visual cultures
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This volume addresses a subject central to both world archaeology and trans-cultural art history. Landscape has been a key theme in the last half-century at least in both disciplines, particularly in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural world, within archaeology. However, the representation of landscape has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the archaeologically accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed have a significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space in the visual sphere but were discovered within archaeological contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art and the construction of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk Road via Pompeii, this book emphasizes the importance of thinking about models of landscape in ancient art and also the value of comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic. Notably it focuses on questions of space, both actual and conceptual, including how space is configured through form and representation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller

This chapter critically examines the Materialist-Phenomenological Method for studying religion and the work of the sociologist of religion Manuel A. Vásquez. This method focuses on the study of embodied religious practices, visual cultures, vernacular idioms, and particular locales as these are studied according to historical and often ethnographic methods of analysis. The chapter interrogates Vásquez’s work More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, which proffers a “somatocentric” theory that aims to escape the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The chapter raises questions about Vásquez’s philosophical anthropology and shows how he repeats and reinforces the firewall separating the study of religion from reasons for studying it. In More than Belief, the chapter shows, one encounters the fact-value dualism that underwrites the ascetic ideal in religious studies, one so thoroughgoing that it prevents Vásquez from grasping the need to provide philosophical reasons to justify his theory.


2021 ◽  
pp. 162-210
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer

Chapter 4 moves from France to England, where the growth of fervent evangelical Protestantism and a massive publishing industry resulted in an exponential increase in the reproduction and adaptation of Doré’s imagery. At the heart of this chapter are the monumental religious works produced for the Doré Gallery, established in London in 1868. By relying on consistent compositional structure and highly legible narratives, Doré’s biblical paintings cohere to evangelical principles and functioned counterdiscursively to the visual cultures of spectacle that shaped much of Victorian experience. While French audiences derided Doré’s efforts at painting, British viewers eagerly consumed these works, which were offered in the heart of the commercial art district and provided wholesome entertainment that counterbalanced the more suspect spectacles of nearby neighborhoods. This was a context in which commercialism and religious experience overlapped and which became, as one commentator put it, “where the godly take their children.”


Author(s):  
Ketaki Savnal

In this paper, I discuss networked photography practices and selfie cultures at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, an annual cultural festival in Mumbai, to demonstrate how global digital visual cultures are translated in the urban Indian context, and offer new ways of thinking about the conceptualisation and experience of art, the city and the resident. I argue that the desire for networked photography that animates the assemblage of installations, artists, visitors, curators, camera technologies and social networking sites, alters ideas of space and place, and object production and meaning making. I approach the selfie and everyday networked photography as a form of self-expression, labour (Abidin 2016), locative media (Hess 2015), embodied socialisation (Frosh 2015) and a mode of photography that collapses binaries of subject/object, spectator/operator and curated image/curator (Frosh 2015, Senft and Baym 2015). I use qualitative digital methods, interviews, audiovisual documentation and autoethnography. Through visuals recorded in the exhibition area at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in 2020, I demonstrate how the unique sense of intimacy and limited field of vision offered by the lens and screen of the camera phone, turn the exhibition space into a space of embodied interdependence and collaboration. At the same time, as a result of the neoliberal logic of commodification of the algorithms of social networking sites, postcolonial place is rendered ahistorical and reinterpreted as a space for creative photography and the visual production of a global digital identity.


Photographies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-378
Author(s):  
Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi

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