CULTURE STUDIES [Anthropology]
Over Under and Around
Essays on Performance and Culture
Richard Schechner
Rs 450 £ 12.95 $ 19.95
ISBN 8170462622
The essays collected in this book represent Schechner's lifetime in
performance studies. Political theatre, the avant garde, the secular
and sacred rituals of performance, the nature of belief and its
suspensions in theatre, aesthetics, performance theory, and performance
studies have been his recurring subjects even as his knowledge has changed
and deepened from seeing performances of all kinds, all over the world.
So he is in a position to compare the incomparable-Yaqui and Ramlila, dixi
and namahage-in a manner that furthers the study of ritual and indicates
the ways performance is similarly and differently imbricated in different communities.
Schechner has also learned that the avant garde is more than a historical
occurrence localized in, or originating in, a single culture. Schechner
asserts that we can also understand the avant garde as a particular kind
of articulation of the traditional and the oral. The range and depth of
Schechner's scholarly endeavour informed by his artistic practice has led
him to think about the deep structure of performance and theorize its
construction across cultures. This confluence of practice and scholarship,
where each realm wholly informs the other, is second only to Schechner's
far ranging contact with diverse types of performance in generating his
exceptional thinking on the meaning and importance of performance as the
paradigm for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
RICHARD SCHECHNER is a theatre director, author and teacher. He founded
The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. He has directed plays,
conducted performance workshops and lectured in Asia, the Americas,
Australia and Europe. His books include Performance Studies-An
Introduction, Performance Theory, and Between Theatre and Anthropology.
He is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University..
Actors,
Pilgrims, Kings and Gods
The Ramlila of
Ramnagar
Anuradha
Kapur
Rs 375 £ 12.95 $ 19.95
ISBN 8170460468
The Ramlila at Ramnagar (Benaras) is a unique theatrical and religious
event, a month-long enactment of the Ramayana story which is now an annual
tradition. The performance covers a whole town and involves an entire
community from its Maharaja to its thousands of common people. Men, women
and children follow the course of the processional performance, accompanying
Rama from his exile to his triumphant return to Ayodhya to partake of
the joy and glory of Ramarajya.
Readers are plunged into the rich and lively experience of the Ramlila
with its svarupas, effigies, masks, Ramayanis, Vyasas, gods, goddesses,
demons and monkeys; with its theatrical gimmickry and spectacle and marvels;
with its thronging, surging crowds. Performers and spectators are part
of a seamless ceremony; and the readers re-live this whole experience
through the vivid pages of Anuradha Kapur's diaries.
The work does many things at the same time. It documents and recreates
an event; provides a rare insight into an Indian community's negotiation
with religious lore; unravels and explores a unique theatrical tradition;
and above all offers us a piece of life-earthy, rumbustious, and sacred.
Archives
for the Future
global perspectives
on audiovisual archives in the 21st Century
Edited
by Anthony Seeger and Shubha ChaudhuriRs
Rs 350 £ 19.95 $ 20
ISBN 8170462231
This unique
book is based on a workshop for an international group of administrators
of research-based archives held near New Delhi in December 1999, the aim
of which was to bring together archivists from industrializing countries
which have a relatively recent history of audiovisual archives, principally
from the Southern Hemisphere; to take concerns of audiovisual archives
outside the national and regional boundaries that so often define them;
and to focus on audiovisual archives that document musical and folklore
traditions or ethnomusicology.
Pooling the experience of participants from Austria, Australia, China,
Cuba, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, The Philippines,
South Africa, Sudan, and the United States, the volume will be of interest
to cultural workers both as an introductory textbook in ethnomusicology
courses and as a book for specialists.
The book begins with a theoretical introduction, including general observations
on archives, a discussion of the principal points in the participant papers,
a description of the workshop itself, and how the process of the workshop
has been transformed into this volume. Section One deals with archive
structure and operations, including a chapter on recording technology
which begins with a paper by the world-renowned expert in technology for
audiovisual archives, Dr Dietrich Schuller, Director of the Vienna Phonogramm-Archiv,
Austria, the oldest such archive in the world; and one on issues of copyright
and ethics by Grace Koch. Section Two consists of the participants' papers.
The volume also includes useful material such as sample agreement forms,
a bibliography of major resources on audiovisual archives, and a website
list of the most important professional organizations and archive sites.
Birsa Munda and his Movements
K.S. Singh
Fwd Mahasweta Devi
Rs 625.00 £ 25.00 $ 40.00
ISBN 8170462053
This work is a complete account of probably the best-known
millenarian movement in tribal India. The movement of the Mundas led by
Birsa was typical of the resistance and revitalization movements in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. A combination of a religious and
a political movement, it represented the struggle and aspirations of his
people, sowing the first stirrings of nationalism among them and featuring
an urge to recreate the old world which had disappeared under the onslaught
of colonialism.
Acclaimed as the first of its kind, this study is based on anthropological
data and archival material. It traces Birsa’s early life and his transformation
into a ’black Christ’ against the background of the processes of transformation
of the tribal society of Chotanagpur. His political movement and his religion
are closely studied in the context of their impact on the course of history.
The book was translated into various languages of the country and inspired
various forms of creative adaptation in contemporary folk and regional
literature, including Mahasweta Devi’s major novel Aranyer Adhikar.
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