Christine Jones

Elizabeth Hallam

Wide reading is essential, not only for native speakers of English, but also for learners of English. Practice Makes Perfect 1 features 14 carefully-structured, self-contained units written in a restricted vocabulary focusing mainly on the first 1000 most-commonly-used words in English.

High Interest Non-Fiction Reading with Comprehension Practice

Practice Makes Perfect 1

The wild success of the traveling Body Worlds exhibition is testimony to the powerful allure that human bodies can have when opened up for display in gallery spaces. But while anatomy museums have shown their visitors much about bodies, they themselves are something of an obscure phenomenon, with their incredible technological developments and complex uses of visual images and the flesh itself remaining largely under researched. This book investigates anatomy museums in Western settings, revealing how they have operated in the often passionate pursuit of knowledge that inspires both fascination and fear. Elizabeth Hallam explores these museums, past and present, showing how they display the human body—whether naked, stripped of skin, completely dissected, or rendered in the form of drawings, three-dimensional models, x-rays, or films. She identifies within anatomy museums a diverse array of related issues—from the representation of deceased bodies in art to the aesthetics of science, from body donation to techniques for preserving corpses and ritualized practices for disposing of the dead. Probing these matters through in-depth study, Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history of the spaces human bodies are made to occupy when displayed after death.

Death and the Body Displayed

Anatomy Museum

Tim Ingold

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression.

Creativity and Cultural Improvisation

Jenny Hockey

- How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies? - How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories? - Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making? Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending. Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being ‘invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.

Death, Memory and Material Culture

Examines the reigns of Henry II, Richard I, and King John, and discusses the Magna Carta, the Crusades, and life in twelfth-century England

The Plantagenet Chronicles

Brian Street

Cultural Encounters examines how 'otherness' has been constituted, communicated and transformed in cultural representation. Covering a diverse range of media including film, TV, advertisements, video, photographs, painting, novels, poetry, newspapers and material objects, the contributors, who include Ludmilla Jordanova and Ivan Karp, explore the cultural politics of Europe's encounters with Brazil, India, Israel, Australia and Africa, examining the ways in which visual and textual art forms operate in their treatment of cultural difference.

Representing Otherness

Cultural Encounters

Late20th century firefighter Annabel Lowell emerges from a forest fire into earthquake ravaged 1906 San Francisco where she meets fireman Cole Brady, and hunkish, courageous hero who fans the flames of her heart. Original.

Yesterday's Flame

Charles West

Capetian France 987-1328 is an authoritative overview of the country's development across four centuries, with a focus on changes to the political, religious, social and cultural climate during this period. When Hugh Capet took the throne of France in 987, his powers were weak and insignificant, but from an inauspicious beginning he founded a dynasty that was to last over 300 years and that came to dominate western Europe. This carefully updated third edition draws extensively on new scholarship that has emerged since the previous edition. It contains images, maps, family trees and a discussion of key sources, allowing the reader to develop a strong contextual knowledge as well as a greater connection with the material world of the period. Maintaining a balance between a compelling narrative and an in-depth examination of central themes of the age, Capetian France987-1328 provides a comprehensive account of this significant era within France's history and is essential reading for all students of medieval France and Europe. mp;lt;/EM>provides a comprehensive account of this significant era within France's history and is essential reading for all students of medieval France and Europe.

Capetian France 987-1328

Glennys Howarth

Beyond the Body presents a new and sophisticated approach to death, dying and bereavement, and the sociology of the body. The authors challenge existing theories that put the body at the centre of identity. They go 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing. Chapters draw together a wide range of empirical data, including cross-cultural case studies and fieldwork to examine both the management of the corpse and the construction of the 'soul' or 'spirit' by focusing on the work of: *undertakers *embalmers *coroners *clergy *clairvoyants *exorcists *bereavement counsellors.

Death and Social Identity

Beyond the Body

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relationship between creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression.

Anatomy museums around the world showcase preserved corpses in service of education and medical advancement, but they are little-known and have been largely hidden from the public eye. Elizabeth Hallam here investigates the anatomy museum and how it reveals the fascination and fears that surround the dead body in Western societies. Hallam explores the history of these museums and how they operate in the current cultural environment. Their regulated access increasingly clashes with evolving public mores toward the exposed body, as demonstrated by the international popularity of the Body Worlds exhibition. The book examines such related topics as artistic works that employ the images of dead bodies and the larger ongoing debate over the disposal of corpses. Issues such as aesthetics and science, organ and body donations, and the dead body in Western religion and ritual are also discussed here in fascinating depth. The Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history that investigates the ideas of preservation, human rituals of death, and the spaces that our bodies occupy in this life and beyond.

The Anatomy Museum

Samuel J. M. M. Alberti

This title brings together curators and scholars to open up new perspectives on the past, present and future of medical museums in Europe and North America.

Past, Present, Future

Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms, the book calls this distinction into question, examining the implications for our understanding of materials, design and creativity. Grounding their arguments in case studies from different regions and historical periods, the contributors to this volume show how making and growing give rise to co-produced and mutually modifying organisms and artefacts, including human persons. They attend to the properties of materials and to the forms of knowledge and sensory experience involved in these processes, and explore the dynamics of making and undoing, growing and decomposition. The book will be of broad interest to scholars in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, history and sociology.

Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts

Making and Growing

In 987, when Hugh Capet took the throne of France, founding a dynasty which was to rule for over 300 years, his kingdom was weak and insignificant. But by 1100, the kingdom of France was beginning to dominate the cultural nd religious life of western Europe. In the centuries that followed, to scholars and to poets, to reforming churchmen and monks, to crusaders and the designers of churches, France was the hub of the universe. La douce France drew people like a magnet even though its kings were, until about 1200, comparatively insignificant figures. Then, thanks to the conquests and reforms of King Philip Augustus, France became a dominant force in political and economic terms as well, producing a saint-king, Louis IX, and in Philip IV, a ruler so powerful that he could dictate to popes and emperors. Spanning France's development across four centuries, Capetian France is a definitive book. This second edition has been carefully revised to take account of the very latest work, without losing the original book's popular balance between a compelling narrative and an fascinating examination of the period's main themes.

Elizabeth Hallam

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