Survey & Basic Concepts

Poverty, civil war, the demand for cheap labor, and even the pressure to succeed in business: all of these forces are contributing to a world in which many children are forced to live, work, and suffer like adults. This powerful five-part series narrated by Roger Moore travels to Mexico, India, Uganda, the Philippines, and Japan to examine the lives of children who are being deprived of their childhood, and to search for possible solutions. 5-part series, 45 minutes each.

Where did Homo sapiens come from? How did they interpret their world? And what did they think and feel? This program seeks to profile modern humankind's distant forerunners through the research of ethnologists Bernard Saladin D'Anglure and Valentina Gorbatcheva, archaeologist Sergei Vassiliev, historian Jean Clottes, linguist Merritt Ruhlen, anthropologist Bernard Vandermeersch, geneticist Michael Hammer, and ethnoarchaeologist Polly Wiessner. Prehistoric caves in southern France; the oldest-known human tombs, in Israel; fossil words"; the genealogy of the Y-chromosome; and other topics serve as portals to the past. Not available in French-speaking Canada. (53 minutes)"

Although her fieldwork has been criticized, Margaret Mead was one of the foremost fieldworkers of her day. In the United States, Bali, and New Guinea, she examined child development, sex, and temperament to see what role society plays in making people what they are. She emphasized that humans arrange their social worlds in many different ways, and that qualitative judgments cannot be made between them. (52 minutes)

Rather than disappearing completely, many ancient forms of spirituality live on in legend and tradition. This eight-part series examines age-old beliefs and cultures that remain meaningful today-to people with ancestral or cultural connections, and to archaeologists, anthropologists, and religion scholars. Each program examines a specific community or culture and offers a wealth of facts and observations-from scientists and researchers, from present-day practitioners of ancient worship systems, and from those who have synthesized scholarship and practice. A Discovery Channel Production. 8-part series, 23-26 minutes each.

This major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop armchair theorizing" and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them. Throughout the centuries travelers, adventurers, and explorers have been fascinated by other cultures. But most tribal societies were regarded as "primitive" and were thought of as inferior beings, presumed to be living evidence of the way we in the West once were. However, towards the end of the 19th century, the new science of anthropology began to change all that, bringing with it a greater understanding and respect for other cultures. The programs were filmed all over the world, from the frozen Canadian Arctic to the dry outback of Australia ... from New Guinea to India, Africa to the South Pacific. The program-makers retraced the steps of the pioneering anthropologists in those countries and, by following the life story of each scholar, they reveal how social anthropology has contributed to our lives. 6-part series, 52 minutes each."

In 1920, explorer Robert Flaherty arrived on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay to film a year in the life of an Inuit hunter. This is the story of the making of the world's first documentary, Nanook of the North-and of the Inuit people who would become the stars of it. Clips from Nanook are interspersed with dramatizations in which Adamie Inukpuk, Nanook's great-grandson, plays the famed hunter. Flaherty's life among the Inuit is also dramatized, capturing in great detail the near-impossible feat of filming and printing a movie in the Canadian North of that time period. Passages from Flaherty's diary are also included. (50 minutes)