1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910563098603321

Titolo

Embodiments of Cultural Encounters [[electronic resource]] / Sebastian Jobs, Gesa Mackenthun

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Münster, : Waxmann, 2011

ISBN

3-8309-7548-1

Edizione

[1st, New ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (272 p.) : mit zahlreichen, teils farbigen Abbildungen

Collana

Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship ; 3

Soggetti

Bodies and Cultural Encounters

Herman Melville

History of Tattooing

Same-Sex Sexuality and the Colonial Archive

Sexualities in the French Foreign Legion

African Pentecostal-type Christianity

German Ethnic Shows

Ethnographic Dioramas

Ethnological Museums

Bali

Guatemala

Oaxaca

Andean

New England

Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Sommario/riassunto

The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly



inscribed and represented as the 'body politic' or 'the exotic other'; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the 'real' or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations - their function of disciplining colonized bodies and subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices - whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body.

This impressive publication [...] is part of a valuable series of intellectual explorations in negotiating the intercultural journey. - Bruce Harding in: Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte, 13/2013