Examines a variety of tattooing, scarification, painting and adornment techniques used in Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania since the eighteenth century with a discussion of body adornment in rituals and religion
This unrivalled collection of striking photographs traces more than ten thousand years of cultural history - from the body painting of stone-age peoples to the self-inflicted piercing of punks and the enduring image of the carnival clown in modern industrial society - illustrating an art form that is finding new relevance in the world of today. To set the plates in context, a distinguished team of art historians, ethnologists and archaeologists has provided enlightening commentaries which document the development of an extraordinarily broad spectrum of body painting, tattooing and scarring techniques.
Celebrates body decorations through color photographs and commentaries that describe the evolution of different practices throughout history and its role in specific special occasions.
Shocking or beautiful, body decoration can make people stop and stare. Make sure it's on your radar! Inside you'll find these features: The History Bit Discover why body decoration is nothing new. Five-Minute Interview Crystals, glitter, flowers, and animal prints—a nail artist explains why she adores her job. Star Story Meet TV star and tattoo artist Kat von D!
Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, this book takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooing to the wealth of grave goods found in the Upper Paleolithic burials and body painting of the Nuba, we see that there is no one who does not adorn themselves, their possessions, or their environment. But what messages do these adornments send? Drawing on aesthetics, evolutionary history, archaeology, ethology, anthropology, psychology, cultural history, and gender studies, Stephen Davies brings together African, Australian and North and South American indigenous cultures and unites them around the theme of adornment. He shows us that adorning is one of the few social behaviors that is close to being genuinely universal, more typical and extensive than the high-minded activities we prefer to think of as marking our species – religion, morality, and art. Each chapter shows how modes of decoration send vitally important signals about what we care about, our affiliations and backgrounds, our social status and values. In short, by using the theme of bodily adornment to unify a very diverse set of human practices, this book tells us about who we are.
Body piercing, scarification, tattooing - for thousands of years decorative alteration of the human body has been invested with profound cultural and social meaning. This collection of essays, photographs and drawings focuses on the many and diverse ways that human beings have permanently decorated their bodies.
Over the course of numerous voyages to Africa's Omo Valley, Hans Silvester became fascinated by the beauty of the Surma, Mursi, Hamer and Kurma tribes, who share a taste for body painting and extravagant decorations borrowed from nature. This collection of photographs captures these accoutrements.
"" When Sumita hennas my hands and feet, I am transported to another time and place a world of magic, passion, and romance. Madonna""No longer the preserve of Asian and Middle Eastern brides, mehndi has been embraced by women of all backgrounds. Sumita Batra's stunning henna designs have graced some of the most renowned celebrities of our time, including Madonna and Gwen Stefani. Now she has created the definitive guide to this ancient art form of body decoration, featuring everything from the historical, symbolic, and spiritual aspects of mehndi to 40 original and easily reproduced patterns including glitter techniques."
This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.