As part of the Canadian Classics Screening Series, the Vancouver International Film Centre is screening Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Actor, filmmaker and well-known Inuit sculptor Natar Ungalaaq will be in attendance.

Details:
Vancouver International Film Centre (Vancity Theatre)
1181 Seymour Street (corner Davie Street)
April 19, 2007 at 7:30 pm

http://www.academy.ca/events/screenclassics07.cfm

Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner is based on an ancient Inuit legend which takes place in the area around Igloolik. You can follow the detailed story of the film while tracing the location of events on a map of the region at the Atanarjuat website.

Related Readings:

Angilirq, P.A., & Cohn, N. (2002). Atanarjuat : the fast runner. Toronto: Coach House Books.
This screenplay is in both Inuktitut and English, and includes ethnographic commentary written specially for the book by Bernard Saladin D’Anglure.

Bessire, L. (2003). Talking back to primitivism: Divided audiences, collective desires. American Anthropologist, 105(4), 832-838.

Ginsburg, F. (2003). Atanarjuat off-screen: From ‘media reservations’ to the world stage. American Anthropologist, 105(4), 827-831.

Huhndorf, S. (2003). Atanarjuat, the fast runner: Culture, history, and politics in inuit media. American Anthropologist, 105(4), 822-826.

Siebert, Monika. (2006). Atanarjuat and the ideological work of contemporary indigenous filmmaking. Public culture, 18 (3), 531-550.

Of potential interest to anthropologists looking at culture and communication technologies: UBC Library now has access to the electronic version of the Encyclopedia of Developing Regional Communities with Information and Communication Technology from Idea Group.

A sampling of the many entries:

The URL for the eBook is located in the catalogue record for the print title – search by title in the library catalogue to locate it.

(And we do also have the print volume of this book in Koerner library stacks at HN49.C6 E545 2006.)

As part of his research into Digital Ethnography, Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University created a short video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us“, posted it to the online video sharing site YouTube, and sent the link to a handful of friends and colleages. Within days, the video had spread throughout the blogosphere – a viral video.

The rapid spread of this video nicely illustrates the power of Web 2.0, one of the focuses of Wesch’s class on Digital Ethnography, where students have been researching the social and cultural power of the web alongside related topics such as what makes a viral video.

Wesch’s work was recently profiled in an article on the website Inside Higher Ed. The article also profiles his work with the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University, which examines the impacts of digital technology on human interaction.