My Cocaine Museum

2009-12-19
 |  Social Science
My Cocaine Museum

Author: Michael Taussig

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226790152

Category: Social Science

Page: 336

View: 393

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In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.

Arts of Wonder

2013
 |  Art
Arts of Wonder

Author: Jeffrey L. Kosky

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226451060

Category: Art

Page: 222

View: 349

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Kosky focuses on a handful of artists - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy - to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation.

The Inbetweenness of Things

2017-03-23
 |  Social Science
The Inbetweenness of Things

Author: Paul Basu

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781474264808

Category: Social Science

Page: 296

View: 938

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We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of 'animate' and 'inanimate', 'natural' and 'supernatural', 'self' and 'other', 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once. Adopting an 'object-centred' approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how 'things' mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies. An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

The Contested Crown

2022-02-16
 |  Art
The Contested Crown

Author: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226802060

Category: Art

Page: 248

View: 482

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia

2020-12-14
 |  Art
Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia

Author: Natasha Eaton

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781000262551

Category: Art

Page: 236

View: 819

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Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia questions what are ideas of vertiginous collecting, art-making and museums as expanded fields, including wonder houses and missionary museums (or museobuses) in Britain and South Asia. If the historiography of British India has privileged photography and the 'Imperial Picturesque', the emphasis here is on the formation of a creole modernity, one that considers the relationship between art and labour, including pearlescence and pearl fishing in Sri Lanka, and the iconoclastic/fetish debates and forms of collecting amongst missionaries. Eaton explores these themes alongside the genealogies and modernities of white(ness) in contemporary curating and amateur female practice, and how the museobus or museum as a unique object has informed the work of contemporary artist group Raqs Media Collective. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Asian history, and imperial and colonial history.

Selling Our Death Masks

2014-12-12
 |  Political Science
Selling Our Death Masks

Author: Yesenia Barragan

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

ISBN: 9781782792697

Category: Political Science

Page: 101

View: 179

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A radical historical ethnography on the meaning of a fundamentally new physical landscape of our age of austerity: cash-for-gold shops that numerically exploded in the wake of the worst economic crisis of our times.

Channeling the Past

2013-03-15
 |  History
Channeling the Past

Author: Erik Christiansen

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

ISBN: 9780299289034

Category: History

Page: 320

View: 620

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After the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II, Americans looked to the nation’s more distant past for lessons to inform its uncertain future. By applying recent and emerging techniques in mass communication—including radio and television programs and commercial book clubs—American elites working in media, commerce, and government used history to confer authority on their respective messages. With insight and wit, Erik Christiansen uncovers in Channeling the Past the ways that powerful corporations rewrote history to strengthen the postwar corporate state, while progressives, communists, and other leftists vied to make their own versions of the past more popular. Christiansen looks closely at several notable initiatives—CBS’s flashback You Are There program; the Smithsonian Museum of American History, constructed in the late 1950s; the Cavalcade of America program sponsored by the Du Pont Company; the History Book Club; and the Freedom Train, a museum on rails that traveled the country from 1947 to 1949 exhibiting historic documents and flags, including original copies of the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta. It is often said that history is written by the victors, but Christiansen offers a more nuanced perspective: history is constantly remade to suit the objectives of those with the resources to do it. He provides dramatic evidence of sophisticated calculations that influenced both public opinion and historical memory, and shows that Americans’ relationships with the past changed as a result.

The End of the Cognitive Empire

2018-07-16
 |  Social Science
The End of the Cognitive Empire

Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Publisher: Duke University Press

ISBN: 9781478002000

Category: Social Science

Page: 392

View: 271

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In The End of the Cognitive Empire Boaventura de Sousa Santos further develops his concept of the "epistemologies of the South," in which he outlines a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical framework for challenging the dominance of Eurocentric thought. As a collection of knowledges born of and anchored in the experiences of marginalized peoples who actively resist capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, epistemologies of the South represent those forms of knowledge that are generally discredited, erased, and ignored by dominant cultures of the global North. Noting the declining efficacy of established social and political solutions to combat inequality and discrimination, Santos suggests that global justice can only come about through an epistemological shift that guarantees cognitive justice. Such a shift would create new, alternative strategies for political mobilization and activism and give oppressed social groups the means through which to represent the world as their own and in their own terms.

What are Exhibitions for? An Anthropological Approach

2019-02-07
 |  Art
What are Exhibitions for? An Anthropological Approach

Author: Inge Daniels

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781350065376

Category: Art

Page: 248

View: 274

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Why do people go to exhibitions, and what do they hope to gain from the experience? What would happen if people were encouraged to move freely through exhibition spaces, take photographs and be playful? In this book, Inge Daniels explores what might happen if people and objects were freed from the regulations currently associated with going to an exhibition. Traditional understandings of exhibitions place the viewers in a one-way communication form, where the exhibition and those behind its creation inform their audiences. However, motivations behind exhibition-going are multiple and complex and frequently the intentions of curators do not match the expectations of their visitors. Based on an in-depth ethnographic examination of the processes involved in the making and reception of one particular exhibition-experiment as well as a study that follows 'freed' objects into their new homes, this publication not only sheds light on what exhibitions are, but also what they could become in the future. Featuring over 175 colour illustrations and using practical examples, this is an important contribution for students and scholars of anthropology, museum studies, photography, design and architecture.

Sustainability in the Anthropocene

2019-04-29
 |  Philosophy
Sustainability in the Anthropocene

Author: Róisín Lally

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN: 9781498584234

Category: Philosophy

Page: 258

View: 638

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This collection of essays, written by an international group of scholars, provides a more critical and creative contemporary practice of “sustainability.” The book sets this practice free from its reductive interpretations and applies a more thoughtful environmental ethics to the current and emerging technologies that dominate our lives.

Transnational Modern Languages

2022-05-13
 |  Language Arts & Disciplines
Transnational Modern Languages

Author: Jennifer Burns

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

ISBN: 9781800345560

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 352

View: 730

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An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series.

A Different Kind of Ethnography

2017-01-01
 |  Social Science
A Different Kind of Ethnography

Author: Denielle Elliott

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

ISBN: 9781442636613

Category: Social Science

Page: 158

View: 205

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"Produced by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, this collection introduces the idea of an imaginative and creative approach to anthropological inquiry, one that is collaborative, open-ended, embodied, affective, and experimental. Rather than structuring the book around traditional methods like interviewing, participant observation, and documentary research, the authors organize their thoughts around different methodologies--sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording. As well, innovative, practical exercises are included that allow ethnographers to not just 'talk the talk', but also 'walk the walk' so they can deepen, complicate, and extend ethnographic inquiry. A list of additional resources at the end of each chapter provide rich support for those who want to pursue more imaginative and creative methodologies."--