Timothy Asch in Memoriam

Timothy Asch, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, died in Los Angeles on October 3, 1994 after a lengthy illness. He was born July 16, 1932 in Southampton, New York and was educated at the Putney School, then served apprenticeships with still photographers Minor White, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. After service during the Korean conflict, he graduated from Columbia University in 1959 with a B. S. in Anthropology and later received an M.A. from Boston University's African Studies Program. While studying at Columbia University, he worked as a teaching assistant for Margaret Mead who got him interested in the potential use of visual media for instruction. This became his life-long passion and career.

He began his career in ethnographic film by working 1959-62 as an editor on John Marshall's South African films at Harvard's Peabody Museum. During the 1960's he worked on documenting the educational experiments that led to the first anthropology curriculum for elementary schools, known as Man: A Course of Study, inspired by Jerome Bruner. In 1968, and again in 1971, Asch joined Napoleon Chagnon in Venezuela to film the Yanomamš Indians in Venezuela. The films they made collaboratively have been used in university classrooms throughout the world and have won numerous prizes and awards. Tim's energy and enthusiasm in encouraging educators to use film contributed to a pedagogical shift from merely showing films to incorporating them into instruction as part of lectures and class assignments of written study guides.

Beginning in 1975, he worked in partnership with his wife, Patsy Asch, to collaborate with anthropologists in Afghanistan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, creating a body of ethnographic films widely used for education and research. Their films have won numerous international awards, most recently the Grand Prix du Bilan awarded by the ComitŽ du film ethnographique at the MusŽe de l'Homme in Paris. In the past two years, Tim's films have been shown at numerous international festivals, including the Festival di Populi, the American Anthropology Association annual meetings, the Australian Anthropological Association annual meetings, and the Manchester Ethnographic Film Conference. Major retrospectives of his work were featured last year at the Dritte Welt Film Forum in Freiburg and at the Margaret Mead Festival in New York and Los Angeles. Timothy Asch taught visual anthropology at Brandeis University beginning in 1967, then at Harvard and NYU.

In 1976 he went as a senior research fellow to the Australian National University's School of Advanced Studies, then returned to the USA in 1982 to join the faculty at the University of Southern California where he served for ten years as Director of the Center for Visual Anthropology. Under his direction and in collaboration with the Schools of Cinema-Television and Journalism, the USC Center for Visual Anthropology created a graduate anthropology program unique in its emphasis on both visual media and written texts as components of an academically grounded thesis. In recent years, Asch felt it important to collaborate with Venezuelan anthropologists to teach the Yanomami how to handle and maintain their own video equipment and to provide ongoing support. He hoped to encourage the Yanomami to use media to convey their culture and perspective to the rest of Venezuelan society and the wider world.

Memorial contributions for an annual award to student ethnographic filmmakers should be sent to the:

Timothy Asch Memorial Fund
Dept of Anthropology
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0032