Astonishment And Evocation

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

Organised around the theme of beauty, this innovative collection offers insight into the development of anthropological thinking on art, aesthetics and creativity in recent years. The volume incorporates current work on perception and generative processes, and seeks to move beyond a purely aesthetic and relativist stance. The chapters invite readers to consider how people sense and seek out beauty, whether through acts of human creativity and production; through sensory experience of sound, light or touch, or experiencing architecture; visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings; experiencing the environment through ‘places of outstanding natural beauty’; or through cooperative action, machine-engineering or designing for the future.

World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by non-Western filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalization. With case studies of essayistic works by John Akomfrah, Nguyen Trinh Thi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, amongst many others, and with a photo-essay by Trinh T. Min-ha and a discussion of Frances Calvert's work, it expands current research on the essay film beyond canonical filmmakers and frameworks, and presents transnational perspectives on what is becoming a global film practice.

Images have become an integral part of the political regulation of migration: they help produce categories of legality versus illegality, foster stereotypes, and mobilize political convictions. Yet how are we to understand the relationship between these images and the political in the discourse surrounding migration? How can we, as anthropologists, migration scholars, or documentary filmmakers visually represent people who are excluded from political representation? And how can such visual representations gain political momentum? This volume not only considers the images that circulate with reference to migrants or draw attention to those that accompany, show, or conceal them. The book explores the phenomena of migration with the help of images. It offers an in-depth analysis of the documentary approaches of Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens, Bouchra Khalili, Silvain George, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Alex Rivera, and Rania Stepha, which evoke the particularities of migrant lifeworlds and examine urgent questions regarding the interrelations between politics and poetics, mobility and mediation, and the ethics of probability and possibility. The author also discusses his own cinematic practice in the making of Tell Me When (2011), A Tale of Two Islands (2012), and Intimate Distance (2015), a trilogy of films that explore the potential to communicate the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration.

This festschrift is situated within the contexts of the 'Writing Culture' debate, the 'Rhetoric Culture' project, and the legacy of anthropologist Stephen Tyler's work on language and representation. While Writing Culture (1986) alerted readers to the power of ethnographers over their field, Writing in the Field alerts readers to the power of the field over its ethnographers. Rather than reprise familiar debates about writing and representation, the book's individual chapters elucidate how anthropological fieldwork is a highly fraught, provisional, and incomplete practice enmeshed in the gaps between self and the other. The book's emphasis on the concepts of pathos, epiphany, and dissociation is developed through essays that are personal, yet not merely subjective, for they draw on and contribute to deep traditions of thinking about culture and rhetoric. (Series: Ethnologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 24) *** "This fine collection of essays is a fitting tribute to the positive influence of Stephen Tyler, an original and influential anthropologist of protean gifts." - E. Douglas Lewis, School of Social and Political Sciences, U. of MelbourneÃ?Â?

Filming the Gods examines the role and depiction of religion in Indian cinema, showing that the relationship between the modern and the traditional in contemporary India is not exotic, but part of everyday life. Concentrating mainly on the Hindi cinema of Mumbai, Bollywood, it also discusses India's other cinemas. Rachel Dwyer's lively discussion encompasses the mythological genre which continues India's long tradition of retelling Hindu myths and legends, drawing on sources such as the national epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; the devotional genre, which flourished at the height of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 40s; and the films made in Bombay that depict India's Islamicate culture, including the historical, the courtesan film and the 'Muslim social' genre. Filming the Gods also examines the presence of the religious across other genres and how cinema represents religious communities and their beliefs and practices. It draws on interviews with film stars, directors and producers as well as popular fiction, fan magazines and the films themselves. As a result, Filming the Gods is a both a guide to the study of film in religious culture as well as a historical overview of Indian religious film.

Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes—particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters—Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace’s famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be "surprised by sin" in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton’s epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller’s book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

Volume 1b in Brill's Josephus Project contains Book 2 of Josephus' Judean War (translation and commentary). This book deals with a period of enormous consequence: from King Herod's death (4 BCE) to the first phase of the war against Rome (66 CE). The commentary aims at a balance between historical and literary issues.