The Land beneath Our Feet: An Interview with Gregg Mitman

In this interview, historian Gregg Mitman discusses the background and significance of The Land beneath Our Feet, a documentary he completed with Sarita Siegel in 2016 that explores a 1926 scientific expedition to Liberia undertaken by Harvard University's Department of Tropical Medicine and funded by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Mitman reveals how Harvard's ethnographic film footage, which constitutes some of the only surviving visual media of early twentieth-century inland Liberians, raises complex questions about film's relationship to national memory and local heritage, thus challenging habitual associations between the medium of film and the practices of racial science.