Conjuring Asia

Conjuring Asia PDF Author: Chris Goto-Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107076595
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book charts the history of modern magic across India, China and Japan, analyzing representations in the cultural imagination of the West.

Conjuring Asia

Conjuring Asia PDF Author: Chris Goto-Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107076595
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book charts the history of modern magic across India, China and Japan, analyzing representations in the cultural imagination of the West.

Empire of Enchantment

Empire of Enchantment PDF Author: John Zubrzycki
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190914394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
"How Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become a popular amusement for the masses around the globe"--Provided by publisher.

Conjuring Property

Conjuring Property PDF Author: Jeremy M. Campbell
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806192
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Winner of the 2017 James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers Honorable Mention for the 2016 Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Since the 1960s, when Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization, violence and confusion have often accompanied national policies concerning land reform, corporate colonization, indigenous land rights, environmental protection, and private homesteading. Conjuring Property shows how, in a region that many perceive to be stateless, colonists - from highly capitalized ranchers to landless workers - adopt anticipatory stances while they await future governance intervention regarding land tenure. For Amazonian colonists, property is a dynamic category that becomes salient in the making: it is conjured through papers, appeals to state officials, and the manipulation of landscapes and memories of occupation. This timely study will be of interest to development studies scholars and practitioners, conservation ecologists, geographers, and anthropologists.

Techniques of Illusion

Techniques of Illusion PDF Author: Katharina Rein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000891488
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This book explores stage conjuring during its “golden age,” from about 1860 to 1910. This study provides close readings highlighting four paradigmatic illusions of the time that stand in for different kinds of illusions typical of stage magic in the “golden age” and analyses them within their cultural and media-historical context: “Pepper’s Ghost,” the archetypical mirror illusion; “The Vanishing Lady,” staging a teleportation in a time of a dizzying acceleration of transport; “the levitation,” simulating weightlessness with the help of an extended steel machinery; and “The Second Sight,” a mind-reading illusion using up-to-date communication technologies. These close readings are completed by writings focusing on visual media and expanding the scope backwards and forwards in time, roughly to 1800 and to 2000. This exploration will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

Conjuring Asia

Conjuring Asia PDF Author: Chris Goto-Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The promise of magic has always commanded the human imagination, but the story of industrial modernity is usually seen as a process of disenchantment. Drawing on the writings and performances of the so-called 'Golden Age Magicians' from the turn of the twentieth century, Chris Goto-Jones unveils the ways in which European and North American encounters with (and representations of) Asia - the fabled Mystic East - worked to re-enchant experiences of the modern world. Beginning with a reconceptualization of the meaning of 'modern magic' itself - moving beyond conventional categories of 'real' and 'fake' magic - Goto-Jones' acclaimed book guides us on a magical mystery tour around India, China, and Japan, showing us levitations and decapitations, magic duels and bullet catches, goldfish bowls and paper butterflies. In the end, this mesmerizing book reveals Orientalism as a kind of magic in itself, casting a spell over Western culture that leaves it transformed, even today.

Mediality on Trial

Mediality on Trial PDF Author: Ehler Voss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110416417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly associate the term "medium" with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human (trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the personal and the technological. The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they communicate with an "other" realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a better life; yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due to this combination of promise and suspicion that "mediumism" has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus, we can speak of a "mediumistic trial" – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.

Asia's Miracle Economies

Asia's Miracle Economies PDF Author: Jon Woronoff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315487675
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
An expanded and updated edition of Woronoff's 1986 study of Asia's emerging economic giants, this book looks back at what has happened in the intervening years, especially as regards the "discovery" of this phenomenon in the Western media and the overreactive hype that has accompanied it. As the author puts it: "My purpose is to show how these countries, which hitherto has been quite unremarkable, began to develop vigorously. What policies and strategies they used. What they did right and, even more importantly, what they did wrong."

The Empire of Effects

The Empire of Effects PDF Author: Julie A. Turnock
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477325328
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic. The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.

Wonderstruck

Wonderstruck PDF Author: Helen De Cruz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691232121
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions"--

The Secret History of Magic

The Secret History of Magic PDF Author: Peter Lamont
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524704458
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Pull back the curtain on the real history of magic – and discover why magic really matters If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt, with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic. It is a history of people from humble roots, who made and lost fortunes, and who deceived kings and queens. In order to survive, they concealed many secrets, yet they revealed some and they stole others. They engaged in deception, exposure, and betrayal, in a quest to make the impossible happen. They managed to survive in a world in which a series of technological wonders appeared, which previous generations would have considered magical. Even today, when we now take the most sophisticated technology for granted, we can still be astonished by tricks that were performed hundreds of years ago. The Secret History of Magic reveals how this was done. It is about why magic matters in a world that no longer seems to have a place for it, but which desperately needs a sense of wonder.