Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments
Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments

Author: Eric Ames

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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The name of Carl Hagenbeck is as evocative in Europe as that of P. T. Barnum or Walt Disney in North America. Hagenbeck was the nineteenth century's foremost animal trader and ethnographic showman, known for his enormously popular displays of people, animals, and artifacts gathered from all corners of the globe. The culmination of Hagenbeck's commercial ventures was the opening of his Tierpark near Hamburg in 1907, a dazzling assemblage of constructed exotic environments inhabited by humans and animals. Eric Ames shows that Hagenbeck's various enterprises illustrate a significant evolution in popular culture. Earlier display forms that relied on the collection and presentation of "authentic" artifacts and living beings--the panorama, the zoological garden, the ethnographic collection--gave rise to the self-consciously synthetic forms of entertainment that we now associate with theme parks and films. This shift took place in the context of Hagenbeck's exhibitions, which were simultaneously the apotheosis of the collecting impulse and the germinating source for the creation of fictional spaces that rely for their effect on the spectator's imaginative engagement and interaction with the spectacle. Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments locates Hagenbeck's myriad enterprises in the context of colonialism and nascent globalization; ethnography and anthropology; zoological gardens and international expositions; museum culture and visual spectacle; and consumerism and immersive entertainments. By tracing out the divergent lineages of themed environments, Ames offers a vivid reconstruction of the impulses and contradictions that lay behind the visual and display culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a culture that forms the foundation of contemporary themed environments. Written in an accessible style with many wonderful images, this book draws on meticulous archival research and a wealth of primary sources not available in English. It is an original and entertaining interdisciplinary study that will appeal to readers interested in visual culture, popular culture, nineteenth-century German history, and film studies, as well as anyone intrigued by the history of such popular entertainments as zoos, museums, panoramas, world's fairs, cinema, theme parks, anthropological exhibitions, and Wild West Shows.

Through the Lion Gate
Through the Lion Gate

Author: Gary Bruce

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190234989

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In the first English-language history of the Berlin zoo, Gary Bruce traces the fascinating story of one of Germany's most popular cultural institutions, from its 19th century displays of "exotic" peoples to Nazi attempts to breed back long-extinct European cattle. As an institution with broad public reach, the zoo for more than 150 years shaped German views not only of the animal world, but of the human world far beyond Germany's borders.

Empire of Enchantment
Empire of Enchantment

Author: John Zubrzycki

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0190934883

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India's association with magicians goes back thousands of years. Conjurors and illusionists dazzled the courts of Hindu maharajas and Mughal emperors. As British dominion spread over the subcontinent, such wonder-workers became synonymous with India. Western magicians appropriated Indian attire, tricks and stage names; switching their turbans for top hats, Indian jugglers fought back and earned their grudging respect. This book tells the extraordinary story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Recounting tales of levitating Brahmins, resurrections, prophesying monkeys and "the most famous trick never performed," Empire of Enchantment vividly charts Indian magic's epic journey from street to the stage. This heavily illustrated book tells the extraordinary, untold story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Drawing on ancient religious texts, early travelers' accounts, colonial records, modern visual sources, and magicians' own testimony, Empire of Enchantment is a vibrant narrative of India's magical traditions, from Vedic times to the present day.

Our Gigantic Zoo
Our Gigantic Zoo

Author: Thomas M. Lekan

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0199843678

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Our Gigantic Zoo tells the story of Bernhard Grzimek, the most important European wildlife conservationist, and his role in creating a permanent sanctuary for innocent animals in Serengeti National Park.

Advertising Empire
Advertising Empire

Author: David Ciarlo

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-01-03

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 0674050061

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David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the "African native" had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism's political and cultural meaning as well as, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast.

The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures
The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures

Author: Harris M. Berger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-03

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0190693878

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A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

Black Handsworth
Black Handsworth

Author: Kieran Connell

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0520971957

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In 1980s Britain, while the country failed to reckon with the legacies of its empire, a black, transnational sensibility was emerging in its urban areas. In Handsworth, an inner-city neighborhood of Birmingham, black residents looked across the Atlantic toward African and Afro-Caribbean social and political cultures and drew upon them while navigating the inequalities of their locale. For those of the Windrush generation and their British-born children, this diasporic inheritance became a core influence on cultural and political life. Through rich case studies, including photographic representations of the neighborhood, Black Handsworth takes readers inside pubs, churches, political organizations, domestic spaces, and social clubs to shed light on the experiences and everyday lives of black residents during this time. The result is a compelling and sophisticated study of black globality in the making of post-colonial Britain.

Ferocious Reality
Ferocious Reality

Author: Eric Ames

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780816677634

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Over the course of his career Werner Herzog has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." This book asks how this conviction, hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world's most provocative documentarians. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog's career, the author makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so.--From publisher description.

The Animal Game
The Animal Game

Author: Daniel E. Bender

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-11-07

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0674972767

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The spread of empires in the nineteenth century brought more than new territories and populations under Western sway. Animals were also swept up in the net of imperialism, as jungles and veldts became colonial ranches and plantations. A booming trade in animals turned many strange and dangerous species into prized commodities. Tigers from India, pythons from Malaya, and gorillas from the Congo found their way—sometimes by shady means—to the zoos of major U.S. cities, where they created a sensation. Zoos were among the most popular attractions in the United States for much of the twentieth century. Stoking the public’s fascination, savvy zookeepers, animal traders, and zoo directors regaled visitors with stories of the fierce behavior of these creatures in their native habitats, as well as daring tales of their capture. Yet as tropical animals became increasingly familiar to the American public, they became ever more rare in the wild. Tracing the history of U.S. zoos and the global trade and trafficking in animals that supplied them, Daniel Bender examines how Americans learned to view faraway places and peoples through the lens of the exotic creatures on display. Over time, as the zoo’s mission shifted from offering entertainment to providing a refuge for endangered species, conservation parks replaced pens and cages. The Animal Game recounts Americans’ ongoing, often conflicted relationship with zoos, decried as anachronistic prisons by animal rights activists even as they remain popular centers of education and preservation.

Staged Otherness
Staged Otherness

Author: Dagnosław Demski

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2021-12-22

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 963386688X

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The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow. The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.