Download or read book Opera as Anthropology written by Vlado Kotnik and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contemplates the relationship between opera and anthropology. It rests on the following central arguments: on the one hand, opera is quite a new and “exotic” topic for anthropologists, while, on the other, anthropology is still perceived as an unusual approach to opera. Both initial arguments are indicative of the current situation of the relationship between anthropological discipline and opera research. The book introduces the work of anthropologists and ethnographers whose personal and professional affinity for opera has been explicated in their academic and biographical accounts. Anthropological, ethnological, ethnographic, and semiotic accounts of opera by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, William O. Beeman, Denis Laborde, Paul Atkinson, and Philippe-Joseph Salazar establish that opera can be a pertinent object of anthropological interest, ethnographic investigation, cultural analysis, and historical reflection. By touching on opera not merely as a musical, aesthetic, or artistic category, but as a social, cultural, historical, and transnational phenomenon that, over the last four centuries, has significantly influenced and reflected the identity of Western culture and society, this monograph suggests that opera and anthropology no longer need be alien to one another.
Download or read book Opera Power and Ideology written by Vlado Kotnik and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera is able to offer enchanting performance sites, in which people create and experience glamorous or ecstatic imagined worlds, but behind this picture we find a real social organization embraced by reality, which makes opera's world and its history accessible for ethnographic enquiry, historical reflection and cultural analysis. This book therefore presents the author's original anthropological study, which shows complex historical, socio-cultural, political, economic, ideological, academic and ethnographic facets of opera culture in Slovenia, including the field sites of both Slovenian national opera houses, in Ljubljana and Maribor. The study explicates how social representations of opera are produced and enacted by different social agents involved within the Slovenian national operatic habitus, and how opera is used as an idealized vision of nationhood and national identity in a provincial society.
Download or read book Everyday Arias written by Paul Atkinson and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2006 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Atkinson explores the remarkable world of opera through his fieldwork with the internationally known Welsh National Opera company. In order to show us how cultural phenomena are produced and enacted, he takes us on stage and behind the scenes into the collective social action that goes into the realization of an opera. The author demonstrates how artistic interpretation is translated into the routine work of the rehearsal studio and the theatre, and how producers negotiate a practical reality with her or his performers to ultimately create extraordinary performances through the mundane, everyday work that makes them possible. The author calls for a sustained investigation of cultural phenomena, not based solely on textual analysis but on the importance of collective work and social organization. Atkinson's work will appeal to anthropologists and sociologists who study the performance arts, as well as to those engaged in theatre arts, opera and music.
Download or read book Divine Threads written by April Liu and published by . This book was released on 2019-01-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 100 years, Vancouver has been home to a vibrant and thriving Cantonese opera scene. As a performance art carried out by transient troupes, it is an ephemeral medium that rarely leaves a trace in the historic records. However, an extraordinary treasure trove of early 20th-century Cantonese opera costumes, props, and stage dressings made its way to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC. In the first book-length study of this little known collection, April Liu retraces the arduous journeys of early Cantonese opera troupes who began arriving along the west coast of North America during the mid-19th century. A close examination of the costumes and props reveal the moving songs, stories, performances, and ritual practices of early Chinese migrant communities who struggled to make a home in a foreign and often hostile land.
Download or read book Opera in a Multicultural World written by Mary Ingraham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through historical and contemporary examples, this book critically explores the relevance and expressions of multicultural representation in western European operatic genres in the modern world. It reveals their approaches to reflecting identity, transmitting meaning, and inspiring creation, as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that occur across the time and place(s) of their performance. This collection brings academic researchers in opera studies into conversation with previously unheard voices of performers, critics, and creators to speak to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the genre. Together, they deliver a powerful critique of the perpetuation of the values and practices of dominant cultures in operatic representations of intercultural encounters. Essays accordingly cross methodological boundaries in order to focus on a central issue in the emerging field of coloniality: the hierarchies of social and political power that include the legacy of racialized practices. In theorizing coloniality through intercultural exchange in opera, authors explore a range of topics and case studies that involve immigrant, indigenous, exoticist, and other cultural representations and consider a broad repertoire that includes lesser-known Canadian operas, Chinese- and African-American performances, as well as works by Haydn, Strauss, Puccini, and Wagner, and in performances spanning three continents and over two centuries. In these ways, the collection contributes to the development of a more integrated understanding of the interdisciplinary fields inherent in opera, including musicology, sociology, anthropology, and others connected to Theatre, Gender, and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book Opera and the City written by Andrea Goldman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
Download or read book Puppets Gods and Brands written by Teri J. Silvio and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere—in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own—from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers—and how people interact with them—in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as “playing God.” Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.
Download or read book Theological Anthropology in Mozart s La clemenza di Tito written by Steffen Lösel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart’s late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book’s thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera’s advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart’s operatic work.
Download or read book Huju written by Jonathan P. J. Stock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Jonathan Stock is an authority on Chinese music, with previous books on Chinese flute and violin solos and Abing, a twentieth-century composer. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, Stock's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai allows him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and the first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. He next focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a specially 'musical' reading of gendered performance. Further chapters reverse conventional ethnomusicological arguments that music constructs place by looking at how Shanghai's institutions before 1949 shaped the environment within which troupes developed new dramatic materials and competed for work. In considering reforms post-1949, the author shows how the infusion of explicit political content actually weakened the expressive impact of these dramas. Finally, developments since 1980 are reviewed. The book includes songs and illustrations of performance styles. An innovative combination of urban and historical ethnomusicology, the book's findings will engage the historian of China and general scholar of music alike.
Download or read book Anthropology Mass Communication written by Mark Allen Peterson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media productio and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists. A former Washington D.C. journalist, Mark Allan Peterson is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He has published numerous articles on American, South Asian and Middle Eastern media, and has taught courses on anthropological approaches to media t at he American University in Cairo, the University of Hamburg, and Georgetown University.
Download or read book Understanding the Women of Mozart s Operas written by Kristi Brown-Montesano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni’s story the only one—or even the most interesting one—in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it’s Mozart’s men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations. Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.
Download or read book Time and the Other written by Johannes Fabian and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).
Download or read book Cultural Anthropology written by Richard H. Robbins and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with SAGE Publishing! In a first-of-its-kind format, Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach is organized by problems and questions rather than topics, creating a natural discussion of traditional anthropological concerns such as kinship, caste, gender roles, and religion. This brief text promotes critical thinking through meaningful exercises, case studies, and simulations. Students will learn how to analyze their own culture and gain the tools to understand the cultures of other societies. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly updated and reorganized to emphasize contemporary issues around social and economic inequality, gender identity, and more. Included with this title: The password-protected Instructor Resource Site (formally known as SAGE Edge) offers access to all text-specific resources, including a test bank and editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides.
Download or read book Opera and Sovereignty written by Martha Feldman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in light of the period’s social and political upheavals. Taking an anthropological approach to European music that’s as bold as it is unusual, Martha Feldman traces Italian opera’s shift from a mythical assertion of sovereignty, with its festive forms and rituals, to a dramatic vehicle that increasingly questioned absolute ideals. She situates these transformations against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Italian culture to show how opera seria both reflected and affected the struggles of rulers to maintain sovereignty in the face of a growing public sphere. In so doing, Feldman explains why the form had such great international success and how audience experiences of the period differed from ours today. Ambitiously interdisciplinary, Opera and Sovereignty will appeal not only to scholars of music and anthropology, but also to those interested in theater, dance, and the history of the Enlightenment.
Download or read book A Possible Anthropology written by Anand Pandian and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of intense uncertainty, social strife, and ecological upheaval, what does it take to envision the world as it yet may be? The field of anthropology, Anand Pandian argues, has resources essential for this critical and imaginative task. Anthropology is no stranger to injustice and exploitation. Still, its methods can reveal unseen dimensions of the world at hand and radical experience as the seed of a humanity yet to come. A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography of anthropologists at work: canonical figures like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, ethnographic storytellers like Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula K. Le Guin, contemporary scholars like Jane Guyer and Michael Jackson, and artists and indigenous activists inspired by the field. In their company, Pandian explores the moral and political horizons of anthropological inquiry, the creative and transformative potential of an experimental practice.
Download or read book Molecular Anthropology written by Morris Goodman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1962 at the Burg Wartenstein Symposium on "Classification and Human Evolution," Emile Zuckerkandl used the term "molecular anthropology" to characterize the study of primate phylogeny and human evolution through the genetic information contained in proteins and polynucleotides. Since that time, our knowledge of molecular evolution in primates and other organisms has grown considerably. The present volume examines this knowledge especially as it relates to the phyletic position of Homo sapiens in the order Primates and to the trends which shaped the direction of human evolution. Participants from the disciplines of protein and nucleotide chemistry, genetics, statistics, paleon tology, and physical anthropology held cross-disciplinary discussions and argued some of the major issues of molecular anthropology and the data upon which these arguments rest. Chief among these were the molecular clock controversy in hominoid evolution; the molecular evidence on phylogenetic relationships among primates; the evolution of gene expression regulation in primates; the relationship of fossil and molecular data in the Anthropoidea and other pri mates; the interpretation of the adaptive significance of evolutionary changes; and, finally, the impact on mankind of studies in molecular anthropology. Most of the papers in this volume were presented in a preliminary form at Symposium No. 65 on "Progress in Molecular Anthropology" held at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, from July 25 to August 1, 1975. These papers were subsequently revised and some additional papers related to the theme of the symposium were also contributed to this volume.
Download or read book Expanding American Anthropology 1945 1980 written by Alice Beck Kehoe and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines American anthropology's participation in the expansion of the social sciences after World War II. Anthropology itself expanded into diverse subfields at this time on the initiative of individuals. The Association of Senior Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) askes some of these individuals to give accounts of their personal inovations in this discipline which provides primary source material on the history of American anthropology.
