Mavi Boncuk |
Balikci grew up in Istanbul. His parents belonged to the Greek Orthodox minority of the Bulgarians. The family's last name was Nikolow. Balikci's father came from what is now Greece near the Albanian border and was initially a milk trader and later, after his marriage, a fish trader in the Istanbul bazaar. Balikci's mother came from a Bulgarian village near Istanbul. The family spoke Bulgarian at home. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the family emigrated to Sofia for fear of a pogrom against the Christian population . There the family was bombed out in 1943. In 1944, a few days before the Red Army marched in, the family returned to Istanbul. His father voted in the Kemalist after World War II for fear of persecutionTurkey the surname Balıkçı ("fisherman") according to his profession. Asen Balikci attended a French school in Istanbul.
Anthropologist and filmmaker Asen Balikci has been an innovator in the field of ethnographic film and film in education for decades. Born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1929, he was educated in francophone Switzerland, and went on to study at Columbia University with Margaret Mead and others, where he earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology.
From 1957 to 1965 Balikci conducted fieldwork with the Netsilik Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic Coast, resulting in the Netsilik Eskimo film series (1968), subsequently broadcast by a multitude of international television stations, and its companion volume on traditional Eskimo life. From 1963 to 1966 he was a senior scientist in the (Hu)mans: A Course of Study Program. The field of human ecology in arctic and arid zones, already present in the Netsilik Eskimo films, appears again in Sons of Haji Omar, a much regarded study of nomadism and rural life among Pashtoon pastoralists in Afghanistan, in collaboration with Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch.
From 1989 to 1991 Dr. Balikci made a number of field trips to Siberia where he was principle investigator for Chronicle of Sireniki, an ethnographic film on the Bering Strait Eskimos of Eastern Siberia (1989), and initiated a program for teaching visual anthropology centered on the Khazim River Ostyak of Western Siberia. From 1992 until 1998 he worked on a research project on inter-ethnic relations in Southwest Bulgaria, and on the culture of poverty in post-socialist Bulgaria, while teaching visual anthropology in multicultural settings.
In Bulgaria, Balikci conducted two visual ethnography training seminars for village boys and girls, the first entitled Balkan Portraits, concerning Bulgarian Muslims and the second devoted to the Bulgarian Gypsies, entitled Gypsy Portraits. His films on Bulgaria include A Month In The Life of Epthim D. (2003), and two films on the Pomak (Bulgarian Muslims), entitled Pomak Portraits – the first on Pomak Women, the second on Pomak Men. Most recently, he has contributed to a film describing the prevailing ideological confusion among Balkan Muslims, which is entitled Muslim Labyrinths.
Balikci is the author of numerous publications in English, French, and Bulgarian, which center on the topics of the ethnography of the peoples of the Arctic Coast, pastoralism in general, and visual anthropology. He was co-chairman of the Program in Ethnographic Film (PIEF), from 1966-1968, chairman of the Commission on Visual Anthropology, from 1983-1993, associate editor of Visual Anthropology (1986-1993), and editor of CVA Review (1986-1993).
Among various academic positions Balikci held a chair as a professor of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal from which he retired in 1994. When he retired from his academic post, he moved back to his home country of Bulgaria to apply his media skills to facilitate communication and education both inside and outside the country.
In the 1960s, Balikci conducted research with the Netsilik Inuit in northern Canada, where he shot a film series that is one of the classics of ethnographic documentary film. The films show the netsilik hunting seals, hiking, building igloos, hunting salmon, building sleds and playing.
Asen Balikci later shot the film "The Son to Haji Omar" with Timothy Asch in Afghanistan, a study of nomadism and agriculture among the pastoral Pashtuns in Afghanistan. In 1989 Balikci produced a film about the Eskimos in East Siberia. Balikci also worked in Bulgaria and India. Until 1994 he was Professor of Ethnology in Montréal.
The film series about the netsilik
- At the Autumn River Camp
- At the Winter Sea Ice Camp
- Jigging for Lake Trout
- At the Spring Sea Ice Camp
- Group Hunting on the Spring Ice
- At the Caribou Crossing Place
- Building a Kayak
- Fishing at the Stone Weir
Books | The Netsilik Eskimo. New York 1970 (Taschenbuchausgabe 1989: ISBN 0881334359)
DVD | The professional foreigner : Asen Balikci and visual ethnography
| Author: | Rolf Husmann; Manfred Krüger; Verena Gruber; Documentary Educational Resources (Firm) |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Watertown, MA : Documentary Educational Resources, ©2009. |
| Edition/Format: | NTSC color broadcast system : English |
| Summary: | Asen Balikci has been a leading figure in making ethnographic films for many decades. In a series of talks between Balikci and filmmaker Rolf Husmann in different locations, the life and work of Asen Balikci are shown and discussed: the film takes us from Asen's youth in Istanbul to his career in Canada where he became famous for making the Netsilik Eskimo Series, to filming in Afghanistan and then turning to two other activities of his: as a networker for the Commission on Visual Anthropology (CVA) and as a teacher of Summer Schools in Siberia and Bulgaria. His film work among the Bulgarian Pomak and his still ongoing work in Sikkim (India) conclude the film which is not only the portrait of a famous expert in Visual Ethnography, but also more generally touches upon vital issues of ethnographic filmmaking. |
Dina Iordanova, ‘The Professional Foreigner: Asen Balikci (1929-2019)’
Introduction to the special programme dedicated to Balikci’s work.
Catalogue of the Astra Film Festival, Subiu, Romania, October 2019. Pp. 50-60.
THE PROFESSIONAL FOREIGNER: ASEN BALIKCI (1929-2019)1
Dina IORDANOVA
‘You see, I was an outsider. I was at the periphery. In Istanbul I was definitely a foreigner. In Geneva- definitely a foreigner. Then going to Canada – definitely a foreigner. So, all my life, I am a professional foreigner. That’s probably why I went into anthropology. No matter how much you learn about a culture, you do not belong to it.’
Asen Balikci
"...Born in Istanbul, Turkey, to a Bulgarian family – his father himself a migrant from multicultural Macedonia (from Kastoria, a lakeside town in Northern Greece near the Albanian border) and his mother from a Slavic settlement near the Bosphorus, left over after the population exchanges at the end of the Ottoman empire – Balikci’s original family name was Nikolov. The father was engaged in the fish trade around the Golden Horn, thus a ‘balikci’ (fisherman), and it is from here that his adopted family name derives. It was a name that disguised the foreignness, a step that would make life
in Turkey easier for the son. So, from early on Asen, who was being schooled in French, was aware of what it means to live with difference –from not be fully fluent in the majority language to knowing the advantages of pragmatic mimicry. The context was not always friendly, and for a period the family moved back to Bulgaria -- just to find the country embroiled in World War II and more turbulent than Turkey – and subsequently returned to neutral Istanbul in 1944. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 17, Asen was dispatched to Switzerland, to study economics. .."