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The Open Graves, Open Minds project discussed in this book relates the undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption and social change. The story of vampires, since their discovery in eighteenth-century Europe, is one of transformations and interbreedings of genre, which mediate shifts in ways of knowing and doubting. It is marked by metamorphoses of the vampire itself, from monstrous to sympathetic, but always fascinatingly Other. Certain tropes, such as optical figures, and particularly that of reflection, recur throughout, calling attention to the preoccupation with epistemology in vampire narratives. The book focuses on various aspects of these themes as the story unfolds to the present day. It shows how the persona of Lord Byron became an effective vehicle for the vampire of fiction as a transformed Gothic mode, and grapples with the figure of the non-reflecting vampire who casts no shadow, moving deftly between Dracula and Wilde's Dorian Gray and the 'vampire painting' and installations of the contemporary artist David Reed. The book gives a luminous account of early vampire cinema as a 'Kingdom of shadows', and explores the undead at the interface, where knowing becomes problematic: 'unsettlement'. The book also unearths the folklore roots of vampire fiction and offers a glimpse of how contemporary writers adapt the perennial figure.
training. In the last chapter, Leung makes a call to leave the binary notion of digital divide behind, with an invitation to multidisciplinary teams to explore with an open mind the complexities associated with the use of technology by individuals from refugee backgrounds. She concludes by inviting the reader to find the middle ground between a purely functionalist approach and an integrative view of technology. Leung writes in an accessible manner and weaves the words of her participants into the
Northern Ireland to the point that the constitutional problems could be resolved by those that more fairly represented the diversity of opinion in Northern Ireland, creating the potential for the consensus so badly lacking in 1973 and 1974 to be established. Orme believed that ‘If the workingclass people of Northern Ireland can be convinced that, whatever their religious denominations, they have economic interests in common, they 115 THE LESSONS OF SUNNINGDALE will be able to approach the constitutional problem … with open minds’ (Ibid.). Using a combination of Orme
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
activity defies traditional boundaries. Sometimes political activists use arguments, at other times they vote – and occasionally they resort to violence; in other words: talking, voting and fighting. To understand political action we are required to have an open mind and to be open to different methods. In chapter 1 an account is developed of what is required for the study of political phenomena. Using a largely qualitative method, drawing on writers like C. Wright Mills, Richard Fenno, Clifford Geertz and above all Hannah Arendt, it is argued that political
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Der Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception, to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century, and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Der Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
In Developing the Open, Graves, Open Minds project, I was struck by the irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture. My research here has developed directly out of this meditation on the vampire’s reflection or shadow. Bram Stoker’s Dracula famously ‘throws no shadow’ though he has long been associated with darkness
’s job to help Jonathan, Mina, Seward, Quincy and Arthur achieve this absolute faith in the essence of the thing itself. Van Helsing says to Seward, ‘I want you to believe … [t]o believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue’. … He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not
. ( Venetia , Chapter 4 , Story 11) The second theme is attentiveness. Above all, this is about listening and observing closely, and the importance of focussing on the person as well as on the illness. It might include keeping an open mind about diagnosis. The stories indicate the importance of picking up cues, knowing when “labelling” can be helpful, as well as problematic, when patients would prefer a relaxed or a more formal style of communication, and when there might be mixed messages and dissent among family members