Body Arts and Modernity - Softcover

Elizabeth Ewart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907774041 ISBN 13: 9781907774041

Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity? In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed 'traditions' of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film. The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the 'Other', and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from Amazonia, Indonesia, Africa and Australasia, this volume shows how bodily presentation plays a fundamental role in contemporary identity politics in tension with encompassing national and global stereotypes, which may in turn both constrain and empower local traditions. CONTENTS Chapter 1: Body arts and modernity: an introduction, Chapter 2: Ski masks,veils, nose-rings and feathers: identity on the frontlines of modernity; Chapter 3: Black paint, red paint and a wristwatch: the aesthetics of modernity among the Panará in Central Brazil; Chapter 4: Clothing as acculturation in Peruvian Amazonia; Chapter 5: Body art and modernity: south-east Nuba; Chapter 6: From self-decoration to self-fashioning: Orientalism as backward progress among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea; Chapter 7: Lipsticked brides and powdered children: cosmetics and the allure of modernity in an eastern Indonesian village; Chapter 8: Encounters on the surface of life: t-shirts and visual analogy in South Auckland; Chapter 9: Decorated being in Huli: parleying with paint; Chapter 10: Island dress that belongs to us all : mission dresses and the innovation of tradition in Vanuatu.

About this title

About the Author

EDITORS: Elizabeth Ewart is university lecturer in the anthropology of Lowland South America at the University of Oxford. Her fieldwork is with Panara people in Central Brazil. Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University's museum of anthropology and world archaeology. His original fieldwork was with the Wahgi people in Highlands New Guinea. His subsequent career was as an anthropologist and curator at the British Museum. CONTRIBUTORS: Catherine Allerton, Lissant Bolton, Chloe Colchester, Beth Conklin, James C. Faris, Laurence Goldman, Peter Gow, Bruce Knauft.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1907774041
• ISBN 13: 9781907774041
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194
• Editor: Elizabeth Ewart, Michael O'Hanlon