O encontro com o outro: uma aproximação entre a antropologia e o documentário

Abstract

Abstract

Both anthropology and documentary filmmaking, while not reducible to this aspect, share a common point: the encounter with the other. Subjects were revealed when documentary filmmakers entered diverse spaces with their cameras or searched archives for records of the other in the past. These same devices, cameras and photographs, began to accompany ethnographies, serving as instruments for recording and interaction between the anthropologist and the other. The very landmark of documentary cinema highlights the encounter between Robert Flaherty and the Inuit community, resulting in Nanook of the North (1922). Parallel to this moment, also in 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski, with Argonauts of the Western Pacific, laid the foundations of modern anthropology. In Anthropology and Image, a book by Andréa Barbosa and Edgar Teodoro da Cunha, it is pointed out how anthropology and cinema developed simultaneously, at a time when images, in a broad sense, could record a world of greater diversity. This parallel development, in fact, led to mutual influences. While documentary filmmaking has led to questioning the objectivity of recording, anthropology has alerted filmmakers to question the form and interpretation of what has been filmed, according to Barbosa and Cunha. In this sense, the article seeks to demonstrate how these two fields have dealt with subjects, aiming, in the end, to contribute to a sensitive perception of the other.