The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move forward. This in-depth ethnography and social history of the islands focuses on how individual citizens redefined themselves and reimagined their society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Wei-Ping Lin shows how islanders used both traditional and new media to cope with the conflicts and trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of 'imagining subjects', interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions. This title is Open Access.
Illustrated with 200 stunning photographs and encompassing objects from furniture and ceramics to jewelry and metal, this definitive work from Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton showcases some of the greatest pieces of American crafts of the last two centuries. Potter Craft
"Between 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era's most innovative artists flocked to a very unexpected place: New Jersey. Appreciating what others tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state's most desolate peripheries: its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual, performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site, whose title evokes the mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968 while driving the state's highways with Nancy Holt. This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists, including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes--ruin, cooperation, and displacement--Kelly Baum's essay considers their work in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally dramatic changes to New Jersey's economy, infrastructure, landscape, demography, and social stability."--
This is the first study to examine in detail ritual objects known as 'Lamak', a fascinating and unique form of ephemeral material culture which is a prominent feature of Balinese creativity.
Site-Specific Art charts the development of an experimental art form in an experimental way. Nick Kaye traces the fascinating historical antecedents of today's installation and performance art, while also assembling a unique documentation of contemporary practice around the world. The book is divided into individual analyses of the themes of space, materials, site, and frames. These are interspersed by specially commissioned documentary artwork from some of the world's foremost practitioners and artists working today. This interweaving of critique and creativity has never been achieved on this scale before. Site-Specific Art investigates the relationship of architectural theory to an understanding of contemporary site related art and performance, and rigorously questions how such works can be documented. The artistic processes involved are demonstrated through entirely new primary articles from: * Meredith Monk * Station House Opera * Brith Gof * Forced Entertainment. This volume is an astonishing contribution to debates around experimental cross-arts practice.
Magliocco impressively corrals the diverse writings and experiences of U.S. neo-pagans into this highly readable and deeply researched ethnographic study. . . . Highly recommended.--Choice
This study questions the traditional view of sacrifices in hero-cults during the Archaic to the early Hellenistic periods. The analysis of the epigraphical and literary evidence for sacrifices to heroes in these periods shows, contrary to the traditional notion, that the main ritual in hero-cults was a thysia at which the worshippers consumed the meat from the animal victim. A particular handling of the animal’s blood or a holocaust, rituals previously taken to be typical for heroes, can rarely be documented and must be considered as marginal features in hero-cults. The terms eschara, escharon, bothros, enagizein, enagisma, enagismos and enagisterion, believed to be characteristic for hero-cults, are seldom used in hero-contexts before the Roman period and occur mainly in the Byzantine lexicographers and in the scholia. Since the main kind of sacrifice in hero-cults was a thysia, a ritual intimately connected with the social structure of society, the heroes must have fulfilled the same role as the gods within the Greek religious system. The fact that the heroes were dead seems to have been of little significance for the sacrificial rituals and it is questionable whether the rituals of hero-cults are to be considered as originating in the cult of the dead.