An Anthropology of Images

An Anthropology of Images PDF Author: Hans Belting
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839785
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A compelling theory that places the origin of human picture making in the body In this groundbreaking book, renowned art historian Hans Belting proposes a new anthropological theory for interpreting human picture making. Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a "living medium" that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, An Anthropology of Images presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function. The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two "media of the body," the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.

An Anthropology of Images

An Anthropology of Images PDF Author: Hans Belting
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839785
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A compelling theory that places the origin of human picture making in the body In this groundbreaking book, renowned art historian Hans Belting proposes a new anthropological theory for interpreting human picture making. Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a "living medium" that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, An Anthropology of Images presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function. The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two "media of the body," the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.

The Corporeal Image

The Corporeal Image PDF Author: David MacDougall
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691121567
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
David MacDougall argues for a new conception of how visual images create human knowledge in a world in which the value of seeing has often been eclipsed by words.

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary PDF Author: Paul Rabinow
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239006X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
In this compact volume two of anthropology’s most influential theorists, Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus, engage in a series of conversations about the past, present, and future of anthropological knowledge, pedagogy, and practice. James D. Faubion joins in several exchanges to facilitate and elaborate the dialogue, and Tobias Rees moderates the discussions and contributes an introduction and an afterword to the volume. Most of the conversations are focused on contemporary challenges to how anthropology understands its subject and how ethnographic research projects are designed and carried out. Rabinow and Marcus reflect on what remains distinctly anthropological about the study of contemporary events and processes, and they contemplate productive new directions for the field. The two converge in Marcus’s emphasis on the need to redesign pedagogical practices for training anthropological researchers and in Rabinow’s proposal of collaborative initiatives in which ethnographic research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed. Both Rabinow and Marcus participated in the milestone collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Published in 1986, Writing Culture catalyzed a reassessment of how ethnographers encountered, studied, and wrote about their subjects. In the opening conversations of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Rabinow and Marcus take stock of anthropology’s recent past by discussing the intellectual scene in which Writing Culture intervened, the book’s contributions, and its conceptual limitations. Considering how the field has developed since the publication of that volume, they address topics including ethnography’s self-reflexive turn, scholars’ increased focus on questions of identity, the Public Culture project, science and technology studies, and the changing interests and goals of students. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary allows readers to eavesdrop on lively conversations between anthropologists who have helped to shape their field’s recent past and are deeply invested in its future.

Demanding Images

Demanding Images PDF Author: Karen Strassler
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478004691
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape, yielding a vibrant and volatile public sphere within which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. In Demanding Images Karen Strassler theorizes image-events as political processes in which publicly circulating images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past, present, and future. Considering photographs, posters, contemporary art, graffiti, selfies, memes, and other visual media, she argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images. Demanding Images is both a closely observed account of Indonesia's turbulent democratic transition and a globally salient analysis of the work of images in the era of digital media and neoliberal democracy. Strassler reveals politics today to be an unruly enterprise profoundly shaped by the affective and evidentiary force of images.

Expanded Visions

Expanded Visions PDF Author: Arnd Schneider
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390896
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book argues for a new anthropology of the moving image, bringing together an important range of essays on time-based media in the contemporary arts and anthropology. It builds on recent attempts to develop more experimental formats and engages with debates on epistemologies of ethnography, relational aesthetics, materiality, sensory ethnography, and observational and participatory cinema. Arnd Schneider critically revisits Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum and the hyperreal, engages with new media theory, and elaborates on the potential of the Writing Culture critique for moving image practices bordering art and anthropology. This important work will be essential reading for anybody working across the fields of visual anthropology, film and media studies and visual studies.

The Anthropology of Time

The Anthropology of Time PDF Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000323285
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Time - relentless, ever-present but intangible and the single element over which human beings have no absolute control - has long proved a puzzle. The author examines the phenomenon of time and asks such fascinating questions as how time impinges on people, to what extent our awareness of time is culturally conditioned, how societies deal with temporal problems and whether time can be considered a `resource' to be economized. More specifically, he provides a consistent and detailed analysis of theories put forward by a number of thinkers such as Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, Piaget, Husserl and Bourdieu. His discussion encompasses four main approaches in time research, namely developmental psychology, symbolic anthropology (covering the bulk of post-Durkheimian social anthropology) `economic' theories of time in social geography and, finally, phenomenological theories. The author concludes by presenting his own model of social/cognitive time, in the light of these critical discussions of the literature.

In God's Image

In God's Image PDF Author: Michael Welker
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 146746208X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
From the 2019/2020 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh In God’s Image describes how centering our culture on the human and divine spirit can revitalize four universally acknowledged characteristics of a thriving human existence: justice, freedom, truth, and peace. Inspired not only by religious sources but also by scientists, philosophers, economists, and legal and political theorists, Michael Welker develops the idea of a “multimodal” spirit that generates the possibility of living and acting in the image of God. Welker’s new approach to natural theology explains why the human and the divine spirit cannot adequately be grasped in simple bipolar relations and why the human spirit should not be reduced to the rational mind. Addressing the question What is the calling of human beings? in the context of late-modern pluralistic societies, he aims at explaining to believers and nonbelievers alike what it means to be persons created in the image of God, moved by a spirit of justice, freedom, truth, and peace.

The Chimera Principle

The Chimera Principle PDF Author: Carlo Severi
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9780990505051
Category : Collective memory
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using philosophical and ethnographic theory, presents new approaches to ritual and memory, relating them to visual and sound images as acts of communication.

Studying the Image

Studying the Image PDF Author: Eloise Meneses
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532636679
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The field of anthropology provides rich insights into the world of people and cultures. But it also presents challenges for Christians in the areas of cultural relativism, evolutionary theory, race and ethnicity, forms of the family, governments and war, life in the global economy, the morality of art, and religious pluralism. Most significantly it raises questions regarding the truth and how we can know it. This book provides the opportunity to investigate such questions with both the informed understanding of anthropological theory and ethnography, and the larger framework and commitment of Christian biblical and theological studies. So equipped, readers are encouraged to investigate for themselves the depths and intricacies of topics in anthropology that are especially relevant for Christians.

Art History After Modernism

Art History After Modernism PDF Author: Hans Belting
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226041841
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
"Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all. So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, The End of the History of Art?. "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the Economist, Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues—the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum—and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art. With Art History after Modernism, Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.