Anthropology research seminar with Professor Len Kamerling: American Maasai. Navigating an evolving ethnographic film story. Reflections on a work-in-progress by Peter Biella and Len Kamerling

Film stories change and evolve in surprising ways. Discoveries waiting for us from behind the camera and in the editing room can radically redefine our research—if only we are flexible enough to see them.

American Maasai is an ongoing ethnographic film project, partially filmed and currently unedited. Filmmakers Peter Biella and Len Kamerling went to Sekenani, Kenya, in 2022, with the intention of continuing fieldwork started three years earlier. Sekenani is a Maasai community bordering the Maasai Mara wildlife preserve in Southern Kenya—the entry point for almost all tourists visiting the preserve.  The original intent of the film project was to study the consequences of economic and cultural change brought to the region by a new paved road from Nairobi, electrification, and the massive influx of tourists that resulted.

But the story changed. Accompanying the researchers as interpreter and advisor was a young Maasai man from Sekenani, Emmanuel Kantaro, who had worked as a safari guide in the Maasai Mara. On a safari trip six years ago, he met an American woman, began a relationship, and immigrated to California.  The community’s reaction to Emmanuel’s return, his conflicted feelings about his perceived obligations, his complex interactions with family and friends, and his deepening questions about his own cultural identity, eclipsed the original research questions and pointed the project in a new direction. American Maasai is about migration, assimilation, and change, and how one individual seeks to find a balance between two opposing identities. “I’m a typical Maasai,” Emmanuel tells us, but his return to Sekenani brought into stark relief just how much he has changed.

How do filmmakers find balance in telling ethnographic stories? How do we remain open to unanticipated events and characters that can shift a film’s direction? And, most importantly, how do we ensure that the anthropology is rigorous, the story structure is compelling, and the subject community is served?

Len Kamerling will discuss the evolution and challenges of this project, its editing and storytelling strategies, and plans for the next phase of filming at Emmanual’s home in California.