Cultural Anthropology Lecture on Indigenous Filmmaking and Latin America

Photo courtesy of Lucas Bessire

Lucas Bessire, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, will present a lecture on indigenous filmmaking in Latin America at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24 in Gearhart 102 as part of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthroplogy's Cultural Anthropology Lecture Series.

The lecture, "Visuality and Immanence in the Ayoreo Video Workshop," is a piece of Bessire's extensive research with the Ayoreo peoples of the Bolivian and Paraguayan Gran Chaco. Forced off their lands due to ranching and bulldozing, the Ayoreo collaborate on video workshops and documentaries to manage and shape how they are politically and culturally represented. 

The lecture argues that unauthorized indigenous self-imagery and the minor conditions of its production may offer untimely correctives to the visual economies, perceptual silos and political lexicons often presumed to define the present.

An avid traveler, Bessire has conducted 52 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Ayoreo-speaking peoples of the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia and Paraguay. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press), an ethnographic study of crisis and change among recently contacted Ayoreo peoples, and winner of the Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

He is also the co-editor of Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century (New York University Press), and the director of the documentary films Asking Ayahai: an Ayoreo Story, From Honey to Ashes, and Farewell to Savage.

The lecture is free and open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Latin American and Latino Studies Program, the Religious Studies Program, and the Indigenous Studies Program.