I’m a Recorder: Interview with Asen Balikci

Abstract

Asen Balikci was one of the founding fathers of modern visual anthropology. He was part of the generation that established the subdiscipline in the 1950 to 1970s period. Along with Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch and others he contributed to the formation of modern ethnographic film and its use of cinematographic means to study and represent culture. He was an anthropologist who used his expertise in visual anthropology and the cultural knowledge he gained in fieldwork to curate film projects aimed to achieve cross-cultural understanding. He chose the subject matter of the films and supervised cameramen, sound recordists and film editors to work according to the principles he had learnt from Margaret Mead.