John Bishop's site featuring photographs taken by Adelaide de Menil. From the website: "In 1969, Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil travelled extensively in Papua New Guinea researching the effects of media on that emerging nation. As part of a film about Edmund Carpenter, I am currently editing her film footage from the expedition. I was struck by the beauty and humanity of these portraits."

Biography of Carl Schuster on Tribalarts.com
by Edmund Carpenter

From the article: "The unparalleled scholarship I found in these files exists nowhere else in the world. Forget most existing literature. Forget the American preoccupation with political agendas. Forget Jungian nonsense, psychological explanations, art critics' metaphors, and anthropologists' fears of "far-flung comparisons." An examination of Schuster's work takes one into a mind that bypasses academic conventions but whose thought is rooted in empirical evidence."

A High Arctic Settlement On Zhokov Island, Russian Siberia
by Edmund Carpenter

Abstract of Carpenter's presentation at the University of Pennsylvania's conference on Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements, October 19-21, 2000.

Edmund Carpenter (Became What He Beheld)
by Marshall Soules

From the website: "Carpenter studied the dream of humanity, humanity's dreaming about itself. Like McLuhan, he had a great respect for the way media communicates to the unconscious mind. To speak to that mind we must use the rhetoric of the dream to circumvent the illusions of the conscious mind ... "

Edmund Carpenter - short biography

From the IWF Origins of Visual Anthropology website: "Edmund Carpenter (PhD U Penn 50) explored, by chance, the anthropology of visual media, beginning in the late 1940s. To supplement his U of Toronto salary, he undertook a CBC-Radio series, then, beginning in 1950, a CBC-TV series, at the same time free-lancing in print. It soon became apparent that certain media favored certain ideas. ..."

A Brief History of Anthropology at the University of Toronto

From the website: "The years 1944 to 1948 brought Ray Birdwhistell, G. Gordon Brown, and Edmund S. Carpenter to the department. Carpenter, an extremely popular lecturer, was a collaborator of Marshall McLuhan, with whom he co-edited Explorations in Communication. Carpenter's work focussed on social symbolism in ancient & non-Western art as well as modern mass media, and his publications, such as a book on the Canadian Arctic, sometimes involved collaboration with famous artists, including Frederick Varley."

Containers, Computers, and the Media Ecology of the City
by Lance Strate

From the paper: "Innis in turn laid the foundation for what is sometimes known as the Toronto School, whose "membership" includes Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Edmund Carpenter. Insofar as "Toronto School" refers to a pattern of influence rather than strict geographical location, membership is also extended to Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and a number of other scholars ... "

Tribal Dreams (review of Patterns That Connect)
written by Philip Marchand (author of Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger)
for the Toronto Star, Arts section, Saturday, March 22, 1997.

From the article: "In the 1950s, as a young anthropologist at the University of Toronto who had done a lot of field work among the Inuit, he was the sidekick of an English professor named Marshall McLuhan. They were quite a pair - as far as their more conventional colleagues were concerned, they constituted a two-man leper colony. McLuhan was always outraging his fellow faculty members with his alarming vitality, his free-wheeling speculations, his disdain for academic protocol. And Carpenter practically went out of his way to irritate and insult his colleagues. ... Both men were consummate lecture room performers. Students either loved or hated them. During one graphic Edmund Carpenter lecture on Polynesian sexual mores- this in the '50s, mind you - a female student left in disgust. Carpenter called out after her, "You don't have to rush, my dear, the boat doesn't leave for two days.""

Media Ecology 101 -- An Introductory Reading List
Prepared by Lance Strate

Carpenter's Phantom gets on the list at #17: "Another representative of the Toronto School, Carpenter was an early colleague and collaborator with Marshall McLuhan. As an anthropologist, he contributes a key comparative approach to the study of communication and perception across cultures in this 1974 publication."

symbolism.org
John Fraim, The Greathouse Company

Great site with masses of content centering on the symbolism in popular culture. The voice of Edmund Carpenter can be heard in the background of much of the work on this site. In an article titled, "The Medium of the Messenger" Fraim comments on Carpenter directly: "Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall’s book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness."

THE UBIS DICTIONARY OF CHANGE
SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, REVOLUTION, NATURE, LOGIC AND LOVE

Click on "Perception" on the left: "The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter believes that we live in a sensory environment totally different from that of pre-literate man, simply because we have learned to read. He says that in "shifting from speech to writing, man gave up an ear for an eye, and transferred his interest from spiritual to spatial, from reverential to referential." ...

Visual Anthropology
by Joseph Flaherty, April 1972
From the Afterimage 25th Anniversary Issue

From the article: "Edmund Carpenter was the one person to bring this point into perspective when he said, "Some cultures believe that to have your picture taken is to have your soul stolen by the camera. Well, that's true." He spoke of the creation of an entirely new environment, of ancient rituals being scrapped after they had been filmed, and of people recognizing each other not by their faces but by the Polaroid pictures in their headdresses ... "

Visualanthropology. NET Resources Online for Visual Anthropology

A tremendous collection of on-line resources related to Visual Anthropology. Now featuring "Virtual Snow" in the Spotlight.