Immaterial Bodies

Author: Lisa Blackman
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 144626887X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
In this unique contribution, Blackman focuses upon the affective capacities of bodies, human and non-human as well as addressing the challenges of the affective turn within the social sciences. Fresh and convincing, this book uncovers the paradoxes and tensions in work in affect studies by focusing on practices and experiences, including voice hearing, suggestion, hypnosis, telepathy, the placebo effect, rhythm and related phenomena. Questioning the traditional idea of mind over matter, as well as discussing the danger of setting up a false distinction between the two, this book makes for an invaluable addition within cultural theory and the recent turn to affect. In a powerful and engaging matter, Blackman discusses the immaterial body across the neurosciences, physiology, media and cultural studies, body studies, artwork, performance, psychology and psychoanalysis. Interdisciplinary in its core, this book is a must for everyone seeking a dynamic and thought provoking analysis of culture and communication today.

Spirited Politics

Author: Kenneth M. George
Publisher: SEAP Publications
ISBN: 9780877277378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Introduction : Religion, the nation, and the predicaments of public life in Southeast Asia / Kenneth M. George and Andrew C. Willford -- The priestess and the politician : enunciating Filipino cultural nationalism through Mt. Banahaw / Smita Lahiri -- The modernist vision from below : Malaysian Hinduism and the "way of prayers" / Andrew C. Willford -- Fraudulent and dangerous popular religiosity in the public sphere : moral campaigns to prohibit, reform, and demystify Thai spirit mediums / Erick White -- Islam and gender politics in late New Order Indonesia / Suzanne Brenner -- A sixth religion? : Confucianism and the negotiation of Indonesian-Chinese identity under the Pancasila state / Andrew J. Abalahin -- Relocating reciprocity : politics and the transformation of Thai funerals / Thamora Fishel -- Immaterial culture : "idolatry" in the lowland Philippines / Fenella Cannell -- Picturing Aceh : violence, religion, and a painter's tale / Kenneth M. George.

Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage

Author: Blanca de-Miguel-Molina
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030768821
Category : Cultural property
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
This open access book offers an interdisciplinary perspective and presents various case studies on music as ICH, highlighting the importance and functionality of music to stimulating social innovation and entrepreneurship., Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) covers the traditions or living expressions proposed by the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in five areas, including music. To understand the relationship between immaterial and material uses and inherent cultural landscapes, this open access book analyzes the symbolic, political, and economic dimensions of music. The authors highlight the continuity and current functionality of these artistic forms of expression as well as their lively and changing character in continuous transformation. Topics include the economic value and impact of music, strategies for social innovation in the music sector, music management, and public policies to promote cultural and creative industries. [Resumen de la editorial]

An Archaeology of the Immaterial

Author: Victor Buchli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317502132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
An Archaeology of the Immaterial examines a highly significant but poorly understood aspect of material culture studies: the active rejection of the material world. Buchli argues that this is evident in a number of cultural projects, including anti-consumerism and asceticism, as well as other attempts to transcend material circumstances. Exploring the cultural work which can be achieved when the material is rejected, and the social effects of these ‘dematerialisations’, this book situates the way some people disengage from the world as a specific kind of physical engagement which has profound implications for our understanding of personhood and materiality. Using case studies which range widely in time over Western societies and the technologies of materialising the immaterial, from icons to the scanning tunnelling microscope and 3-D printing, Buchli addresses the significance of immateriality for our own economics, cultural perceptions, and emerging forms of social inclusion and exclusion. An Archaeology of the Immaterial is thus an important and innovative contribution to material cultural studies which demonstrates that the making of the immaterial is, like the making of the material, a profoundly powerful operation which works to exert social control and delineate the borders of the imaginable and the enfranchised.

Stuff

Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745654967
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.

Practical Considerations for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

Author: Michelle L. Stefano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000412385
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Practical Considerations for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage examines theoretical issues relating to intangible cultural heritage policy and practice, whilst also proposing practical ways to facilitate the safeguarding of such heritage. Providing guidelines for best practice that take into account the constraints of the UNESCO-ICH paradigm, Stefano examines the principles and practices of two alternative and largely non-UNESCO frameworks for sustaining living cultural traditions: the philosophy of ecomuseology, and the discipline of public folklore in the context of the U.S. Arguing that they offer more collaborative, equitable, and effective ways forward for safeguarding ICH, Stefano demonstrates how they can address the limitations of the UNESCO-ICH paradigm. Importantly, the book offers a personal perspective, grounded in the author’s public sector work, which allows the ICH discourse to move beyond critical analysis and explore realistic, alternative ways in which ICH can be collaboratively and equitably safeguarded. Practical Considerations for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage proposes guidelines for professionals, researchers, and communities that foster safeguarding approaches that are as unique and nuanced as ICH expressions themselves. The interdisciplinary nature of the book will ensure that it is useful to those interested in community-led ICH safeguarding, as well as the impacts of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention, in diverse geographic, political, economic, and sociocultural contexts.

Anthropological Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage

Author: Lourdes Arizpe
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3319008552
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
A decade after the approval of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), the concept has gained wide acceptance at the local, national and international levels. Communities are recognizing and celebrating their Intangible Heritage; governments are devoting important efforts to the construction of national inventories; and anthropologists and professionals from different disciplines are forming a new field of study. The ten chapters of this book include the peer-reviewed papers of the First Planning Meeting of the International Social Science Council’s Commission on Research on ICH, which was held at the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias (UNAM) in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 2012. The papers are based on fieldwork and direct involvement in assessing and reconceptualizing the outcomes of the UNESCO Convention. The report in Appendix 1 highlights the main points raised during the sessions.

Intangible Cultural Heritage in International Law

Author: Lucas Lixinski
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199679509
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Intangible cultural heritage is the traditional practices, expressions, knowledge, and skills that form part of a community's culture. It is protected by a 2003 UNESCO Convention, and by several regional and national instruments. This book analyses its legal protection, including from within human rights, intellectual property, and contract law.

Materiality

Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386712
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human. Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift

Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England

Author: Daniel Wakelin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009100580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.