All Tomorrow's Cultures

I watched Carol Reed’s “ The Third Man ” (1949) again last week, and I was again reminded what a perfect parable the film is for the ethnographic encounter.  It begins with Holly Martins’ arrival in post-war Vienna.  He’s a dime-store novelist who’s been invited by his school friend, Harry Lime, for a visit—but Harry’s been run over by a car and killed.  And yet, Holly is suspicious, and begins to pursue leads that take him through the fractured landscape of postwar Vienna, through different zones controlled by Allied forces, and ultimately face-to-face with Harry Lime himself, a decidedly not-dead black market trader in doctored penicillin.  And all this to the crazy virtuosity of Anton Karas’s zither score. View from the first level of the Eiffel Tower. Photo courtesy wikicommons Where’s the ethnography?  Certainly, there’s a resemblance in Holly’s awkward confusion to that of anthropologist entering the field—he’s perpetually flummoxed and frustrated...