What Makes Baby Yoda So Lovable?
The internet doesn’t agree on much these days. But there is one indisputable fact: Baby Yoda is absolutely adorable. For the uninitiated, Baby Yoda is an infantile alien…
Tag: movies
Speaking Of Jinn…
I recently participated in a podcast about jinn, material culture and modernity and globalization on the Archaeological Fantasies podcast. Here’s their episode notes: Magical Jinn and where …
Coming to Our Senses
In this Conversations episode of This Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins explore the subject of sensory ethnography – a focus in anthropology that tends to deemphasize…
Grounded Dreams?
Hong Kong and Hollywood face the challenges of a globalizing movie economy. Hortense Powdermaker’s analysis of a Hollywood movie industry driven by extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and crisis in…
Watching Movies in Ghana
Re-presenting the stuff of dreams and invisible forces, films feed the popular imagination. “It’s true, it’s true. All these things happen, all these things happen in real life.…
Film for Good
Can cinema produce social justice? Six decades separate the #OscarsSoWhite movement and the publication of Hortense Powdermaker’s ethnography on Hollywood’s inner workings Hollywood, the Dream Factory…
Spielberg: 1, Harvard: 0
Hollywood used to know what Americans wanted. Then came the new diversity of moving-going taste and preference. Hollywood was in trouble. In the words of Tom Hanks: “Nobody…
It’s Not Oscar, It’s HBO
I can’t remember the last movie I watched in an actual movie theater. Some of that is because I find the dramatic TV serial so much more powerful…
And Still the World Pursued–The Management of Waste in Max Mad: Fury Road
By Emma Louise Backe Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.” -The First History Man What are the roots that…
Allegra TV: Chiatura, my pride
Today Allegra TV features a film that is the first in a series of five ethnographic films produced by Ian Cook , Stephanie Endter, Anna Dziapshipa and Mikheil…
Damsels & Demons: Women in Horror Part II
By Emma Louise Backe Part I of the series can be read here. The genre of horror is one that is not overtly concerned with gender, and yet…
“Words of Witness” Captures The Ambiguity of The Egyptian Revolution
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Words of Witness, Mai Iskander’s compelling account of the aftermath of Egypt’s 2011 revolution in Tahrir Square that led to the resignation…
On Cameron Crowe’s Aloha and Indigenous Pacific Films We Actually Recommend
Still from Living Along the Fenceline (2011), directors Lina Hoshino & Gwyn Kirk By Hinemoana of Turtle Island: Lani Teves, Liza Keanuenueokalani Williams, Maile Arvin, Fuifuilupe Niumetol…
Racism in ‘Exodus’ Casting
The new Ridley Scott movie, Exodus, is attracting criticism because of the racial background of its stars. Christian Bale and Sigourney Weaver are white people playing ancient Egyptians…