The largest collection of ethnographic primary sources supporting students’ firsthand engagement with human diversity around the world. The Anthropology Resource Library contains field notes, draft manuscripts and published ethnographies from key scholars, enabling students to trace the full scholarly process in all of its iterations, from data gathered in the field to later analyses, drafts and publications.
Resources work in tandem to bring the fieldwork process to life by juxtaposing original fieldwork with subsequent published ethnographies, as well as follow up studies and visual ethnographies that span a century.
Anthropology Online brings together a wide range of written ethnographies, seminal texts and contemporary studies, many of which are the final published works resulting from the research digitized in Anthropological Fieldwork Online. Learn more.
Alexander Street is the most comprehensive resource for visual anthropology in the world, providing access to over 2,000 hours of film and always growing, from raw field footage to crafted ethnographies and documentaries. Available in any current model popular today for acquiring video, from single titles, to PDA, to curated collections, these offerings provide core visual materials for anthropology courses of all levels. Learn more.
Ethnographic Sound Archives Online brings together previously unpublished historic audio recordings and their supporting field materials, opening new paths for the study of music in its cultural context. The collection brings together 2,000 hours of audio recordings from field expeditions around the world, particularly from the 1960s through the 1980s—the dawn of ethnomusicology as a codified discipline. Learn more.
Alexander Street brings unique functionality to this material. Deep indexing lets users search and browse by cultural group, place, subject, and ethnographer, optimizing visibility for all material. Users can also search video transcripts to locate specific cultural groups, rituals, traditions, or case studies and watch relevant material within seconds, or pour through thousands of pages of archival content to learn how anthropology’s biggest names did their work. For example, users can read Bronislaw Malinowski’s original field notebooks alongside his published ethnographies, and find follow-up studies and visual ethnographies from his Trobriand Islands field site created a century later.
A curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities. There are a variety of themes that are discussed including family and kinship, gender roles, cultural identity, belief systems and other topics centered around diversity, change, and culture. All teaching materials within this collection are created by the Education Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
How do these resources work together to support teaching and research?
Use Case: Link original field notes ot their final, published ethnographies