming, Academic Video Online) ... is the Wodaabe world disappearing? and how are we to place the painted male faces? The very considerable success of this film is the ways it answers these questions. J. Picto The Wodaabe follow their herds in an endless migration across the borders of Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon in search of pasture.
- The Hunters (streaming, Academic Video Online) This re-release of an early classic in anthropological film follows the hunt of a giraffe by four men over a five-day period. The film was shot in 1952-53 on the third joint Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored Marshall family expedition to Africa to study Ju/'hoansi, one of the few surviving groups that lived by hunting - gathering.
- Cartel Land (streaming, Academic Video Online) In this Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary, director Matthew Heineman and executive producer Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker", "Zero Dark Thirty") gain unprecedented, on-the-ground access to the riveting stories of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy - the murderous Mexican drug cartels.
- Beef, Inc. (streaming, Academic Video Online) A struggle for control of the world food market is waging, and the battle promises to escalate in the 21st century. This documentary by Carmen Garcia examines how a handful of companies have come to dominate beef production and distribution in North America. This film gives a voice to independent cattle producers who, unable to compete with the corporations, find themselves being squeezed out of the industry.
- Food, Inc. (streaming, Kanopy) Your steak and chicken may not taste quite the same after you digest all of the information found in this documentary about food production in the United States. Exposing not only the disturbing conditions under which livestock exist prior to their slaughter, the film examines the complex issues surrounding our health and the profits of corporations invested in supplying people with inexpensive (if not exactly nutritious) food.
DVDs & VHS
- Darwin's Nightmare (dvd) ubert Sauper's documentary on the devastating effects of global capitalism looks at the introduction of the Nile perch to Tanzania's Lake Victoria in the 1960s and the subsequent death of all other fish species in the larger context of globalization. As cargo planes fly overhead bringing guns into Africa and leave carrying tons of Nile perch fillets to European markets, the AIDS-plagued peoples of this war-torn region starve.
- The Perfect Storm (dvd) Sebastian Junger's book about a real-life tragedy at sea was brought to the screen by Wolfgang Petersen. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, William Fichtner and John C. Reilly play the fishermen of the Andrea Gail, who were at sea when climactic conditions unexpectedly developed into one of the worst storms in recorded history.
- Rabbit-Proof Fence (dvd) This film from Phillip Noyce is based on the true story of Molly Craig, a young aboriginal girl in Australia, who leads her younger sister and cousin in an escape from an official government camp, set up as part of an official government policy to train them as government workers and integrate them into white society.
- The Women's Olamal (vhs, Geddes) Documentary focusing on four Maasai women follows the controversial events leading up to a fertility ceremony in Loita, Kenya
- The Nuer (vhs) This film, produced by Robert Gardner and Hilary Harris for the Film Study Center of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, presents the important relationships and events in the lives of the Nuer, Nilotic people in Sudan and on the Ethiopian border.
Browse Podcasts
- Pets, Pests And Food: Our Complex, Contradictory Attitudes Toward Animals (Hidden Brain, NPR) This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the contradictions and quandaries embedded in our relationships with animals.
- Animals and Anthropology (AnthroPod) There has been a recent fluorescence of anthropological interest in human-animal relationships, animals in society, and animal politics in a conjuncture often called the “animal turn.” Many find the turn of a humanist discipline to nonhuman subjects perplexing and even problematic. In this episode of AnthroPod, we bring you a conversation with Nikhil Anand, Philippe Descola, Radhika Govindrajan, Laura Ogden, and Paige West on the theory, method, and politics of studying nonhuman subjects from anthropological perspectives.
- Beasts to Besties: Our Relationship to Animals (The Human Angle) From "furry creatures in drag" to wild animal activism, two Stanford historians talk about the evolution and social implications of human-animal relationships.
- Naisargi Dave on Animal Rights Activism in India (AnthroPod) AnthroPod interviews Professor Naisargi Dave, who draws our attention to the act and experience of witnessing an animal's suffering for activists in India, and, through a narrative that is both theoretically innovative and deeply affecting, helps us think through the contradictions and complexities of being human with animals, as we live with together, speak and act on their behalf, and perhaps even become them.
- Species Podcast 'The Podcast about Animals" created by BU CAS Alum Macken Murphy
