Disappearing World

Capture a rare insight into Afghani society and culture that is especially important to understanding the Afghanistan conflict in post 9/11 America.

Afghan Exodus
In 1979, Soviet troops invade Afghanistan, displacing approximately one million Afghans, including Kirghiz, Hazara, and Pathans. Forced to flee over the borders into neighboring countries, the militant Pathans begin to regroup and are eager to take back their homeland, even if it means confronting Soviet tanks and fighter jets. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologists: Akbar Ahmed and Remy Dor
Buy Now | Learn More

Khyber Pass
The Pakistani army struggles to keep peace on the Khyber Pass, where 17,000 British soldiers, women, and children were massacred by the Pathans in 1842. There is still constant conflict with the Pathans who will not give up their home on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. (60 Minutes)
Anthropologists: Akbar Ahmed and Louis Dupree
Buy Now | Learn More

The Pathans
The Pathans do not acknowledge the political boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan that divides their people. Their culture’s code of conduct is based on personal honor and revenge, and they accept no imposed leadership — as the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan discovered. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Akbar Ahmed
Buy Now | Learn More

The Kirghiz of Afghanistan
The Kirghiz, “the undying.” An isolated culture native to the remote corner of modern Afghanistan and unchanged since the Middle Ages. Survival here depends completely on the favor of the Khans, feudal lords who claim descent from the legendary Genghis Khan. (60 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Nazif Shahrani
Buy Now | Learn More

Masai Manhood
The Masai warriors of East Africa must live on the fringes of society. They are not permitted to marry and are excluded from tribal council. This program focuses on the lives of these young men at the time of the eunoto, a dramatic four-day ceremony that marks their transition from warrior to elder. (53 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Melissa Llewelyn-Davies
Buy Now | Learn More

Masai Women
This program examines the culture of the women of the Masai tribe, animal herders in the East African Rift Valley — from childhood through marriage to old age — and their role in a completely male-dominated society. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Melissa Llewelyn-Davies
Blue Ribbon winner, American Film Festival
Buy Now | Learn More

The Mende
The Mende recognize the constant presence of a supernatural world that affects farming, fishing, and all other aspects of their daily routine. This village portrait of some 260 Mende people, who live in the forest of unstable Sierra Leone, shows successful citizens and unlucky ones, clowns and gossips, happy households and divided ones. (51 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Mariane Ferme
Buy Now | Learn More

The Mursi: The Land Is Bad
Natural and manmade disasters threaten the Mursi of the Omo Valley in southwestern Ethiopia, whom believe that the very land on which they live is turning against them. Despite this, the Mursi struggle to remain faithful to their old ways and traditions, herding cattle and cultivating sorghum, even as their Omo River's flood level continues to drop. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: David Turton
Buy Now | Learn More

The Tuareg
Life is changing for the Tuareg of the Algerian desert. Slavery, the economic basis of their society, was abolished in 1962 and the Tuareg are struggling to adapt. The nomadic Tuareg carry on their traditions and customs to maintain prestige, but schools are teaching their children about the world outside the desert. (60 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Jeremy Keenan
Buy Now | Learn More

Inside China: Living with the Revolution
Life in a changing China, home to a quarter of the world's population, is captured in these unique firsthand accounts, which show the effects of China’s social and political changes on two families: the Dings and the Zhus, who live near Wuxi in southwest China as they learn to cope with modernization. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Barbara Hazard
Buy Now | Learn More

The Meo
When war in Vietnam shatters their peaceful existence, most males fourteen and older are forced into combat, while tens of thousands of other Meo flee to refugee camps. Before the Vietnam War, the Meo of Indochina grew maize and opium, and lived in villages with their extended families. Now, they must re-examine their traditional way of life. (53 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Jacques Lemoine
Buy Now | Learn More

We Are All Neighbors: Bosnia
In a Muslim / Catholic village near Sarajevo, rumors fly and suspicions spread. When Catholic Croats assert control, Muslim businesses are attacked, villagers arrested and harassed, and homes threatened. Three weeks later, neighbors who had been close friends for fifty years no longer speak to each other and the peaceful coexistence between Croats and Muslims disintegrates into mutual distrust and fear. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Tone Bringa
Buy Now | Learn More

Cakchiquel Maya of San Antonio Palopo
The Tunecos of San Antonio Palopo speak Cakchiquel, one of more than twenty Mayan languages still extant in Guatemala. As development encroaches, these people must decide whether the loss of their culture is too high a price to pay for incorporation into the world beyond their lakeside village. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Tracy Bachrach Ehlers
Buy Now | Learn More

Carnaval Bahia
Carnaval is practiced in many Western cultures, but nowhere is it done like in Brazil. See the culture, music, dance, and spiritual traditions in northern Brazil's Bahia during Carnaval, a five-day pre-Lenten celebration of hedonism that precedes Shrove Tuesday. Festival participants divide into groups, each trying to outdo the other in producing spectacular floats, dazzling costumes, and exuberant displays. (50 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Peter Fry
Buy Now | Learn More

The Kayapo
Life is changing for the Kayapo. In 1982, thousands of outsiders invaded the tribe's Amazonian rain forest following the discovery of gold on their land. The fiercely independent Kayapo were forced to become "businesspeople" or see their traditional way of life destroyed. (53 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Terry Turner
Buy Now | Learn More

The Kayapo: Out of the Forest
The destruction of Brazil's Amazonian rain forest now threatens the existence of its native peoples. The Kayapo Indians have gained international recognition for their bold political resistance and for the reassertion of their traditional cultural identity. (53 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Terry Turner
Blue Ribbon winner at the American Film Festival
Buy Now | Learn More

The Eskimos of Pond Inlet
The Inuits (Eskimos) of Pond Inlet, a new village built by the Canadian government on Baffin Island, talk about their lives, their land, and the changes forced upon them by the encroaching culture of the "powerful and frightening" whites, who hire them as laborers and place their children in government schools. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Hugh Brody
Buy Now | Learn More

The Whale Hunters of Lamalera
The Lamaholot, who inhabit an Indonesian island, hunt sperm whale with forged iron harpoons ten hours a day, six days a week, eight months a year. But, their way of life is jeopardized by the scarcity of their prey, and they are leaving their island village of Lamalera to seek more profitable work elsewhere. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Robert Barnes
Buy Now | Learn More

The Kawelka: Ongka's Big Moka
In Papua New Guinea, status and power are earned by giving things away rather than by acquiring them. The larger the gift, the greater the victory is over the recipient. The Moka is the ceremony in which people, sometimes whole tribes, give gifts to members of other tribes. This program documents one tribal leader, Ongka, as he the plans of the largest Moka to date. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Andrew Strathern
Buy Now | Learn More

The Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea
The society that inhabits the Trobriand Islands off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, shows a complex balance of male authority and female wealth that harmonizes with the magic and sorcery that pervades everyday life. See firsthand the distribution of a woman's estate, by her relatives, after her death and the celebration following the yam harvest. (52 Minutes)
Anthropologist: Annette B. Weiner
Buy Now | Learn More