Anya Peterson Royce turns the anthropological gaze on the performing arts, attempting to find broad commonalities in performance, art, and artists across space, time, and culture. She asks general questions as to the nature of artistic interpretation, the differences between virtuosity and artistry, and how artists interplay with audience, aesthetics, and style. To support her case, she examines artists as diverse as Fokine and the Ballets Russes, Tewa Indian dancers, 17th century commedia dell'arte, Japanese kabuki and butoh, Zapotec shamans, and the mime of Marcel Marceau, adding her own observations as a professional dancer in the classical ballet tradition. Royce also points to the recent move toward collaboration across artistic genres as evidence of the universality of aesthetics. Her analysis leads to a better understanding of artistic interpretation, artist-audience relationships, and the artistic imagination as cross-cultural phenomena. Over 29 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate the wide range of Royce's cross-cultural approach. Her well-crafted volume will be of great interest to anthropologists, arts researchers, and students of cultural studies and performing arts.
Reciprocity Rules explores the rich and complicated relationships that develop between anthropologists and research participants over time. Focusing on compensation and the creation of friendship and “family” relationships, contributors discuss what, when, and how researchers and the people with whom they work give to each other in and beyond fieldwork. Through reflexivity and narrative, the contributors to this edited collection, who are in various stages in their professional careers and whose research spans three continents and eight countries, reflect on the ways in which they have compensated their research participants and given back to host communities, as well as the varied responses to their efforts. The contributors consider both material and non-material forms of reciprocity, stories of successes and failures, and the taken-for-granted notions of compensation, friendship, and “helping.” In so doing, they address the interpersonal dynamics of power and agency in the field, examine cultural misunderstandings, and highlight the challenges that anthropologists face as they strive to maintain good relations with their hosts even when separated by time and space. The contributors argue that while learning, following, openly discussing, and writing about the local rules of reciprocity are always challenging, they are essential to responsible research practice and ongoing efforts to decolonize anthropology.
Powerful and beautifully written, this is the story of the Isthmus Zapotecs of southern Mexico and their unbroken chain of ancestors and collective memory over the generations. Mortuary beliefs and actions are collective and pervasive in ways not seen in the United States, a resonant deep structure across many domains of Zapotec culture. Anthropologist Anya Peterson Royce draws upon forty years of participant research in the city of Juchitán to offer a finely textured portrait of the vibrant and enduring power of death in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec of Mexico. Focusing especially on the lives of Zapotec women, Becoming an Ancestor highlights the aesthetic sensibility and durability of mortuary traditions in the past and present. An intricate blending of Roman Catholicism and indigenous spiritual tradition, death through beliefs and practices expresses a collective solidarity that connects families, binds the living and dead, and blurs the past and present. A model of ethnographic research and presentation, Becoming an Ancestor not only reveals the luminescent heart of Zapotec culture but also provides important clues about the cultural power and potential of mortuary traditions for all societies.
Anya Peterson Royce turns the anthropological gaze on the performing arts, attempting to find broad commonalities in performance, art, and artists across space, time, and culture. She asks general questions as to the nature of artistic interpretation, the differences between virtuosity and artistry, and how artists interplay with audience, aesthetics, and style. To support her case, she examines artists as diverse as Fokine and the Ballets Russes, Tewa Indian dancers, 17th century commedia dell'arte, Japanese kabuki and butoh, Zapotec shamans, and the mime of Marcel Marceau, adding her own observations as a professional dancer in the classical ballet tradition. Royce also points to the recent move toward collaboration across artistic genres as evidence of the universality of aesthetics. Her analysis leads to a better understanding of artistic interpretation, artist-audience relationships, and the artistic imagination as cross-cultural phenomena. Over 29 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate the wide range of Royce's cross-cultural approach. Her well-crafted volume will be of great interest to anthropologists, arts researchers, and students of cultural studies and performing arts.
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