Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology (Studies in Rhetoric and Culture, 5)

All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how __astonishment__ and __evocation__ deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences. "All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler's view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences."--pub. desc Contents Acknowledgments Illustrations Introduction Part I Image CHAPTER 1 Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention CHAPTER 2 Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life CHAPTER 3 Tangled Up in Blue: Symbolism and Evocation CHAPTER 4 Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematography Part II Performance CHAPTER 5 Captivated by Ritual: Visceral Visitations and the Evocation of Community CHAPTER 6 The Spell of Riddles Among the Witoto CHAPTER 7 Sounds of the Past: Music, History, and Astonishment CHAPTER 8 Tears, Not So Idle Tears “Time Binding,” Lachrymose Emotionality, and Ethnographic Disambiguation Part III Text CHAPTER 9 Stones, Drumbeats, and Footprints in the Writing of the Other CHAPTER 10 The Translation of the Said and the Unsaid in Sikkanese Ritual Texts CHAPTER 11 Ethnographic Evocations and Evocative Ethnographies CHAPTER 12 Reading Public Culture: Reason and Excess in the Newspaper Contributors Index