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Asen Balikci (1929 in Istanbul - January 2, 2019 in Sofia) was an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker. He is considered one of the founding fathers of modern visual anthropology.

Early life and education
Asen Balikci was born Asen Nikolov in 1929 in Istanbul, Turkey to a Slavic-Macedonian and Eastern Orthodox father from Kastoria and a Bulgarian mother from Istanbul. Balikci's father owned a successful fish-mongering business, and Balikci attended an international school in Istanbul as a child. The family spoke Bulgarian, Greek, and French at home. Balikci's father moved the family to Sofia during the Second World War, where he changed their last name from Nikolov to Balikci, which means 'fisherman'/'fishmonger' in Turkish in order to avoid any problems with their ethnic or religious identity. After the war, the family returned to Istanbul.

When Asen was 16 years old, he was sent to Geneva for his undergraduate degree, where he studied economics and geography at l'Université de Genève. While attending the university, Balikci joined a friend who was a biologist on a research trip to northern Morocco, where his experiences in a traditional village led him to the decision to become an ethnographer. At the time, l'Université de Genève did not offer any serious courses in ethnography, so Balikci completed his economics degree. He pursued his interest in ethnography and was deeply influenced by the work of Marcel Mauss. He volunteered at the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva for a short time.

Balikci could not get any jobs in Switzerland due to being a foreigner, and decided to emigrate to Canada, where he worked different jobs doing manual labor in the meatpacking industry. He realized that there were no studies on Slavic minorities in Canada at the time, and began an ethnographic study of his coworkers, who were Macedonians, Bulgarians, and people from other Slavic nations. This research led him to begin working in the Department of French-Canadian Folklore at the (now defunct) National Museum of Canada in 1954. While at the museum, he continued his work on Slavic minorities, and, after the sudden death of a colleague, the museum director sent Balikci to continue his colleague's fieldwork on various cultures in the Canadian North.

After a couple of years, and at the recommendation of the museum director, he decided to pursue his doctorate in anthropology. Balikci was accepted into the PhD program at Columbia University in New York in 1957, where he studied anthropology under Margaret Mead.

Fieldwork
Balikci conducted fieldwork with the Netsilik Inuit of the Canadian Arctic Coast from 1957 to 1965 and produced a film series on the Netsilik in 1967, as well as a book,The Netsilik Eskimo, in 1970.