Winter 2013

Anand Pandian, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, studies Tamil filmmaking in an effort to understand human creativity. The result, a book currently titled The Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, is a meditation on what he calls life's "radical uncertainty," a slipperiness that he believes isn't unique to filmmaking. "How do you live with the not knowing of where a sound will take you?" Pandian asks. "How do you live with the not knowing where a rhythm as it changes over time will take you? I came to see that there is a way of living with not knowing what these filmmakers were actually doing." / Johns Hopkins Magazine