In the 1830s, missionaries in French Polynesia sought to suppress the traditional art of tattooing, because they believed it to be a barbaric practice. More than 150 years later, tattooing is once again thriving in French Polynesia. This engrossing book documents the meaning of tattooing in contemporary French Polynesian society. As a permanent ...
This groundbreaking work takes a look at the contemporary cultural trends of tattooing, piercing, implanting, and branding as a quest for a transformative psychic experience. Color photos.
"Foreign Bodies" analyzes how our culture defines our naturally-evolved bodies. The author calls upon contemporary ways of understanding the body to explore forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The theory is then contrasted with the practice of the body as found in quite different kinds of language - the language of plastic ...
Ancient Maya and Egyptian cultures present evidence of similar concerns with body and self: monumental art depicts complex costume and standards of beauty, and ornaments, cosmetics, and items of dress used by the living are recovered in tombs in which the bodies of the dead were arrayed. Despite the centrality of such practices, these two ...
Focusing on Spanish culture and society in the second half of the Twentieth century, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies traverses a variety of disciplines: literature, film studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and history, to examine crucial moments of cultural transition. Beginning with an analysis of the period of autarky -- Spain's ...
In this new book, the philosopher and critic Alphonso Lingis extends a question that has occupied him throughout his career: how are we to understand the strangeness of our bodies? Weaving together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Lingis explores how the body might be more richly understood in terms of parts. Moving from ethics to ...
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, Andre Breton asked, 'Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?'. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the ...
"The Other Within" aims to disclose the blessings of outsider-hood, the many gifts and insights contributed to culture by the marginalized and outcast. Unlike studies that focus on the plight of the outsider, author Daniel Deardorff tells us that to be cast down and out of the consensus-worldview affords a difficult yet significant opportunity: to ...
Of the Presence of the Body gathers nine original essays by eminent scholars in the fields of dance and performance studies. Its focus is the historical, cultural and political contexts that inform choreographic and dance practices and critical readings of dance - in other words, how dance operates as critical discourse. The question that runs ...
Hailed by scholars as a major breakthrough in the field of myth and psychology, this brilliant new study by Daniel Deardorff proposes that a certain poetic consciousness is generated by those who inhabit societal and psychic margins. This consciousness is identified as 'Trickster-wisdom', a subversive virtue that provides creative and innovative ...
Focusing on Spanish culture and society in the second half of the Twentieth century, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies traverses a variety of disciplines: literature, film studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and history, to examine crucial moments of cultural transition. Beginning with an analysis of the period of autarky -- Spain's ...
Contemporary psychoanalysis has devoted so much of its attention to the relational and interpersonal aspects of psychic life that questions have begun to emerge regarding the place of the body and bodily experience in our psychological worlds. Relational Perspectives on the Body addresses these questions in exemplary fashion. Contemporary ...
This collection of essays explores the study of bodily reality - not as a natural or given, but as a substantial, vital constituent of cultural experience. Contributors look at bodies engaged in practices as varied as pageantry, physical education, festivals and exhibitions, tourism, and social and theatrical dance. They succeed in bringing these ...
In Telling Flesh , Vicki Kirby addresses what may be the major theoretical issue in both the social sciences and feminist theory, namely the nature/culture dualism. Her particular focus is on postmodern approaches to corporeality. Kirby explores how these approaches look at the body in terms of meaning, and she argues that they result in the ...
This groundbreaking work explores masculinity and the body within sports. Sports continue to retain expectations for presentations of specific forms of masculinity. The body is central to these presentations. These everyday bodily performances are rehearsed and performed either successfully or unsuccessfully - and the consequences of these actions ...
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