Series Strangers Abroad, Programme 1
Director André Singer, Bruce Dakowski (writer and presenter)
Country/Production UK
Release 1986
Length 52 mins
Format Colour, B&W / DVD or VHS / PAL or NTSC / All region
Location various
Comments Special price for series, 6 for 5
Order No RAI-200.275
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Central Television’s major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop ‘armchair theorising’ and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them.
Spencer represents the link between the armchair anthropologist and the modern fieldworking anthropologist. The series begins by following in the footstep of the British Scientist. It shows his work with the Australian Aborigines – who had, up until then, been regarded as step in the evolutionary ladder between Neolithic men and the 'civilised' Victorian. Spencer went to Australia in 1887 as Professor of Biology at Melbourne University. While there he was invited to join the Horn expedition, an ambitious project to explore Australia's still largely unknown interior. At Alice Springs Spencer met Frank J. Gillen, the operator of the telegraphic station and an initiated elder of the Aranda tribe. It was Gillen's special place in Aboriginal society that enabled Spencer to document the world of this ancient and complex culture through books, glass-plate photographs, wax cylinder recordings and some of the earliest cine films shot outside Europe. Spencer and Gillen made several expeditions together; the data they collected fuelled the theories of anthropologists around the world. Some of their film was used in the programme.
