Robert Ascher was born on April 28, 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of California where he received a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Dr. Ascher is currently married and has no children. He is a Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is currently involved in a project titled "Myth onto Film." His research interests include creating films about myths. His recent fieldwork was in Pilgrimages/ Israel.
Dr. Ascher's main field of study and field of teaching includes film, visual anthropology, material culture, and myth. His research interests include the expression of anthropological ideas through the study of non-western fields of knowledge, in particular, film making and the study of myth and mathematical ideas (ethnomathematics).
Ascher is well known for creating films about myths. One of his well-known films is Cycle, Bar Yohai, and Blue: A Tlingit Odyssey. For his work, he has received many honors from such places as the Chicago Film Festival, the San Francisco Film Festival, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts.
Dr. Ascher's films have been noted for having a dream-like quality to them. "The quality of Ascher's films is the pivotal point of his personal theory of film making: combining the ideas of film theorists who observe resemblances between dreaming and watching movies and anthropologists who see similarities between the other-worldly logic of dreams and myths, he puts myths onto films," " to communicate in some subliminal sense the deepest part of another culture," he said. Dr. Ascher receives most of his funding for his work through grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Humanities and from faculty grants from Cornell University.
Former link, http://www.news.cornell.edu/general/PRESS93/PR03129301.html, (April, 2001)
Dept of Anthropology, Cornell, http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/Anthro/, (April, 2001)
Ascher, Robert E-mail Interview, (April, 2001)
Written By: Richard Shir