Prof Paul Henley

Studied for a BA in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, 1969-1973, including 1971-1972 as an anthropological field assistant at the Laboratorio de Antropología of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Caracas, followed by a PhD, also at Cambridge, 1974-1979, based on fieldwork amongst the Panare (E’ñepa) of southern Venezuela, supervised by J.A. Barnes . Also studied as Leverhulme Film Training Fellow at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield, 1984-1987, graduating as ‘director-cameraman’.

Appointed as first Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in 1987 and also Director of the University Media Centre, 1989-1993.

Previous positions: Lecturer, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, 1979-1980; Junior Research Fellow, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 1980-1983.

Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI); since 1988, member of the RAI Film Committee (Chair, 1993-1998); Director, RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, 1990, 1992, 2007.
External assessor: Instituto de Antropologia, Arqueologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2003-); Équipe de Recherches de Ethnologie Amerindienne, CNRS, Villejuife, Paris (2001); Laboratorio de Imagem e Som en Antropologia (LISA), Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil (1999-);.East Asia Institute of Visual Anthropology (EAIVA), Yunnan University, Kunming, PR China (1998-2000);  Centro Humboldt, Amazonas, Ministry of the Environment & Renewable Resources (MARN), Venezuela (1994-1997).

Film festival juries: Bilan du Film Ethnographique, Musée de L’Homme, Paris (1991, Chair 2006,2007); Nuoro International Ethnological  Film Festival, Sardinia (2002); Sibiu International Ethnographic Film Festival, Romania (Chair, 1996).

• History, theory and practice of ethnographic documentary film-making
• Indigenous societies of Amazonia and adjacent regions of lowland South America
• Hispanic Afro-caribbean societies

• The cinema of Jean Rouch
• Rurality, landscape and memory in southern Tuscany (film project)

In 2009-2010, I am teaching the following courses:

• An undergraduate course on the ethnography of indigenous Amazonia
• Beyond Observational Cinema, the second phase of the hands-on training in practical ethnographic film-making offered on the MA in Visual Anthropology
• Images, Texts, Fieldwork (taught jointly with Angela Torresan), a course in which visual anthropology and ‘straight’ social anthropology Masters students are encouraged to explore the contrast between visual and textual media as means of representing fieldwork experience. The anthropology of the city of Manchester serves as the medium for this exploration and students are invited to carry out brief fieldwork projects around the city as part of the course.

I also have a number of students on the PhD with Visual Media programme (listed below) and run a fortnightly seminar, Filmwork and Fieldwork for them and other students on the programme in the second semester.

I am currently working with colleagues in the School of Music and Drama to develop AMP, a new doctoral programme in Anthropology, Media and Performance, which will draw its intellectual inspiration from the ethnofictional work of Jean Rouch.  We are still working on the details of this but have formal permission from the Faculty to launch this programme in 2010-11.

In press  The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. University of Chicago Press, due to be published in November 2009

In press  Postcards at the service of the Imaginary: Jean Rouch, shared anthropology and the ciné-trance. To appear in Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales, eds., Out of the Study and into the Field: ethnographic theory and practice in French anthropology.

2009  In denial – authorship and ethnographic film-making.  In Andréa Barbosa, Edgar Teodoro da Cunha and Rose Satiko G. Hikiji, eds.,  Imagem-Conhecimento: antropologia, cinema e outros diálogos. Campinas: Papirus Press 

2007  Beyond the burden of the real: anthropological reflections on the technique of ‘a masterful cutter’. In Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Taylor, eds., The Cinema of Robert Gardner. Oxford: Berg [December 2007]

2007  Jean Rouch and the legacy of the ‘pale master’: filming the Sigui, 1956-2033. In Joram ten Brink, ed., Building Bridges: the cinema of Jean Rouch. London: Wallflower Press [November 2007]

2007  Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in ‘visual’ anthropology. In Peter Biella and Colette Piault, eds., Visual Anthropology in Europe. Special edition of Visual Anthropology Review 23 (1) [May 2007].

2007  The origins of observational cinema: conversations with Colin Young. In Beate  Engelbrecht, ed., Memories of the Origins of Visual Anthropology, pp.139-161. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

2006  Spirit-possession, power and the absent presence of Islam: reviewing Les maîtres fous. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12: 731-761 [Winner of 2004 Curl Essay Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute]

2006  Anthropologists in television: a disappearing world? In Sarah Pink, ed.,  Applications   of  Anthropology: professional anthropology in the 21st century, pp. 170-189. Oxford: Berghahn.

2006  Narratives: the guilty secret of ethnographic documentary? In Metje Postma & Peter Ian Crawford, eds., Reflecting Visual Ethnography: using the camera in anthropological research, pp.376-401. Hoejbjerg & Leiden:  Intervention Press & CNWS Publications.

In addition to academic film projects, also works on occasion as a free-lance director-cameraman for UK television. Recent work includes:

• 2004 The Thames through Time- The Great River Race (23”). Mosaic Pictures for  ITV/Carlton
• 2004 Director-cameraman: The Thames through Time – Boom and Bust in London’s Docklands (23”). Mosaic Pictures for  ITV/Carlton.
• 2000 Location director-cameraman: The Enemy Within (28"), Mosaic Pictures/ BBC 2.

Co-supervises the visual aspects of the work of the following PhD students, all enrolled on the PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media

Phd Students

Pre-fieldwork

No supervisees currently at this stage

Fieldwork

• Michael Upton (2006-) – Human rights discourses and the EU (with Sarah Green)
• Rachel Webster (2006-) - The changing perceptions of childhood, space and Islam amongst the nomadic Bakkarwal of Indian-administered Kashmir (with Soumhya Venkatesan)

Writing Up

• Alyssa Grossman (2005-) – Museums, outreach and modes of visual display in Romania (with Sarah Green)
• Joceny Pinheiro (2004 - ) - Indigenous leadership and the politics of identity incontemporary Brazilian Northeast  (with Peter Wade)
• Raúl Zevallos (2004 -) – Pilgrims, healers and artisans in the Peruvian Andes (with Penny Harvey)
• Penny Moore (2001-) – Situated creativity: musicians, identity and nationalism in Vienna  (with Karen Sykes)