Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology

Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology
ISBN-10
0520065832
ISBN-13
9780520065833
Series
Foreign Bodies
Category
Social Science
Pages
223
Language
English
Published
1992-01-01
Publisher
Univ of California Press
Authors
A. David Napier, Professor of Medical Anthropology A David Napier

Description

"An understanding of what is foreign is typically based on a radical differentiation between the self and that which we call the "other". In five wide-ranging essays, Napier examines a different process. He explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of one's cultural identity rather than as something outside of it. Preclassical Greece, Baroque Italy and Western post-modernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine. In each instance, Napier argues that assimilation is most successful when a culture is confident enough about itself to engage its core cultural images in a symbolic dialogue with those foreign images it perceives as most alien." (résumé éditeur)

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