Ethir Veliyeedu
Contemporary Authors In Tamil Literature
View Rights PortalThis volume puts ambiguity and its generative power at the centre of analytical attention. Rather than being cast negatively as a source of confusion, bewilderment or as a dangerous portent, ambiguity is held as the source of the dynamic between knowledge and experience and of certainty amid uncertainty. It positions human life between the realms of mystery and mastery where ambiguity is understood as the experience and expression of life and part of navigating the human condition. In turn, the tension between the tradition in anthropology of examining cultural certitudes through ethnographic description and efforts to challenge dominant expressions of incertitude are explored. Each chapter presents ethnographic accounts of how people engage individually and collectively with the self, the other, human-made institutions and the more-than-human to navigate ambiguity in a world affected by viral contagion, climate change, economic instability, labour precarity and (geo)political tension.
This book takes the homogeneous, isomorphic, and mutual relationship of Shen Congwen's aesthetic thoughts, artistic thoughts and cultural anthropological thoughts as the starting point, and then explores the anthropological characteristics of Shen Congwen's works from the perspective of anthropological ontology, methodology and axiology. The following analyses focusing on the expression form, ideological root, and value and significance to literary creation and cultural construction are an extended study of Shen Congwen's cultural thought, aesthetic thought, artistic creation thought and value.
Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners. Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.
Shanhaijing is a book that records ancient Chinese mythology, history, geography, plants, animals, minerals, products, witchcraft, religion, medicine, folk custom and nationality. The cultural phenomena reflected in it are all inclusive. In addition to the abundant mythological materials, it also involves many academic fields, such as philosophy, aesthetics, religion, history, geography, astronomy, meteorology, medicine, animals, plants, minerals, folklore, ethnology, geology, oceanography, psychology, Anthropology Wait a moment. Under the condition of underdeveloped ancient culture, science and technology and transportation, Shanhaijing is a wonderful book with the most myths recorded in China, and also an ancient encyclopedia.
This new collection of essays presents the latest thoughts of one of the world's leading ethnographic filmmakers and writers on cinema. It will provide essential reading for students in cinema studies, filmmaking, and visual anthropology. The dozen wide-ranging essays give unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. In an era of reality television, historical re-enactments, and designer packaging, MacDougall defends the principles that inspired the earliest practitioners of documentary cinema. He urges us to consider how the form can more accurately reflect the realities of our everyday lives. Building on his own practice in filmmaking, he argues that this means resisting the pressures for self-censorship and the inherent ethnocentrism of our own society and those we film.
In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as 'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts, photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the European avant-garde. ;
In recent years there has been a growth in both the practice and research of dark tourism; the phenomenon of visiting sites of tragedy or disaster. Expanding on this trend, this book examines dark tourism through the new lens of pilgrimage. It focuses on dark tourism sites as pilgrimage destinations, dark tourists as pilgrims, and pilgrimage as a form of dark tourism. Taking a broad definition of pilgrimage so as to consider aspects of both religious and non-religious travel that might be considered pilgrimage-like, it covers theories and histories of dark tourism and pilgrimage, pilgrimage to dark tourism sites, and experience design. A key resource for researchers and students of heritage, tourism and pilgrimage, this book will also be of great interest to those studying anthropology, religious studies and related social science subjects.
This pioneering book studies the rise, heyday and demise of regionalism from the Belle Époque until the Eve of the Second World War. By using a novel comparative perspective it gives a fresh view of the relationship between cultural regionalism, political regionalism and nationalism. Storm further illuminates how during the first decades of the twentieth century the culture of regionalism slowly lost the battle against its main rival: the avant-garde. Regional identities, like national identities, were created and sometimes even invented; and this was equally the case in France, Germany and Spain. Artists, architects and international exhibitions played a highly influential role in this process. They all appropriated, and in some cases perverted, the regionalist message showing that strong regional identities would ultimately reinforce national unity. This book offers new perspectives to specialists of regionalism and nationalism, but will also be of interest to students of the cultural history of France, Germany and Spain and to specialists from the fields of politics, ethnology, art history, cultural studies and architectural history. ;
In this eye-opening ethnography, we learn about the experiences of Muslim migrant husbands from Pakistan and Kashmir, who marry their British counterparts in the hope of marital and global social mobility bliss. For many, the parallel and intertwined migration and marital journeys do not pan out in the way they had hoped. Many experience precarity and vulnerability within the household and/or in employment, with some even being subjected to harrowing forms of domestic violence. Migrant husbands navigate an increasingly hostile British immigration system not only in public but also in private, at the hands of their wives and in-laws. The ethnography demonstrates how citizenship can be deployed as a performance of white power within single group identity, differentiated through colonial legacies of 'Britishness'.
Drawings on the signs of the Stone of the Sun that represent each of the 20 tonaltin of the month, accompanied by the Spanish and Nahuatl words.
The links between islands and tourism, as sights of pleasure is embodied in the touristification of sun, sand and sea. Islandscapes are central to the tourist imaginaries that shape islands as touristified places - curated, designed and commodified for both mass tourism and more niche inclined versions. Yet while islands are parlayed for touristic pleasure seekers, islands are also home to longstanding communities that have variously battled with the tyranny of distance from metropolitan centres, as well as the everyday challenges of climate change effects, and benefitted from their isolation from modern-day pressures. To what extent are islandscapes resilient to rapidly changing utilities, significances and ways of life wrought by tourism expansion? The vulnerability-resilience duality remains firmly entrenched in the discourse on islands where tourism has become prominent. Although tourism provides some resiliency, overall, islandscapes remain subject to externally driven fast and slow change that exercises an overwhelming influence. This anthology of articles previously published in the journal Shima explores emergent themes that describe how island peoples adapt and respond in localised cultural islandscapes as a consequence of tourism expansion. It is aimed at researchers in island studies, tourism, sustainability, human geography, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. The anthology will also be of interest to those with an abiding interest in the trajectories of islands and their peoples, particularly where tourism has come to shape islandscapes.
This book thinks through modernity and its representations by drawing in critical considerations of time and space. It explores the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity as constitutive of our worlds. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory of the phenomena, it discusses modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power over the past five centuries. Subjects of modernity considers the overlaps yet distinctions between modernity, modernism and modernisation, further imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology. Critically engaging historical anthropology, subaltern studies, de-colonial understandings, and post-colonial procedures, it at once offers an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively reassess critical perspectives, from South Asia to Latin America. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, post-colonial studies and cultural geography, among other subjects, finding adoption in different courses/seminars across disciplines.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons () open access license. Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology is about the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more creative forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth. The volume brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual and sound studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural and textual forms which it demonstrates through an accompanying DVD. The book and DVD make an argument for a necessary, critical development in anthropological ways of knowing that take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices.
The Chagos islanders were forcibly uprooted from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean between 1965 and 1973. This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It thus provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritius and Crawley (West Sussex), the six chapters explore Chagossians' challenging lives in Mauritius, the mobilisation of the community, reformulations of the homeland, the politics of culture in exile, onward migration to Crawley, and attempts to make a home in successive locations. Jeffery illuminates how displaced people romanticise their homeland through an exploration of changing representations of the Chagos Archipelago in song lyrics. Offering further ethnographic insights into the politics of culture, she shows how Chagossians in exile engage with contrasting conceptions of culture ranging from expectations of continuity and authenticity to enactments of change, loss and revival. The book will appeal particularly to social scientists specialising in the fields of migration studies, the anthropology of displacement, political and legal anthropology, African studies, Indian Ocean studies, and the anthropology of Britain, as well as to readers interested in the Chagossian case study. ;
African research played a major role in transforming the discipline of anthropology in the twentieth century. Ethnographic studies, in turn, had significant effects on the way imperial powers in Africa approached subject peoples. Ordering Africa provides the first comparative history of these processes. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, the transnational features of knowledge production, and the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. Specific chapters examine French West Africa, the Belgian and French Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian Northeast Africa, Kenya, and Equatorial Africa (Gabon) as well as developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A major collection of essays that will be welcomed by scholars interested in imperial history and the history of Africa.