Abstract

Ethnographic film and video (with its related written scholarship) have evolved from its pioneering roots as cinematic entertainment (such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North) and as an advanced field note device in the service of ethnographic inquiry (rooted in the pioneering work of Mead and Bateson), to its current status as a form of academic dissemination used in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary social science and humanities scholarship.