Terry Turner is dead.

More at Survival International

I first read him when I was living with Graeber in Chicago in 87.  He didn't publish much. He gave his students copies of unpublished manuscripts.

repeats

Guardian "Amazonian tribe take initiative to protect their lands from dam project"

In September, a group of Munduruku made one last attempt to put pressure on the authorities. Making another long journey to Brasilia, they met Maria Augusta Assirati, then president of Funai. In an exchange filmed by one of the Indians on his mobile phone, Assirati conceded: “You are right. It is essential that your land is guaranteed because the land is under pressure from loggers, miners and a series of other elements.” 

However, in a tacit admission that she was being sidelined, Assirati added: “But I can’t dictate the priority interests of the government.” Nine days later, she left office. A few weeks after that, the Munduruku started the long process of digging posts in the ground to mark out their land.

Terry Turner, Chicago and Cornell, on the history of tribes with cameras.

"I realized that this is a way a very material way in which you can study the process of the formation of representations. It's a material… it's an objective correlative as TS Eliot might put it of that process and it it's a it was profoundly interesting. I thought it's an interesting …it's a field method. You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman as he edits footage. If you’ve done a shot record you have a total inventory of what the raw material, of the representation is, and then you cans see how he plays over this raw material and shapes it into a finished construction."

When he refers to people giving cameras to the Kayapo before he got there, I assume he's referring to visits in the 80's. He's been working with the Kayapo since 1962.

"You know, my one contribution to I think the literature on methodology or field methods: become an assistant film editor of an indigenous cameraman..." He's not laughing when he says that. He's smiling; I cracked up.
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Terry Turner: The Kayapo against the dams again

This will not be the first indigenous encampment organized by the Kayapo in their effort to stop the building of dams on the Xingú. In 1989, when the government first set out to implement its plan for a giant hydroelectric complex on the Xingú, with financial support from the World Bank, the Kayapo led a great rally of 40 indigenous nations at Altamira against the scheme, setting up an encampment of several hundred Indians at a Catholic retreat center just outside the town. The five-day rally was extensively covered by national and international media, and succeeded in persuading the World Bank to withdraw its planned loan for the construction of the dams.

I don't like anthropological films. Turner put himself in the position of an anthropologist studying filmmakers.