Films

Central Television’s major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop ‘armchair theorising’ and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them. The six part series was filmed all over the world, from the frozen Canadian Arctic to the dry outback of Australia, from New Guinea to India, Africa to the South Pacific.The programme makers retraced the steps of the pioneering anthropologists in those countries and, by following the life story of each scholar, they reveal how social anthropology has contributed to our lives. University professor Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard taught that our own ideas have many features in common with other cultures and are just as weird and wonderful. He was the first trained anthropologist to do work in Africa, where he lived among the Azande and studied their belief in witchcraft. Later he worked with the Nuer tribe in the Sudan.