LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR
anthropologist, artist, filmmaker
Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental
Studies and of Anthropology

Associate Director, Film Study Center

Director, Media Anthropology Lab

VES 158r: Living Documentary
VES 161: Media Anthropology: Technology, Technique, Techné

(additional course listings)

"Sheep Wreck," 2008

Castaing-Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate Keats’s and Dewey’s sense of art’s negative capability with William James’s radically empirical engagement with the immediate flux of life. He has recently completed eight video works that use different stylistic registers to explore the affective sensibility of human : animal and culture : nature relationships in the contemporary American West. Revising the structural imperatives of a cinema of duration, In the Jug (2001–06), Bedding Down (2001–06), Breakfast (2001–06), Daybreak on the Bed Ground (2001–07), Fine and Coarse (2001–07), Hell Roaring Creek (2001–07), The High Trail (2001–08), and Turned at the Pass (2001–08) variously evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological Western landscapes with multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound. Castaing-Taylor is currently editing a long-form work depicting the annual transhumance of a band of sheep and their herders with the last grazing permit in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. Previous works (codirected with Ilisa Barbash) include Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), an ethnographic video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art market, which won eight international awards. His work has been exhibited and the subject of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum, and also exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Castaing-Taylor’s written publications include Visualizing Theory (ed., Routledge, 1994), Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (with Barbash, University of California Press, 1997), Transcultural Cinema, a collection of essays by the ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (ed., Princeton University Press, 1998), and The Cinema of Robert Gardner (coed., with Barbash, Berg, 2008). He was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review (1991–94).