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New Books

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Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards (eds)
Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame
2009, Ashgate
Lelia Green
The Internet. An Introduction to New Media
2010, Berg Publishers
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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Tim Ingold (ed)
Redrawing Anthropology. Materials, Movements, Lines
2011, Ashgate

Why should anthropologists draw? The answer proposed in this groundbreaking volume is that drawing uniquely brings together ways of making, observing and describing. In twelve chapters, a team of authors from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia explore the potential of a graphic anthropology to change the way we think about creativity and perception, to grasp the dynamics of improvisatory practice, and to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the flows of materials involved in the generation of things.
Drawing on expertise in fields ranging from craftwork, martial arts, and dance to observational cinema and experimental film, they ask what it means to follow materials, to learn movements and to draw lines. Along the way, they contribute to key debates on what happens in making, the relation between design and performance, how people acquire bodily skills, the place of movement in human self-awareness, the relation between walking and imagination, and the perception of time.
This book will appeal not just to social, cultural and visual anthropologists but to archaeologists and students of material culture, as well as to scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences with interests in perception, creativity and material culture.

Contents: Preface; Introduction, Tim Ingold; Materials in making, Stephanie Bunn; Practice drawing writing object, Lesley McFadyen; Networks of objects, meshworks of things, Carl Knappett; Thinking through movement: practising martial arts and writing ethnography, Rupert Cox; Learning the 'banana tree': self-modification through movement, Greg Downey; Performing precision and the limits of observation, Brenda Farnell and Robert N. Wood; The imaginative consciousness of movement: linear quality, kinaesthesia, language and life, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone; Beyond A to B, Griet Scheldeman; Drawing with our feet (and trampling the maps): walking with video as a graphic anthropology, Sarah Pink; 'Both created and discovered': the case for reverie and play in a redrawn anthropology, Amanda Ravetz; Expanded visions: rethinking anthropological research and representation through experimental film, Arnd Schneider; Index.

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Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (eds)
Made do Be Seen. Perspecitves on the History of Visual Anthropology
2011, University of Chicago Press

Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more.
The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.


 
Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright
Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice
2010, Berg Publishers

Between Art and Anthropology provides new and challenging arguments for considering contemporary art and anthropology in terms of fieldwork practice. Artists and anthropologists share a set of common practices that raise similar ethical issues, which the authors explore in depth for the first time.
The book presents a strong argument for encouraging artists and anthropologists to learn directly from each other\'s practices \'in the field\'. It goes beyond the so-called \'ethnographic turn\' of much contemporary art and the \'crisis of representation\' in anthropology, in productively exploring the implications of the new anthropology of the senses, and ethical issues, for future art-anthropology collaborations.
The contributors to this exciting volume consider the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Suzanne Lacy, Marcus Coates, Cameron Jamie, and Mohini Chandra. With cutting-edge essays from a range of key thinkers such as acclaimed art critic Lucy R. Lippard, and distinguished anthropologists George E. Marcus and Steve Feld, Between Art and Anthropology will be essential reading for students, artists and scholars across a number of fields.


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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.


 
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.