Paul Hockings


Paul Hockings is an anthropologist whose prime areas of focus are the dravidian languages, social, visual and medical anthropology. The University of Oslo describes him as "a pioneer in the fields of ethnographic film and visual anthropology", and he has made a number of documentaries in this sphere and published more than 200 papers.

Early life and family

Hockings was born on 23 February 1935 at Hertford and was raised in Hampshire, England. At the age of nine years, he developed interest in prehistory and museums. His father was a cricketer and an engineer and worked as a personal assistant for Henry Royce. Later, he migrated to Australia with his father.

Education

Hockings studied near–eastern archaeology at the University of Sydney, and also completed two majors in the subjects of archaeology and anthropology at the university. In 1962, after receiving a grant for field studies from American Institute of Indian Studies, he moved to the Nilgiris in India and did research on the Badagas of Nilgiris, and completed his Ph.D. on this subject in 1965. He has also studied archaeology and anthropology at the universities in Chicago, Stanford, Toronto, and at University of California, Berkeley.

Career and research

Hockings is a professor emeritus of anthropology at University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also worked at the University of California, Berkeley as a teacher's aide for the biological anthropologist T. D. McCown and as a research assistant for David G. Mandelbaum. He has also taught anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has also served as a former employee of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has also worked as a script writer and journalist in New Zealand and Canada.
In 1969, he was signed as an anthropologist by the MGM Studios for making a film on mankind's origins, titled "The Man Hunters", for the NBC television which drew a large audience. He also worked as a research director for MGM Documentary.
Hockings is the chief editor of Visual Anthropology. He is also serving as the dean of Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the United International College, Xiangzhou District, Zhuhai, and as the Field Museum of Natural History's adjunct curator of anthropology.
He has done research in the midst of several communities in southern India, and he has published books on cultures of South India, and edited South Asian and South East Asian volumes of the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, and has also been the editor for South Asia of Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. For more than 50 years, Hockings has been working with the Badagas in southern India's Nilgiri mountains, and has also published a book on the subject of the Badaga people's medical anthropology. On 23 February 2015, he was awarded the Nilgiris Lifetime Achievement Award by the Nilgiri Documentation Centre.

Works

Books

Some of the books authored and co–authored by Hockings are as follows:

Documentaries