Indy Film Fest: The Anthropologist
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“The Anthropologist,” one of this year’s Documentary Features at the Indy Film Fest, is not a very easy documentary to summarize after watching it.
The directors (Seth Kramer, Daniel Miller and Jeremy Newburger) describe it as a documentary focusing on “the parallel stories of two women: Margaret Mead, who popularized cultural anthropology in America; and Susie Crate, an environmental anthropologist currently studying the impact of climate change.” Within the film, these two anthropologists demonstrate how human societies change in the face of disruption while simultaneously being “uniquely revealed” through the perspectives of their daughters, Mary Catherine Bateson and Katie Yegorov-Crate, respectively.
On the surface, that’s a perfectly adequate description, except that it’s not really how the film plays out at all. Going into this film after reading the description, I was expecting something deep, with a healthy dose of self-discovery and mother-daughter bonding on both sides of the “parallel stories” as the two pairs embedded themselves in other cultures and revealed the challenges those cultures face.
But there is almost none of that. For starters, Mead appears only in old footage, and her daughter provides commentary for Mead’s work and some context for Crate’s. Meanwhile, the main drag of the film follows the Crates over five years, starting when Katie is 13, as they visit the Sakha Republic in Siberia, the Kiribati Islands in the South Pacific, West Virginia, and Peru to study how various cultures there are dealing with climate change.
Thus, the film is much more educational and didactic than it is personal and revelatory. Narratively, the directors focus on Katie the most as she ages from a half-American, half-Siberian teenager reluctantly dragged from place to place (uttering such gems as, “Siberia is intense, yo,” and “I never want to be like my mom”) to a young woman leaving for college with the intention of becoming an international studies / linguistics major. That’s quite a lot of growth over the course of five years, but the filmmakers never quite capture how that growth happens. Nor does the audience ever get to know Susie Crate through the eyes of her daughter, or Margaret Mead at all.
By the end, we know a lot more about the effects of climate change on melting permafrost, rising seas and disappearing glaciers than we do about either the Meads or the Crates. While enlightening in its own way, it’s also a little disappointing. “The Anthropologist” is a relatively short feature documentary at 80 minutes long, but it feels longer because it never gives you much of a reason to care about its subjects. And at such a short running time, the filmmakers easily could have explored more of Susie and Katie’s relationship in conjunction with their experiences around the world to make Katie’s maturation a little more profound at the end. Instead, it’s really just another documentary about climate change, with an emphasis on how it affects culture and disappearing ways of life.
I’m also the daughter of an anthropologist, and while we never trotted the globe, I distinctly remember going to class with my mom at Ball State University when I was no older than 5. I remember playing with my "Star Wars" action figures while my mom and the other adults watched a scary documentary about Ötzi the Iceman. I remember sitting in that classroom 10 years later while my mom taught Anthropology 101, and I remember sitting in, yes, that very same classroom six years after that when I took my one and only anthropology course in college. I can see “The Anthropologist” playing from the TV screens in that classroom, but I can’t really see where it would fit in anywhere else. This film is a good introduction to anthropology as an academic field, but it loses itself in the tragic facts of climate change, leaving the human relationships it claims to focus on a little bit cold.