Abstract

The first time I needed a working definition of ethnographic film was in high school. As a teenager, with only a limited understanding of anthropology or film, I needed a clear set of principles which I could apply to the films I wanted to write about for my senior project. I found just that in the first edition of Karl Heider’s book Ethnographic Film ( 2006 ), first published in 1976. In this classic text, Heider treats the “ethnographicness” of a film as a series of 16 attributes, each of which contributed to making a film more ethnographic. He even provided a convenient “attribute dimension grid” (2006, p. 109) which I faithfully copied out and used to evaluate and compare each of the films discussed in my paper (see Figure 2.1). Figure 2.1