Reverse Anthropology

"Exploring Ethnographic Filmmaking" is a four-part film series that explores anthropology’s longstanding, complex engagement with visual media, asking how film has been used not only to document and render social life, but to categorize, analyze, theorize, and intervene in the world.

Program 2: Reverse Anthropology

Bad-e jinn (1969, Naser Taghvayi, 34 min)
No Archive Can Restore You (2020, Onyeka Igwe, 6 min) 
Petit à Petit (1969, Jean Rouch, 90 min)

Total runtime: 2 hrs 10 min

This program turns the camera back on anthropology itself, reversing the archetypal ethnographic gaze. Through satire, fabulation, reflexivity, and archival intervention, the films challenge colonial and ethnographic epistemologies by reworking who observes, who interprets, and who speaks. These works expose anthropology as a historically situated practice shaped by power, hierarchy, and geopolitical asymmetries.

Bad-e jinn, No Archive Can Restore You, and Petit à Petit collectively demonstrate how film can estrange anthropology’s own methods and assumptions. By foregrounding irony, reversal, and counter-archival practices, the program invites audiences to reflect on how knowledge is produced, authorized, and contested—and how ethnographic film can function as critique as much as documentation.

The screening will be introduced by Natasha Raheja, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, and Parisa Vaziri, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies.

Free admission! Supported by the Department of Anthropology, the Nazaara Media Lab, a Visual Anthropology Research Lab at Cornell University, the Department of Performing & Media Arts, and the Southeast Asia Program.