Visual Anthropology Books

New and Published Books

1. Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia

   An Anthropological Perspective

   By Gregory Forth

   The book examines ‘wildmen’, images of hairy humanlike creatures known to rural villagers and other local people in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Sometimes described in considerable detail, the creatures are reported as still living or as having survived until recent times. The aim of the book is...

   Published April 30th 2012 by Routledge
2. Surviving Dictatorship

   A Work of Visual Sociology

   By Jacqueline Adams

   Series: Contemporary Sociological Perspectives

   Written as a book for undergraduate students as well as scholars, Surviving Dictatorship is a work of visual sociology and oral history, and a case study that communicates the lived experience of poverty, repression, and resistance in an authoritarian society: Pinochet’s Chile. It focuses on...

   Published March 6th 2012 by Routledge
3. Chinese Entertainment

   Edited by Kwok-Bun Chan

   Scholarly studies of Chinese culture, history and society, both within and outside of China, generally pay little attention to leisure, entertainment and amusement, though it has long been known that this aspect of life gives a deep understanding of the psyche and soul, and the hopes and fears, of...

   Published December 4th 2011 by Routledge
4. Okubo Diary (Routledge Revivals)

   Portrait of a Japanese Valley

   By Brian Moeran

   First published in 1985, this Routledge Revival is a lively and colourful account of life in the Japanese countryside, as seen through the eyes of an anthropologist who did fieldwork there for four years. Part journal, part ethnographic observation, part social and moral commentary, this very...

   Published November 28th 2011 by Routledge
5. Making Japanese Heritage

   Edited by Christoph Brumann, Rupert A. Cox

   Series: Japan Anthropology Workshop Series

   This book examines the making of heritage in contemporary Japan, investigating the ways in which particular objects, practices and institutions are ascribed public recognition and political significance. Through detailed ethnographic and historical case studies, it analyses the social, economic,...

   Published June 29th 2011 by Routledge
6. Being Alive

   Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

   By Tim Ingold

   Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social....

   Published April 18th 2011 by Routledge
7. Cross-Cultural Issues in Art

   Frames for Understanding

   By Steven Leuthold

   Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples. Steven Leuthold discusses both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies...

   Published December 12th 2010 by Routledge
8. Japanese Love Hotels

   A Cultural History

   By Sarah Chaplin

   Series: Routledge Contemporary Japan Series

   Drawing on theories of place, consumption and identity, Sarah Chaplin details the evolution of the love hotel in urban Japan since the 1950s. Love hotels emerged in the late 1950s following a ban of licensed prostitution, then were extremely popular in the 1970s, were then legislated against in the...

   Published October 19th 2010 by Routledge
9. Material Powers

   Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn

   Edited by Tony Bennett, Patrick Joyce

   Series: CRESC

   This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state...

   Published October 3rd 2010 by Routledge
10. Museum Materialities

    Objects, Engagements, Interpretations

    Edited by Sandra Dudley

    This is an innovative interdisciplinary book about objects and people within museums and galleries. It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact, and raise...

    Published November 15th 2009 by Routledge