Magic

Magic
Author: Ernesto De Martino
Publisher: Hau
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Basilicata (Italy)
ISBN: 9780990505099

Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.

Finding Afro-Mexico

Finding Afro-Mexico
Author: Theodore W. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108671179

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts
Author: Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 772
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004429301

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, the book's goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in fieldwork, offices, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences – beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves – have been different things during their troubled existence. The book seeks to make these differences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being ‘Afro’ as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been different things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. The book foregrounds these discontinuous and ever-changing contours.

Arrival Cities

Arrival Cities
Author: Burcu Dogramaci
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9462702268

Exile and migration played a critical role in the diffusion and development of modernism around the globe, yet have long remained largely understudied phenomena within art historiography. Focusing on the intersections of exile, artistic practice and urban space, this volume brings together contributions by international researchers committed to revising the historiography of modern art. It pays particular attention to metropolitan areas that were settled by migrant artists in the first half of the 20th century. These arrival cities developed into hubs of artistic activities and transcultural contact zones where ideas circulated, collaborations emerged, and concepts developed. Taking six major cities as a starting point – Bombay (now Mumbai), Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London, New York, and Shanghai –the authors explore how urban topographies and landscapes were modified by exiled artists re-establishing their practices in metropolises across the world. Questioning the established canon of Western modernism, Arrival Cities investigates how the migration of artists to different urban spaces impacted their work and the historiography of art. In doing so, it aims to encourage the discussion between international scholars from different research fields, such as exile studies, art history, social history, architectural history, architecture, and urban studies.

Artistic Research

Artistic Research
Author: Annette W. Balkema
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789042010970

Advanced art education is in the process of developing research programs throughout Europe. What does the term research actually means in the practice of art? What is the relation to the scientific methods of alpha, beta or gamma sciences, directed toward knowledge production and the development of a certain scientific domaine? What will be the influence of scientific research on the art forms?

Handmade in Cuba

Handmade in Cuba
Author: Ruth Behar
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 168340288X

Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from simple supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. Vividly illustrated, this volume shows how the publishing collective responded to the nation’s changing historical and political situation from the margins of society, representing Cuban culture across the boundaries of race, age, gender, and genre. In this volume, poets and scholars reflect on the unique artistic direction of Rolando Estévez, who oversaw the creation of over 500 handmade books and magazines between 1985 and 2014. They highlight the beautiful designs and unusual materials selected, including fabric, metals, wood, feathers, and discarded items. Through diverse perspectives, including an interview with Estévez himself, the essays showcase the unlimited inventive possibilities of books as objects, as sculptural pieces, and as installations. Even in the age of technology, Estévez generated enormous excitement and admiration for these hand-crafted books, and this volume offers the first inside view of this important alternative publishing space. Contributors: Ruth Behar | Juanamaría Cordones-Cook | Gwendolyn Díaz | Erin Finzer | William Luis | Nancy Morejón | Kim Nochi | Carina Pino Santos | Kristin Schwain | Elzbieta Sklodowska

New Daughters of Africa

New Daughters of Africa
Author: Various Authors
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 798
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0241997011

Nearly three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres. From Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the USA, overlooked artists of the past join key figures, popular contemporaries and emerging writers in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them, the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and their common obstacles around issues of race, gender and class. Bold and insightful, brilliant in its intimacy and universality, this landmark anthology honours the talents of African daughters and the inspiring legacy that connects them-and all of us.

Active Collections

Active Collections
Author: Elizabeth Wood
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351383515

In recent years, many museums have implemented sweeping changes in how they engage audiences. However, changes to the field’s approaches to collections stewardship have come much more slowly. Active Collections critically examines existing approaches to museum collections and explores practical, yet radical, ways that museums can better manage their collections to actively advance their missions. Approaching the question of modern museum collection stewardship from a position of "tough love," the authors argue that the museum field risks being constrained by rigid ways of thinking about objects. Examining the field’s relationship to objects, artifacts, and specimens, the volume explores the question of stewardship through the dissection of a broad range of issues, including questions of "quality over quantity," emotional attachment, dispassionate cataloging, and cognitive biases in curatorship. The essays look to insights from fields as diverse as forest management, library science, and the psychology of compulsive hoarding, to inform and innovate collection practices. Essay contributions come from both experienced museum professionals and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, education, and history. The result is a critical exploration that makes the book essential reading for museum professionals, as well as those in training.

Architecture and the Language Debate

Architecture and the Language Debate
Author: Nicholas Temple
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 131727119X

This book examines the creative exchanges between architects, artists and intellectuals, from the Early Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment, in the forging of relationships between architecture and emerging concepts of language in early modern Italy. The study extends across the spectrum of linguistic disputes during this time – among members of the clergy, humanists, philosophers and polymaths – on issues of grammar, rhetoric, philology, etymology and epigraphy, and how these disputes paralleled and informed important developments in architectural thinking and practice. Drawing upon a wealth of primary source material, such as humanist tracts, philosophical works, architectural/antiquarian treatises, epigraphic/philological studies, religious sermons and grammaticae, the book traces key periods when the emerging field of linguistics in early modern Italy impacted on the theory, design and symbolism of buildings.

Subculture

Subculture
Author: Dick Hebdige
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136494731

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.