Felicia Hughes-Freeland

Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.

Dance Traditions and Change in Java

Embodied Communities

Kirsten Hastrup

Peter Loizos

David MacDougall

Terence Wright

André Singer

Alan Macfarlane

Christopher Pinney

James C. Faris

Keyan G. Tomaselli

Timothy Asch

Marcus Banks

Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology

Dai Vaughan

Wilton Martinez

Kathleen Kuehnast

Richard Chalfen

Homer Williams

Gary Seaman

This work examines the reasons why anthropologists have not used the camera as a research instrument or film as a means of communicating ethnographic knowledge. It suggests that images and words in this discipline operate on different logical levels; that they are hierarchically related; that whereas writings may encompass the images produced by film, the inverse of this cannot be true. The author argues for this position further by suggesting that the visual is to the written mode as "thin description" (giving a record of the form of behaviour) is to "thick description" (giving an account of meaning).

Film As Ethnography

Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth. Conference

How can media and performance studies take a place in the discipline of anthropology? IRitual, Performance, Mediademonstrates how individual inventiveness makes society a process of dynamic interaction between creativity and convention. Human beings perform their roles in accordance with the context of the situation--be it in theater, dance, or rites such as spirit invocation or pilgrimages--yet continue to creatively devise ways of extending their engagement with the situation. Case studies of human behavior in relation to contexts in which reality is more than that of everyday routines shows how people continue to actively construct the world in which they live, for the purpose of personal satisfaction and social advantage.

Ritual, Performance, Media

Routledge

Nickie Charles

In Practising Feminisms contributors drawn from a range of backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and social psychology, explore different ways of practising feminism and their effect on gendered identities. The contributors examine feminism and gender differences between different countries, various feminist practices, the call for the recognition of heterosexuality as a politicised identity and the practical role of feminism in nationalist struggles and finally methodological implications of feminist practices. They show women to be different, and that different structural influences come into play to make them different. But women are not so different that a feminist politics or understanding is invalid. Practising Feminisms is an important contribution to the neglected middle ground between post-modern deconstructions of difference and identity, and continued feminist concern with grounded power relations and the validity of experience.

Identity, Difference, Power

Practising Feminism

Felicia Hughes-Freeland

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