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India and Its Visual Cultures
India and Its Visual Cultures is a comprehensive mapping and analysis of contemporary cultural artefacts and visual cultures through different approaches—iconographic, social, political, religious and so on. This book covers various media and their histories by studying visual representational systems, production and consumption of media and culture-specific understandings. Crucial questions about the usage of media in research are also addressed in the book. In the selection of the subjects and objects of enquiry, there is a constant engagement with the popular and the everyday. The objects are studied with respect to their situatedness in urban space and everyday life. The five sections of the book focus on five aspects of visual culture: camera works, folk/artistry, market signs, pictorial politics and monumental landscapes. With attention to ethnographic detail and anthropology, each section brings an added dimension to the study of visible cultural forms.
Amritsar 1984
This book explores a traumatic event known throughout India as Operation Bluestar. During the Operation, the Indian army entered one of Sikhism’s most sacred shrines, the Darbar Sahib in the city of Amritsar, to dislodge militants who had taken shelter within. Among the many who died during Operation Bluestar was the militant leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who is now remembered and commemorated as a martyr. Sikhs revere their martyrs. Images and religious souvenirs of martyrs share space with posters and portraiture of the ten Sikh Gurus. The visual idiom is a key form of remembering the modern martyrs of Operation Bluestar. Despite the emotive imagery, a tension exists between the ne...
Supernatural Entertainments
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the...
Vegetarianism, Meat and Modernity in India
Never before in human history have vegetarianism and a plant-based economy been so closely associated with sustainability and the promise of tackling climate change. Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than in India, which is home to the largest number of vegetarians globally and where vegetarianism is intrinsic to Hinduism. India is often considered a global model for vegetarianism. However, in this book, which is the outcome of eight months of fieldwork conducted among vegetarian and non-vegetarian producers, traders, regulators and consumers, I show that the reality in India is quite different, with large sections of communities being meat-eaters. In 2011, vegetarian/veg/green and non...
Seeing South Asia
This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia a...
Religious Diversity in Asia
The religious landscape in Asia has long been diverse, with various forms of syncretic traditions and pragmatic practices continuously having been challenged by centrifugal forces of differentiation. This anthology explores representations and managements of religious diversity in Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and diaspora religions originating in these countries, seen through the lenses of history, identity, state, ritual and geography. In addition to presenting empirical cases, the chapters also address theoretical and methodological reflections using Asia as a laboratory for further comparative research of the relevance and use of 'religi...
Bonding with the Lord
Few other Hindu gods guide a regional consciousness, pervade walks of everyday life and define a collective psyche the way Lord Jagannath does in Odisha and its contiguous areas. Jagannath is metonymic of Odisha and the Odia way of life, arguably much more than any other god for a particular geography or its peoples. While not derecognising the historical and the spiritual aspects of Jagannath, Bonding with the Lord attempts to look at the deployment of Jagannath in contemporary cultural practices involving the sensorium in the widest sense. The project of a cultural Jagannath not only materialises him in people's everyday practices but also democratises scholarship on him. The expansion of the scope of research on Jagannath to cultural expressions in a more encompassing way rather than confining to 'elitist' religious/literary sources makes him an everyday presence and significantly enhances his sphere of influence. Jagannath's 'tribal' origin, his association with Buddhism and Jainism and his avatari status make him an all-encompassing, multilayered symbol and a treasure trove for multiple interpretations.
The Logic of Design Process
What is the logic of design process? Departing from this question, Tiago da Costa e Silva investigates the characteristic feature of every projective activity, for instance, in architecture, design, engineering design, and in the arts. In opposition to predominant views that understand design processes as mechanical and deterministic, this study, with the help of the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, characterizes design activities as continuous and serendipitous interplays of esthetic and abductive processes that define rules and manifest forms. Tiago da Costa e Silva concludes that invention and discovery, manifested in the form of processes of abduction, actively pervade every development in any given context of design process.
The Bombay Talkies Limited
„Bollywood“ – heute die produktivste Filmindustrie der Welt und für viele Europäer:innen Synonym für überlange, mit Tanz und Gesang durchsetzte Streifen. Nicht zuletzt die Assoziation mit Hollywood fördert darüber hinaus den Eindruck eines durchkommerzialisierten, oberflächlichen Kinos. Doch verdeckt eine solche Sicht den Blick auf die Anfänge der Filmproduktion in Bombay, dem heutigen Mumbai, wo 1934 die Bombay Talkies Ltd. entstanden sind, gegründet und geleitet von Himanshu Rai und dessen Frau Devika Rani. Während letztere einer der frühen Stars des indischen Kinos wurde, sorgte nicht zuletzt Rai dafür, dass die Filme zahlreiche sozialkritische Themen aufgriffen. Überdi...
Bilder guter Trauer
Der erste Tod ist der Tod des Anderen. Menschsein heißt deshalb immer auch trauern. Nach dem Sterben und dem toten Körper rückt die Trauer ins Blickfeld der kulturwissenschaftlichen Thanatologie. Dieses Buch zeigt Verbindungslinien zwischen drei Feldern auf, die zunächst weit voneinander entfernt zu liegen scheinen: psychologisch-psychiatrische Diskussionen um Trauer und psychische Gesundheit, Ethiken der Trauer, die die poststrukturalistische Philosophie und die Dekonstruktion entwerfen, sowie fototheoretische und fotokünstlerische Positionen, die einen Umgang mit Verlust suchen. An den jeweiligen Bildern guter Trauer entscheidet sich, ob Trauer als gemeinschaftsstiftend oder subversiv, als das Verhältnis zum verlorenen Anderen trennend oder bewahrend, als Erinnerung ermöglichend oder unterlaufend verstanden wird. Durch die historische Tiefenschärfe der Analysen tritt die politische Relevanz der Trauer für die Gegenwart hervor.
