About the Authors

Allison at work.
Photo by Cherry Lowman Vayda

Allison Jablonko initiated this web site project in 1996. After putting the first seven story chapters online in 1999, she spent the following 11 years documenting the entire collection of 9,000 photographs for archival use. In 2011 she has gotten back to work on the web site, in April adding six new chapters to "Our Stories" - Privacy, Interruptions, Gunts Yard, Tenegump Hamlet, A Day's Work, and Pfun's Family - and in August adding twelve more. She has also been updating "Useful Links." Work on the sections concerning Maring ethnography and visual research will be continued in 2012 from where tit was left in 1999.

Since the 1960's, when she studied under Margaret Mead as a graduate student at Columbia University in New York, Allison has been active in the field of visual anthropology. After doing fieldwork in New Guinea, she wrote a dissertation on the bodily movement patterns of the Maring in dance and daily life, obtaining her Ph.D. in 1968.

Subsequently, in cooperation with her husband, she helped produce several films on the Maring and, with Maurice Godelier, on the Baruya of the eastern highlands of New Guinea.

When the Society for Visual Anthropology was organized as part of the American Anthropological Association in 1984, she served as the secretary/treasurer for the first three years and participated as juror in the SVA Annual Film and Video Festival and in the yearly Conference on Visual Research in the 1980s and 1990s. She has presented papers at a variety of meetings in the USA and Europe and has gone on to make several short video productions, as well as teaching workshops in the practice of visual anthropology in Slovenia and Italy.

Allison Jablonko
eMail: jablonko@tin.it or at jablonko@mac.com

Additional web site: http://jablonko-baruya.pacific-credo.fr

103-01: Marek and Nintup

Marek Jablonko, a refugee from Poland, came to the U.S.A.in 1949 on a scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, after graduating in 1954, he worked for a number of years with Western Electric as an engineer.

His involvement with visual anthropology began in 1963, after he married Allison Peters and joined her on the Columbia University Expedition to study the Human Ecology of the New Guinea Rainforest. He was the cameraman for the research footage, films and an eight-part series for Italian educational television, "The Maring: Documents of a New Guinea People," which he and Allison produced together between 1966 and 1982. These films include those on the work of French anthropologist Maurice Godelier and his work among the Baruya people of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, as well as Undala, a poetic evocation of a village in Rajasthan, made in collaboration with R.Thomas Rosin.

Marek did the major work of preparing the 110,000 feet of 16 mm. research footage which he and Allison shot among the Maring in New Guinea for the D. Carleton Gajdusek archives in 1963-1964, now at the Salem Peabody Museum, and for the Human Studies Film Archive of the Smithsonian Institution in 1968.

The last project he worked on was a record of his memories of New Guinea, triggered by looking at the photos taken in 1963-1964. Sadly, he died in March, 2002, only shortly after the project was properly under way.

Takashi Sakurai, originally from Tokyo, came to the U.S.A in 1992. Having received his B.A. in cultural anthropology in 1998 from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, he worked for six months as an intern for Allison and Marek Jablonko, creating the basic design for the current web site.

In 2004, he received an M.F.A. in Cinema at San Francisco State University, and then returned to Alaska where he is a filmmaker and researcher at the Alaska Center for Documentary Film, University of Alaska Museum of the North. His main interests are documentary film, contemporary issues of Alaska Native cultures and representation of circumpolar cultures in the media. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Takashi Sakurai
Homepage: Life in Alaskan Bush
eMail: kuugrak@gmail.com
Alaska Center for Documentary Film: http://www.uaf.edu/museum/collections/docfilm/