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New Books

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Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Bhaumik
Visual Sense, A Cultural Reader
Berg Publishers, 2008
Helen J. Chatterjee (ed)
Touch in Museums. Policy and Practice in Object Handing
Berg Publishers, 2008
Rossella Ragazzi
Walking on Uneven Paths.
The Transcultural Experience of Children Entering Europe in the Years 2000

2009, Peter Lang
Terence Wright
Visual Impact. Culture and the Meaning of Images
Berg Publishers, 2008
Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (eds)
Still Moving. Between Cinema and Photography
Duke University Press
2feb
Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (eds)
The Cinema of Robert Gardner
Berg Publisher, 2007
 

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Paul Henley
The Adventure of the Real. Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema
2010, Chiacago University Press

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. Exhaustively researched yet elegantly written, The Adventure of the Real is the first comprehensive analysis of his practical filmmaking methods.
Rouch developed these methods while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvisation by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, Paul Henley reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch’s pioneering career, Henley examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch’s cinematographic legacy. Featuring over one hundred and fifty images, The Adventure of the Real is an essential introduction to Rouch’s work.


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Karen Strassler
Refracted Visions. Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java
2010, Duke University Press

A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.
Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.


 
Lelia Green
The Internet. An Introduction to New Media
2010, Berg Publishers

Life without the internet, a very new technology, seems almost unimaginable for most people in western nations. Today the internet is intrinsic to media and communications, entertainment, politics, defence, business, banking, education and administrative systems as well as to social interaction. The Internet disentangles this extraordinarily complex information and communication technology from its place in our daily lives, allowing it to be examined anew.

Technology has historically been shaped by governmental, military and commercial requirements, but the development of the internet is increasingly driven by its users. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many other emerging applications are shifting the way we express ourselves, communicate with our friends, and even engage with global politics. At the same time three-quarters of the world's population remain effectively excluded from the internet.


 
Sarah Pink
Doing Sensory Ethnography
2010, Sage Publications

Doing Sensory Ethnography responds to a recent an explosion of interest in the senses across the social sciences.
In this important and groundbreaking book, Sarah Pink suggests re-thinking the ethnographic process through reflexive attention to what she terms the \'sensoriality\' of the experience, practice, and knowledge of both researchers and those who participate in their research. The book provides an accessible analysis of the theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of doing sensory ethnography, drawing on examples and case studies from the growing literature on sensory ethnographic studies and from the author\'s own work.
Doing Sensory Ethnography is the first book to concentrate on outlining a sensory ethnographic methodology. It will be of great interest to researchers and students from all disciplines interested in enriching their ethnographic work through a focus on the senses.



 


 
Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz
Observational Cinema. Anthropology, Film, nd the Exploration of Social Life
2009, Indiana University Press

Once hailed as a radical breakthrough in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, observational cinema has been criticized for a supposedly detached camera that objectifies and dehumanizes the subjects of its gaze. Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz provide the first critical history and in-depth appraisal of this movement, examining key works, filmmakers, and theorists, from André Bazin and the Italian neorealists, to American documentary films of the 1960s, to extended discussions of the ethnographic films of Herb Di Gioia, David Hancock, and David MacDougall. They make a new case for the importance of observational work in an emerging experimental anthropology, arguing that this medium exemplifies a non-textual anthropology that is both analytically rigorous and epistemologically challenging.