Sam Pack's interest in visual anthropology grew out of a desire to "go someplace and get away from everyone and everything" after high school in California. Seventeen and "ripe for adventure," he joined a volunteer project modeled on the Peace Corps at a Navajo reservation in Tohatchi, New Mexico.
"I'm always reluctant to talk about this because it sounds so hokey and new-agey," Pack said of his connection with the Navajo. Pack is the son of Korean immigrants, his father a successful developer in the Los Angeles area.
"Here was a place that was different from anything I'd ever known, but I felt strangely at home and I rarely, if ever, feel that way. We'd laugh at the same things. We understood each other and we just got along."
Pack regularly returned to the reservation as he earned his undergraduate degree at Colorado College. After graduation, he worked on a ski patrol in the winter and fought wildfires and served as a ranger for the National Park Service in the summer. "It was a good life, I have to tell you, but after a few years I realized I could wake up tomorrow and it would be twenty years later."
He enrolled in a master's program in religious studies at Arizona State University, and his research interests were strongly tied to his experiences on the Navajo reservation. He grew close to the matriarch of an extended Indian family, often sleeping in one of the family trailers.
"I've been going there over half my life," Pack said. "After about six or seven years I was such a constant presence that even people outside that clan just identified me as a member."
While he was at Arizona State researching the syncretism of Native American religious beliefs, Pack was on the reservation tape- recording an interview with a Navajo elder. They were surrounded by striking red cliffs as the sun was setting. The light was perfect.
"I thought this would be so much cooler if it was on film," Pack said. "There was so much that a tape recorder just couldn't capture. I did some research and discovered there was this thing out there called visual anthropology. I hadn't even known the field existed, but it was exactly what I wanted to study."
The following semester Pack took an ethnography course and read Through Navajo Eyes, a book detailing an anthropological experiment that involved providing cameras and training to seven Navajos and encouraging them to make films. When he found out one of the original assistants on the project, Richard Chalfen, was a professor at Temple University in the visual anthropology program, he wrote to him "with great excitement and exuberance" about the field.
It wasn't long before Pack was working on a doctorate at Temple. He completed the degree in 2004, writing an updated spin on the Navajo film project for his dissertation. After a brief stint at Iowa State University, he started teaching at Kenyon in 2006.