Paul Hockings

In 2015, he was awarded the Nilgiris Lifetime Achievement Award by the Nilgiri Documentation Centre; and in 2016, a Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Visual Anthropology.

Hockings made the first film in the style of Observational Cinema, named, The Village. 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 NBC television which drew a large North American audience. He was then working as a research director for MGM Documentary Dept. About the same tine he served as the last research assistant for Ruth St. Denis, and was on an expedition to India with the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. For over 30 years he has been the chief editor of Visual Anthropology; and the University of Oslo has described him as "a pioneer in the fields of ethnographic film and visual anthropology".

Hockings studied Near-Eastern archaeology at the University of Sydney, and completed two majors in the subjects of archaeology and anthropology at that 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 the Nilgiris, completing a Ph.D. on this subject in 1965. He also studied anthropology at the universities of Chicago, Stanford, Toronto, and at the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Hockings (born February 23, 1935) is an anthropologist whose prime areas of focus are the Dravidian languages, social, visual and medical anthropology.

Hockings was born on February 23, 1935 at Hertford and was raised in Hampshire, England. At the age of ten years, he developed interest in prehistory and museums. His father Arthur Hockings, a Londoner, was a cricketer and an engineer, who worked as a personal assistant for Henry Royce. Later, he helped design landing-craft for D-Day. In 1952, Paul migrated to Australia with his parents.