In Search of the Hamat'sa

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

In Search of the Hamat'sa
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The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker's fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research partners.

The material for this film was gathered and shot over the year between 2002 and 2003 during the course of research for Glass's dissertation in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The research process consisted of extensive archival work - in which he traced the history of ethnographic representation of the Hamat'sa (in texts, film and photography, art gallery and museum display, and intercultural performance) - followed by an eight month period of residence in the Kwakwaka'wakw community of Alert Bay, BC. The film was edited in a documentary filmmaking course in the Program for Culture and Media at New York University. It is intended to communicate some of the complex issues involved in representing indigenous peoples and their expressive practices, especially as anthropological materials increasingly end up back in Native communities where they are used and debated as one kind of historical resource among many.

"...Glass is to be commended in his filming, as well as his writing and editing. It is provocative without being pompous, sympathetic but not romantic, and reflexive without being overly self-obsessed."
— Alexander D. King, Museum Anthropology Review

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Australian Anthropological Society Film Festival, Sydney, 2009

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, Taiwan, 2009

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York, 2008

Society for Cultural Anthropology Meeting, Long Beach, CA, 2008

8th Astra Ethnographic Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania, 2006

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In Search of the Hamat'sa