Celebrating the memory of Prof. dr. Adriaan Gerbrands

The lecture celebrates the memory of Adriaan Gerbrands (1917-1997), museum curator (1947-1966) and professor of cultural anthropology (1966-1987) at Leiden University. Gerbrands was a pioneer in combining ethnographic film and material culture studies in order to translate cultural differences in aesthetic production; as early as the 1960s, he pointed out the theoretical and practical challenges emerging from the overlap between these fields. Gerbrands held a chair at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, was deputy director of the National Museum of Ethnology, and an early advocate of ethnographic film in the Netherlands.

Organisation

The lecture is organized by the Fund for Ethnology Leiden, the National Museum for Ethnology (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde), the Beeld voor Beeld Documentary Film Festival, and the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University).

A jury annually selects the laureate from among several nominees, on the basis of a theme jointly agreed upon by the organizers. Themes covered by the speakers may include cultural heritage (tangible and intangible), indigenous media, repatriation, ethnographic photography and film in the broadest sense, museum studies, material culture studies, music, multimodality, and alternative media.

Contact

Please contact the jury chairperson Mark Westmoreland with any questions regarding the talks. 

Past Lectures

• 25 October 2024 - Felwine Sarr -  Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths
• 1 December 2023 - Deborah A. Thomas and John L. Jackson, Jr - Keywords: Conspiracy, Race, Love
• 3 November 2022 - Jason De León - Soldiers and Kings: Inside the World of Human Smuggling
• 4 March 2021 - Elizabeth Povinelli
• 28 November 2019 - Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck - Photo-writing
• 22 November 2018 - Ariella Azoulay - Imperial Rights and the Origins of Photography
• 30 November 2017 - Tony Bennett - Re-collecting Ourselves: Indigenous Time, Culture and Museums
• 24 November 2016 - Steven Feld - Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene Acoustemology
• 26 November 2015 - Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett - Materializing History: Time and Telos at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
• 28 November 2014 - Christopher Pinney - How To Do the Ethnography of World-System Photography
• 29 November 2013 - Finbarr Barry Flood - Sanctified Sandals – Imaging the Prophet in an Era of Technological Reproduction
• 29 May 2012 - Faye Ginsburg - Australia's Indigenous New Wave: Future Imaginaries in Recent Aboriginal Feature Films
• 1 June 2011 - Howard Morphy - Material Expressions of Ancestral Agency: Yolngn Acting in a Virtual Space