PAUL HOCKINGS is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, and also Editor-in-Chief of Visual Anthropology(Routledge). He has studied anthropology and archaeology at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, Chicago, Stanford and California (Berkeley). He has published a dozen books on Indian topics, and over 200 articles, as well as editing Principles of Visual Anthropology and four anthropological encyclopaedias, and producing several documentary films. He has now been working with the Badaga people of the Nilgiri Hills in south India for over half a century. His latest book (2013) is So Long a Saga: Four Centuries of Badaga Social History.
The 70-minute film called The Village, which he and Mark McCarty made in 1968, was arguably the first ethnographic film to be completed in the style that quickly became known as Observational Cinema. It is marked by a complete lack of commentary, and is bilingual, in English and Gaelic. The film, which presents a general ethnography of one coastal village in the maritime peasant society of western Ireland, forms a marked contrast with Man of Aran, which Robert Flaherty made in 1934 in the same subculture.
