ANTH 1170: Exploring Culture and Gender through Film
3 Credit Hours
A&S Core: Human Diversity
A&S Gen Ed: Distribution-Social Sciences, Diversity-Global Perspective
This course explores culture and gender from an anthropological perspective, using both films and written texts. Some of the films are fiction, some are nonfiction, some blur the line. All of the films have documentary or ethnographic value: they tell us something about the people they depict, the people who made them, and us, the viewer. By reading and watching films about other people and ourselves, students will learn the basic concepts of cultural anthropology and be able to apply them to any society. In addition, students will learn to think critically about films and other media.
Learning Objectives
- Be able to use the basic concepts of cultural anthropology to think critically about cultural and media practices in any social context;
- Understand the concepts of culture, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism and human rights and be able to apply them to the world beyond the classroom;
- Learn how to use the ethnographic method to understand cultural practices;
- Analyze and think critically about documentary and ethnographic representations, including visual, filmic and other media representations;
- Explain how inequality at different scales is historically, politically and culturally produced.
In this course, you will
Watch at least one film in every module, including recent releases;
Reflect on the films in a journal;
Synthesize brief readings, Powerpoint videos introducing key concepts and the films through regular online activities.
Christian Hammons
christian.hammons@colorado.edu
Christian Hammons is a teaching professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He works at the intersection of cultural anthropology and film, teaching courses, conducting research and making films that use the immersive capacity of cinema to explore cultural worlds. His courses "Exploring Culture and Gender through Film" and "Anthropology of the Future" have been taken by tens of thousands of students. His ethnographic research on indigeneity and the state in the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia has been published widely. As a writer, producer and director, he has worked in both documentary and fiction - often at the same time. His documentary feature "American Refuge" previewed at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival in 2025. Past works include the short film "Rumor," which premiered at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in 2020, the short documentary "Messengers," which premiered at the IFS Los Angeles Film Festival in 2019, the short film "Lemonade," which premiered at the Lone Star Film Festival in 2018, the live documentary "Tripod: Mead, Bateson, Bali," and participatory media projects on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and in the Mentawai Islands, Indonesia. Chris received his PhD in anthropology and his MFA in film production from the University of Southern California and is the proud father of actor Sophia Hammons, who switched bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis in Freakier Friday.