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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Featured Films
- Democracía Indígena (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film examines the indigenous rights revolution sweeping Mexico through the municipal elections in Huehuetla, Puebla. In 1989, the Huehuetla Totonacs formed the Organización Independiente Totonaca (OIT), and joined in an electoral alliance with the Partido de la Revolución Democratica (PRD). For ten years the OIT and the PRD carried out a non-violent revolution. The visible signs of this Totonac renaissance are the health clinics, schools, roads, drinking water and electricity. But the real change is in the new self-confidence and pride of the Totonacs themselves. The camera follows Cruz Garcia, an "expatriate" Totonac, as he returns to his community.
- The Shilluk of Southern Sudan (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film presents a compelling visual and aural analysis of Shilluk kingship in 1975, and provides a very useful complement to Evans-Pritchard's 1948 text, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk. Although the Reth (king) has been reduced to the status of second-class magistrate in dispute settlement by the Sundanese government, he is still the focus of political and national identity for a Shilluk people composed of competing territorial groupings. At the death of the Reth, his spirit passes into the Nile.
- Other Europe (streaming, Academic Video Online) What happens to African migrants once granted political refugee status? In Turin, a northern Italian city, an abandoned clinic has been squatted by more than 200 refugees since December 2008. Khaled, Shukri and Ali have been travelling through hell in order to arrive in Italy. They crossed the border and are determined to have a normal life. Their hopes are dashed and they find their lives "suspended." The film follows their stories over the years, showing life in the clinic, including the inevitable internal problems, the protests of citizenship and the initiatives of the city.
- Law and War in Rural Kenya (streaming, Academic Video Online) In 1998, a new movement swept through Kuria, in S.W. Kenya with dramatic effect. Cattle raiding fuelled by the increasing presence of guns had led to a situation of total insecurity, with all in fear of the thieves. In April of that year, a group of men in just one location, Bukira East, effected a new organisation merging ideas from the Tanzanian vigilante movement, sungusungu, with their own indigenous assembly, the iritongo. Within a year the movement had spread throughout Kuria and the District as a whole was at peace. This film revisits the iritongo movement ten years later.
- The Sultan's Burden (streaming, Academic Video Online) Sultan Issa Maigari is the ruler of the northern Cameroon province of Adamawa, an area the size of England. Served by a liveried bodyguard of servants and slaves, he lives in an extraordinary thatched palace with his harem of wives and concubines and his thirty children. We are in a world of heraldry and magic, an ancient world fast disintegrating under the pressures of contempory political forces.In 1992 the Sultan allowed anthropologist Lisbet Holtedahl, and award-winning director Jon Jerstad, to film his life. Never before had a traditional Islamic leader granted such access to a world that seems straight out of the Arabian Nights. We see the many problems besetting the Sultan, ranging from the threat of an armed rebellion among the peasant farmers, to his impossible task of justifying support for the national Christian goverment to his local Moslem subjects. His courtiers criticize his rule.
- Men of Words (streaming, Academic Video Online) n the context of strict censorship by the government of the then dictator of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh, this film explores how ancient traditions of poetry, sometimes set to music and recorded on audio cassettes, were used as a means to circulate ideas about social and political problems related to the fractured relationship between the north and south of the country that it was not possible to discuss through the press.
Featured Podcasts
- AnthroPod: More-Than-Human Politics n this episode of AnthroPod, guest producers Stine Krøijer and Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen take up a debate that is central to current environmental and political anthropology: namely, how ethnographers can identify and describe the political when earth beings, spirits, or nonhuman others become part of the ethnographic equation? How can we methodologically and theoretically engage with these beings as they become entwined in political processes?
- AnthroBites: Sovereignty Our guest for this episode is Yarimar Bonilla, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, who talks us through anthropological approaches to sovereignty.
- Anthropological Airwaves: "Immigration, Discourse, and Trump's Border Wall" This episode features timely interviews with Jason De León and Hilary Parsons Dick about immigration policy and immigration discourse in relation to Trump's border wall, as well as the roles and responsibilities that anthropologists have in the public sphere.
- AnthroBites: Anthropology of NGOs Our guest for this episode is Mark Schuller, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nonprofit and NGO Studies at Northern Illinois University and affiliate at the Faculté d’Ethnologie, l’Université d’État d’Haïti. In this episode, Schuller explains the history of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and discusses their relationship to anthropology with contributing editor Siobhán McGuirk.
- AnthroPod: Anthropology’s Politics: A Conversation with Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar In this episode of AnthroPod, Beth Derderian interviews Lara Deeb (Scripps College) and Jessica Winegar (Northwestern University) about their recent book Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (2015). They discuss how political and economic pressures shape the ways in which U.S.-based scholars research and teach about the Middle East, noting how race, gender, and generational hierarchies influence scholars at all stages of their careers.
- AnthroPod: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Anthropologists Reflect on What Just Happened In this episode of AnthroPod, we bring you a recording of an invited session organized by the American Ethnological Society and the Society for the Anthropology of North America at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, entitled “The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Anthropologists Reflect on What Just Happened.” Taking place just eleven days after the election, this session provided a much-needed platform for leading anthropological voices to discuss the dynamics and implications of Donald Trump's victory.
