In 1959, Carpenter joined anthropologist
Raoul Naroll at San Fernando Valley State College (
California State University-Northridge) and was appointed an assistant professor and founder of an experimental interdisciplinary program of Anthropology and Art, where students were trained in visual media, including filming. As the only faculty member in the new department, Carpenter went on to hire more faculty. In 1960, he was promoted to the rank of associate professor. With award-winning filmmaker Robert Cannon, he made an innovative documentary about "
surrealist"
Kuskokwim Eskimo masks. Carpenter also co-authored
Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), a film documenting six traditional African-American songs and dances by
Gullahs of
St. Simon Island, based on fieldwork by
Alan Lomax. And with
Bess Lomax Hawes, he collaborated on
Buck Dancer (1965), a short film featuring Ed Young, an
African-American musician-dancer from
Mississippi. In 1967, however, just when visual anthropology began to take institutional form as an academic enterprise, the program was closed. During this period, Carpenter worked with McLuhan on the latter's book
Understanding Media (1964). On leave from his faculty position at Northridge, Carpenter subsequently held the Carnegie Chair in anthropology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–69), and then took a research professorship at the
University of Papua New Guinea, officially having resigned his position at Northridge. Joined by photographer Adelaide de Menil (who later became his wife), he journeyed to remote mountain areas where indigenous Papua had "no acquaintance" yet with writing, radios, or cameras. They took numerous
Polaroid and 35mm photographs, made sound recordings, and shot some 400,000 feet of 16mm film in black and white, as well as color and
infrared film. During the next dozen years, Carpenter taught at various universities, including
Adelphi University (c. 1970–1980),
Harvard,
New School University, and
New York University (c. 1980–1981). In addition to numerous other publications, he also completed art historian
Carl Schuster's massive cross-cultural study on traditional art motifs,
Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art: A Record of Tradition and Continuity, published privately in three volumes, with a much-abbreviated one-volume version published in 1996 by Abrams under the title
Patterns That Connect. In 2008, Carpenter guest-curated an important Eskimo traditional and prehistoric art exhibit
Upside Down: Les Arctiques at the
Musée du quai Branly, the ethnographic art museum in Paris, France. This exhibit was re-installed in 2011 as
Upside Down: Arctic Realities at The
Menil Collection, an art museum in
Houston, Texas, which, since 1999, also houses his permanent exhibit
Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision. == Personal life and death ==