Ethnomimesis

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by how we create and perpetuate our representations of folklife and culture. Ethnomimesis is Robert Cantwell's word for the process by which we take cultural influences, traditions, and practices to ourselves and then manifest them to others. Ethnomimesis is an element of ordinary social communication, but springing out of it, too, is that extraordinary summoning up that produces our literature, our art, and our music. In the broadest sense, ethnomimesis is the representation of culture. Using such diverse cultural artifacts as King Lear and an eighteenth-century English manor garden to deepen our understanding of ethnomimesis, Cantwell then explores at length the representation of culture in our national museum, the Smithsonian, focusing especially on the Festival of American Folklife. Like many other such exhibitions, the Festival enacts presentations of culture across the boundaries of rank and class, race and ethnicity, gender and the life cycle. Like the concept of 'folklife' itself, Cantwell argues, the Festival stands where ethnomimesis finds its creative source, at the cultural frontier between self and other. That boundary, and the energy that accumulates there, runs through the many, varied 'exhibits' of this book.

Demonstrating the intimate connections among our public, political, and personal lives, these essays by Robert Cantwell explore the vernacular culture of everyday life. A keen and innovative observer of American culture, Cantwell casts a broad and penetrating intelligence over the cultural functioning of popular texts, artifacts, and performers, examining how cultural practices become performances and how performances become artifacts endowed with new meaning through the transformative acts of imagination. Cantwell's points of departure range from the visual and the literary--a photograph of Woody Guthrie, or a poem by John Keats--to major cultural exhibitions such as the World's Columbian Exposition. In all these domains, he unravels the implications for community and cultural life of a continual migration, transformation, and reformulation of cultural content.

This truly interdisciplinary volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore changes in the significance of media and communication in the era of pandemic. The book answers two interrelated questions: how media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how media and communication were effectively studied during this time. The book presents changes in media and communication in three areas: media production, media content, and media usage contexts. It then describes the theoretical and practical, methodological, technical, organizational, and ethical challenges in conducting research in circumstances of sudden change in research conditions, emergency situations and developing crises. Drawing on various theoretical studies and empirical research, the volume illustrates the principles and results of applying diverse research methods to the changing role of media in a pandemic and offers good practices and guidance to address the problems in implementing research projects in a time of sudden difficulties and challenges. This diverse and interdisciplinary book will be of significance to scholars and researchers in media studies, communication studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a more dynamic sense of embodied and performed engagement with places. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography on performance, invented traditions, constructed places and traveling cultures. Contributions highlight the often contradictory, contested and paradoxical constructions of landscape and community involved both in tourist attractions and among tourists themselves. The collection examines many different practices, ranging from the energetic pursuit of adventure holidays to the reading of holiday brochures. It illustrates different techniques of seeing the landscape and a variety of ways of creating and performing the local. Chapters thus demonstrate the mutual entanglement of practices, images, conventions, and creativity. They chart these global flows of people, texts, images, and artefacts. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia.

This volume provides different disciplinary and cultural perspectives on the ethical and political ramifications of the incommensurable yet inextricable relationships among law, justice, and power.

As the scholarly and interdisciplinary study of human/animal relations becomes crucial to the urgent questions of our time, notably in relation to environmental crisis, this collection explores the inner tensions within the relatively new and broad field of animal studies. This provides a platform for the latest critical thinking on the condition and experience of animals. The volume is structured around four sections: engaging theory doing critical animal studies critical animal studies and anti-capitalism contesting the human, liberating the animal: veganism and activism. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies demonstrates the centrality of the contribution of critical animal studies to vitally important contemporary debates and considers future directions for the field. This edited collection will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, gender studies, psychology, geography, and social work.

In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo