Edmund Carpenter

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Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter (born 1922 in Rochester, New York) is a noted visual anthropologist best known for his work on indigenous peoples and media.

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[edit] Biographical Background

Carpenter began his anthropology studies under Dr. Frank G. Speck at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940. He joined the US Marine Corps in early 1942, fighting in the Pacific for the duration of the war. Discharged as a captain in 1946, he returned to Penn, earning his doctorate four years later.

Meanwhile, Carpenter began teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto in 1948, taking side jobs such as radio programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In 1950, Carpenter started fieldwork among the Aivilik, returning to these Inuit in Nunavut in the famine winter of 1951-52, and again in 1955. When public television took off in Canada with the launching of CBC-TV in 1950, Carpenter began producing and hosting a series of shows.

Moving back and forth between Toronto’s broadcasting studios and Arctic hunting camps, Carpenter became intrigued by theoretical ideas then being developed by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Teaming up with McLuhan, he co-taught a course and together they hatched their core ideas about the agency of modern media in the process of culture change. In 1953, they received a Ford Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary media research project, which funded the Seminar on Culture and Communication (1953-1959) and their co-edited periodical "Explorations." Meanwhile, Carpenter continued his programs on CBC-TV, including a weekly show also titled “Explorations” (which started as a radio program). In his famous article “The New Languages” (1957) Carpenter offers a succinct analysis of modern media based on years of participant observation in different cultures, academic and popular print publishing, and radio and television broadcasting.

In 1957, Carpenter was appointed founding chair of an experimental interdisciplinary program of Anthropology and Art at San Fernando Valley State College (California State University-Northridge), where students were trained in visual media, including filming. With award-winning filmmaker Robert Cannon, he made an innovative documentary about “surrealist” Kuskokwim Eskimo masks. Carpenter also co-authored Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), a film documenting six traditional African-American songs and dances by Gullahs of St. Simon Island. And with Bess Hawes, he collaborated on Buck Dancer (1965), a short film featuring an African-American musician-dancer from Mississippi. In 1967, however, just when visual anthropology began to take institutional form as an academic enterprise, the program was closed.

During this period, Carpenter collaborated (albeit unacknowledged) on McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). The friends rejoined in New York in 1967, sharing the Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University. Carpenter subsequently held the Carnegie Chair in anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz (1968-69), and then took a research professorship at the University of Papua & New Guinea. Joined by photographer Adelaide de Menil (who later became his wife), he journeyed to remote mountain areas where indigenous Papua had “no acquaintance” yet with writing, radios, or cameras. They took numerous Polaroid and 35mm photographs, made sound recordings, and shot some 400,000 feet of 16mm film in black and white, as well as color and infrared film.

During the next dozen years, Carpenter taught at various universities, including Adelphi, Harvard, New School University, and New York University. In addition to numerous other publications, he also completed art historian Carl Schuster’s massive cross-cultural study on traditional art motifs.

[edit] Selected publications

  • Intermediate Period Influences in the Northeast. (PhD Thesis, U Penn, 1950)
  • Eskimo. (with Robert Flaherty, 1959)
  • Explorations in Communication, An Anthology. (co-edited with Marshall McLuhan, 1960)
  • They Became What They Beheld. (1970)
  • Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (1972)
  • "The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness." Pp.451-461. In: Paul Hockings, ed., Principles of Visual Anthropology. (1975a)
  • "Collecting Northwest Coast Art." Pp.8-27. In: Bill Holm & William Reid. Form and Freedom: A Dialogue on Northwest Coast Indian Art. (1975b)
  • In the Middle, Qitinganituk: The Eskimo Today. (with Stephen G. Williams, 1983)
  • Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art. (with Carl Schuster; 3 Parts, 12 vols., 1986-1988)
  • Patterns That Connect:Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art. (1996)
  • "That Not-So-Silent Sea." Pp. 236-261. In: Donald Theall. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. (2001)
  • Norse Penny. (2003a)
  • Comock: The True Story of an Eskimo Hunter. (with Robert Flaherty, 2003b)
  • Two Essays: Chief & Greed. (2005)

[edit] Documentary film

  • Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (2003; Video/DVD, 55 minutes). Filmmakers John Bishop and Harald E.L. Prins, Media-Generation.com [[1]]

[edit] Sources

  • Prins, Harald, E. L. and John Bishop. "Edmund Carpenter: Explorations in Media & Anthroplogy." Visual Anthropology Review. Volume 17, Number 2, Fall-Winter 2001-2002:110-140. See also: http://media-generation.com/Articles/VAR.pdf
  • Prins, Harald E.L., Book Review of “Patterns that Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 841.

[edit] Links


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