Milan, spring 1967. 12 counsellors have to decide the future of a great area in a very serious state of decay in the northern suburbs of Milan. The only one who is against the building plan is the Architect, who is convinced that the best strategic choice is a different project, which has its reasons rooted in the past when the area belonged to the Great Forest-a magic place made of wide grass, great rivers, lush vegetation and animals, now extinct. There begins the journey through the history of Milan and its land, from the foundation by the Celts with the name Medhelan (literally holy place) to the present, mixing real historical characters with fantasy characters from the animal and plant kingdom, witnesses of earth’s transformation over centuries detailing its long battle between Nature and Civilisation, or in other words, when the relationship of man-universe-nature broke. We meet the Celtic King Belloveso, Federico Barbarossa, Francesco Sforza and Ludovico il Moro, in the court of whom there is also Leonardo da Vinci, Etherna, the guardian oak of millennial knowledge Asio the howl, wise chief of the Great Forest, with his loyal crow Barone Rook and Apodeus, the brown mouse that with cleverness beats the black mice troops, the plague carriers. But the Architect’s reasons cannot convince the majority of the counsellors to abandon the idea of the building plan, until something that will forever change the destiny of that area happens... Milan, spring 2015. A Photoreporter of the New York Times goes to Milan for a special report for the Expo 2015: there’s one of the former counsellors from 48 years ago and the story that he chooses to tell is the best example he knows of how Feeding the Planet. He tells about a man and his greatest fulfilment, which is something very similar to the Great Forest of 2500 years ago...
The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere—in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own—from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers—and how people interact with them—in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as “playing God.” Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.
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