Guest Editor's Preface

permissions to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: var.2007.23.1.iii. In her Forward to this issue, Colette Piault points out a fact with which I strongly agree: the need to inform American readers about the thriving state of visual anthropology in Europe. In the United States we suffer from an unfortunate parochialism. It is fueled in part by our capacity to get films made without knowing much about what anyone else is doing. Even modestly funded anthropological film programs in the U.S. exceed the resources of many endowed institutions in Europe. Yet our ignorance of what is happening in European visual anthropology is not exclusively caused by a capacity to do reasonable work in isolation, nor merely by personal indifference to alternative ideas. It is also due to structural forces that promote insularity and are inevitable within the borders of the militaristic state in which we live. Imperial America’s proclivity to do great harm to other countries is made easier by habituating the population to a disinterest in what is going on inside other countries. In addition, we in the United States are undone by waters of linguistic forgetfulness—our River Lethe, the Atlantic. Although English has become the lingua franca of European visual anthropologists, most of their primary works are produced in national languages so numerous as to be out of reach to American scholars. This issue of Visual Anthropology Review presents these objective and subjective difficulties that keep the diverse projects and multi-lingual endeavors of European scholars quite unknown on this side. I would like to recount a little history of the present volume. In 2004, aglow with having finished editing the issue of VAR dedicated to films about Southern Africa, I was eager to hear a new proposal from Colette Piault that this journal should also represent the visual anthropology of Europe. I readily agreed, with poor anticipation of that to which I had committed myself. Colette was perfectly positioned to propose the names of European contributors, since her dedication to the subject, both before and after the decade-long International Research Film Seminars which she collaboratively organized (and discusses in one of her essays below), Guest Editor’s Preface