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Discover the Master's tracks in Cultural and Social Anthropology

The Master's programme Cultural and Social Anthropology offers three tracks.  Visual Anthropology is one of them.

The other tracks are:

• Cultural and Social Anthropology
• Cultural and Social Anthropology: Applied Anthropology

Study programme

This Master's track encourages you to creatively explore how new assemblages of words, images, and sounds (including silences) can not only articulate but also produce anthropologically relevant knowledge. This programme is a practice-based programme that focuses on the craft of filmmaking as ethnographic practice. By training you to bring your anthropological ideas to filmmaking (and vice versa), we intend to contribute to the development of a new audio-visual vocabulary that breaks with existing media formats and has its own critical position within and towards our media-saturated societies.

Academic staff

The track is carried by three core lecturers with an internationally recognised track record in ethnographic film: Mattijs van de Port, whose recent films include Knots and Holes (2016) and The Body won’t Close (2020), Martha-Cecilia Dietrich, director of Entre Memorias (2015) and Horror in the Andes (2019), and Ildikó Zonga Plájás, director of Swamp Dialogues (2015) and Interfaces (2021). The programme director of the MSc in Cultural and Social Anthropology is Yatun Sastramidjaja.

Careers

After graduating from the Master's programme in Visual Anthropology you'll have career opportunities within the field of anthropology, documentary making and applied journalism. Increasingly, anthropologists are hired in companies, NGOS and other institutions to conduct research and offer valuable advice. The insights and skills you gain during your Master's makes you well-equipped to set up and manage (research) projects, reach and communicate with different groups of people nd translate your anthropological views to visual materials.

Is Visual Anthropology for you?

1. Do you get excited when you can learn from other people, their perspectives, emotions and ideas through the modality of filmmaking?
2. Do you want to spend a year doing camera-based research on a topic of your choosing?
3. Do you have an independent attitude and take pleasure in wrestling with anthropological theory through image-making?
4. Do you have a solid knowledge of the technical know-how in filmmaking?
5. Do you have the ambition to become an ethnographic filmmaker?

Then Visual Anthropology might be the right track for you!