ABSTRACT
This chapter is motivated by a series of overly ambitious questions regarding the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and cognate disciplines. Jackson’s seemingly straightforward observation that while anthropologists may believe ethnography can “see through” surface, superficial cultural phenomena by way of “thickly” describing them but that this is not the same as actually seeing a specific phenomenon itself, speaks to a central point of contention in theorizing ethnographic film. To consider observational cinema and sensory ethnography filmmaking as conventional, and to situate them along a continuum, or more accurately as kin-related brethren within a genealogy of ethnographic filmmaking aesthetic genres, is neither radical nor an attempt to diminish the value of either.
