C Pinney
Biographic Data
| ID | 48339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Pinney |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Pinney |
| SIGNATURE | PINNEY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6783-9009 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Make Aura Great Again?
Jeremy Stolow has written a wonderful book that constellates the supernormal in wider universes of the history of photography, in the mechanics and semiotics of visualization, a history of aura’s “...
Piercing The Skin Of The Idol
The &s;anthropological’ theory of art proposed in Art and Agency ‘merges seamlessly with the social anthropology of persons and their bodies’ ( Gell 1998 : 7). Alfred Gell does a brilliant job of persuading us that anthropologists should concern themselves with the performative dimension of artefacts. In the first part of the book, at least, he rejects a linguistic approach, dwelling instead on the agency of images.
What Do Pictures Want Now
The name of the village is Bhatisuda, located on the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh, roughly halfway between Bombay and Delhi in India. Here chromolithograph images portraying Gods are popular across all castes and religious groups. Jains and Muslims own images as well as Hindus, and Scheduled Caste Chamars and (warrior) Rajputs or (priestly) Brahmans own similar numbers of images. (Across the village as whole there is an average of seven images…
Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity
Eschewing national frames in favor of regional patterns, the chapter presents observations concerning “demotic” photographic practices in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India. It attempts to balance differences in local practices with medium specificity. The technical visual conditions of citizenship (such as in the obligatory wearing of a “Dhaka topi” in Nepal) are juxtaposed with a more diffuse “photographability,” as elaborated by Azoulay, which estab…
What Time is the Visual? Photography and the History of the Future
Part of a broader inquiry that asks, “What time is the visual?” this article uses ethnographic observations and recent theoretical work to suggest that photography is as much future‐oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past. I document different temporal orientations of photographs, drawing on historical studio images featuring clocks and photographic paraphernalia and ethnographic research into memorial images in Nepal and centra…
Destroying the negatives
M. N. Srinivas’s The remembered village bristles with references to photography, from a formal group image of villagers marking Gandhi’s death to an account of villagers’ enthusiasm for the products of Srinivas’s own camera. We learn, among other things, that Srinivas became known as the “chamara man,” that he photographed the castration of bulls, that some of his photographs were almost involved in a court case, and that a Dalit worker resisted …
Moon and Mother
At a recent Sydney Biennale, Francesco Clemente exhibited the Story of My Country , a work that included many small paintings depicting the history of Rome. These images, in the conventional patta style of Orissa, were the work of Orissan artists but collectively bore the signature of Clemente. Clemente was incalcated as a child in the Roman Catholic aesthetic, a preparation that made him fully susceptible to popular Hinduism’s ‘succulent realism…
Introduction
Photodemos – Citizens of photography
Some Indian “Views of India”
Delineated in a cochineal red on a delicate ivory background, S. C. Sen’s standardized trade design pictures a south Indian temple and a Mughal pavilion in a manner that looks back toward the colonial concerns of earlier artists like William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell. The paradox, which in the case of Sen’s image is split between the two sides of the cabinet card, is, in modern Indian engagements with architecture, compressed into a s…
I love the smell of napalm in the morning
The relationship of aesthetics to ethics is explored through a discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese military woodblock prints and recent Daesh (ISIL) media productions. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is praised for its anthropological ‘nearness’ to a ‘dangerous’ local aesthetics and ethics, a ‘proximity’ that philosophers of aesthetics seem reluctant to entertain. Thierry de Duve’s engagement with K…
Notas da superfície da imagem
Christipher Pinney apresenta uma discussão sobre como tradições fotográficas locais respondem às demandas visuais da fotografia colonial. Enquanto os esquemas coloniais tentavam fixar identidades colonizadas dentro de certezas cronotrópicas, a fotografia pós-colonial procura negar isso colocando seus referentes na superfície. As identidade, nesse caso, são móveis. O autor começa com a perspectiva cartesiana da fotografia europeia, na qual o "mund…
Crisis and Visual Critique
Perspectives from this special issue on Greece are folded into a discussion of the current post‐Foucauldian and “neo‐Benjaminian” moment of contemporary photographic theory and visual culture. Bourdieu's ethnography of photography is contrasted with his own photographic practice and considered in light of Azoulay's Civil Contract of Photography. The return to the “event” of photography and an understanding of its contingency reawakens its revolut…
Aqueous Modernism
This response to C astaing‐ T aylor and P aravel's L eviathan suggests that it triangulates R obert G ardner's filmic practice with D avid M ac D ougall's theorization and the dynamic cubist potential of multiple G o P ro cameras. While attempting to preserve in language some aspects of L eviathan's “boiling sea,” the commentary also seeks to explore the film's fascination with “submersibility” as a late modernism idiom that insists on the liquid…
Civil Contract of Photography in India
Pinney's essay explores, in the context of both colonized and contemporary India, Ariella Azoulay's argument about the prophetic nature of photographic citizenship. The use of photographs in a number of key Indian National Congress reports reveals the destabilizing potential of the camera. This photographic counter-narrative presents a challenge to certain Althusserian and Foucauldian accounts for which the state is ultimately the arbiter of "evi…
Creole Europe
An Author Meets Her Critics
In the fall of 2011, I was appointed to the Chair of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology in the Faculty of Humanities. As I soon realized, my appointment occurred amid major transitions regarding the institutionalization of the study of religion at Utrecht University. This is part of a broader trend of renegotiating the space between 'theology' and 'religious studies'. This trend echoes a wider process of 'unchur…
Creole Europe
Notes from the Surface of the Image
Domestic Airport (Departures)
This paper was originally given as part of a symposium occasioned by an exhibition, There is Here, showing the work of photographer Avi Gupta, an American of Bengali extraction. His work for this exhibition, curated by Emily Crane, recorded encounters with interior spaces both in Kolkata, India and among Bengali diaspora households in Washington. In departure from ideas his subject-matter tackles, this paper explores the work of three artist/phot…
The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester
Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion 'Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography'. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester - playfully and rigorously eng…
The Material and Visual Culture of British India
Proposing a sideways move from approaches to the ‘cultural technologies’ of colonialism, which continue to relegate representation to a secondary ‘super-structural’ status, the essay explores a number of case studies that might affirm William Blake's provocation that ‘Empire follows Art’. Investigations of eighteenth-century image flows, debates over the most appropriate imperial architectural styles, photographic controversies around indigo prod…
Seven theses on photography
Benjamin and Barthes provide the starting point for a series of inter-connected propositions which seek to return the theorization of photography to the primacy of the pro-filmic. The index is reclaimed as a trace of the photographic event, capable only of delivering what Barthes termed the corps. The resulting contingency and exorbitance are the basis of photography's prophetic and 'troubling' potential which free us from viewing photography as …
Optic‐Clash
This chapter contains sections titled: Darshan: Devotion and Reciprocity Nazar: Looking as Poison and Cure Inter-Ocularity: In Search of the Secular? A Historicized Visuality Somatics and Subjectivity References
The Tiger's Nature, but Not the Tiger
Gandhi was obliged to negotiate the central problem of Bal Gangadhar Tilak's dominance of Indian politics through the first two decades of the twentieth century and the astonishing symmetry between many of their concerns. This article explores the distance that separates Gandhi and Tilak ethically and politically but also attempts to highlight the troubling deeper intimacy that conjoins their philosophies
The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and 'Popular' Politics in India, 1878-1995
Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste and tribe
Much of the photographic record of caste and tribe in India beginning in 1840 formed part of a positivist system of classification which took external characteristics encoded in the bodies of photographic subjects as indices of cultural and political characteristics. Because of the prevalence of endogamous caste groupings India was held to be uniquely suited to this anthropometric investigation and photographic vision came to stand as a metaphor …
The prosthetic eye
Much discussion of photography's relation to 'evidence' insists on imprisoning it within a dichotomy of 'truth' and ' falsehood'. The narrative developed here combines a Peircean assumption concerning photography's ineluctable 'indexicality' with a Kittlerian preoccupation with the 'data ratios' of different recording media. Analogue photography's chemical infrastructure forms a ground upon which a historical understanding of its protean technolo…
The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester
Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion 'Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography'. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester - playfully and rigorously eng…
On living in the kal(i)yug
Nagda in Madhya Pradesh is the site of a large viscose rayon factory employing significant numbers of workers from surrounding villages. Pollution and health and safety issues in and around the factory have been key concerns for several decades and this, combined with the continuous shift system and division of labour, embodies industry as the apparently (negative) antithesis of the rural. This is certainly the perspective of local high-caste vil…
Civil Contract of Photography in India
Pinney's essay explores, in the context of both colonized and contemporary India, Ariella Azoulay's argument about the prophetic nature of photographic citizenship. The use of photographs in a number of key Indian National Congress reports reveals the destabilizing potential of the camera. This photographic counter-narrative presents a challenge to certain Althusserian and Foucauldian accounts for which the state is ultimately the arbiter of "evi…
An Author Meets Her Critics
In the fall of 2011, I was appointed to the Chair of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology in the Faculty of Humanities. As I soon realized, my appointment occurred amid major transitions regarding the institutionalization of the study of religion at Utrecht University. This is part of a broader trend of renegotiating the space between 'theology' and 'religious studies'. This trend echoes a wider process of 'unchur…
Representations of India
A secret of their own country
In the 1920s, W.E. Gladstone Solomon, the nationalist sympathising director of Bombay's J.J. School of Art, provided a remarkable description of that institution's blossoming hybridity: '... the Western buildings in which different departments of the School are housed almost seem, to knowledgeable eyes, to have been draped by the hands of their Indian students with invisible "saris" ... in the depths of their dark eyes are the fires of enlightenm…
Seven theses on photography
Benjamin and Barthes provide the starting point for a series of inter-connected propositions which seek to return the theorization of photography to the primacy of the pro-filmic. The index is reclaimed as a trace of the photographic event, capable only of delivering what Barthes termed the corps. The resulting contingency and exorbitance are the basis of photography's prophetic and 'troubling' potential which free us from viewing photography as …
What Time is the Visual? Photography and the History of the Future
Part of a broader inquiry that asks, “What time is the visual?” this article uses ethnographic observations and recent theoretical work to suggest that photography is as much future‐oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past. I document different temporal orientations of photographs, drawing on historical studio images featuring clocks and photographic paraphernalia and ethnographic research into memorial images in Nepal and centra…
Crisis and Visual Critique
Perspectives from this special issue on Greece are folded into a discussion of the current post‐Foucauldian and “neo‐Benjaminian” moment of contemporary photographic theory and visual culture. Bourdieu's ethnography of photography is contrasted with his own photographic practice and considered in light of Azoulay's Civil Contract of Photography. The return to the “event” of photography and an understanding of its contingency reawakens its revolut…
Introduction
Future Travel
The Quick and the Dead
Epistemo-patrimony
Noting the relative absence of claims for the restitution of cultural heritage objects by diasporic Indians in North America and Europe, this paper explores the heated contestation over what might be called 'epistemo-patrimony'. This term describes the knowledge forms and enunciatory protocols through which India and Hinduism can be constituted as proper objects. Recent interventions by the Infinity Foundation are examined through analogy with th…
The Tiger's Nature, but Not the Tiger
Gandhi was obliged to negotiate the central problem of Bal Gangadhar Tilak's dominance of Indian politics through the first two decades of the twentieth century and the astonishing symmetry between many of their concerns. This article explores the distance that separates Gandhi and Tilak ethically and politically but also attempts to highlight the troubling deeper intimacy that conjoins their philosophies
Hindi Cinema and Half‐Forgotten Dialects
India as a culture area will be nowhere, I think, in the world of knowledge, the sciences and arts, if it does not first defy the European monopoly of the scientific method established in modern times.1 These words are by the anthropologist J. P. S. Uberoi, but they can also be used to adumbrate one of the starting points from which the cultural critic and histo-rian Ashis Nandy has set about investigating the "vestigal dialects " that have remai…
To know a man from his face
Explanations of Itself
Representations of India
The Quick and the Dead
Explanations of Itself
Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste and tribe
Much of the photographic record of caste and tribe in India beginning in 1840 formed part of a positivist system of classification which took external characteristics encoded in the bodies of photographic subjects as indices of cultural and political characteristics. Because of the prevalence of endogamous caste groupings India was held to be uniquely suited to this anthropometric investigation and photographic vision came to stand as a metaphor …
What crisis
Other explanations of itself
Future Travel
The Iconology of Hindu Oleographs
To know a man from his face
Crossing Cultures
Moral Topophilia
This chapter is concerned with the depiction oflandscape in a genre of popular Indian art. These landscapes are represented through a stylized aesthetic which expresses a historical and moral topophilia.1 They frequently give visible form to the intersection and conflict of, on the one hand, a folk model of historical decay and, on the other, a nationalist political language of modernity. I refer to these mass-produced depictions as ‘oleographs’2…
Hindi Cinema and Half‐Forgotten Dialects
India as a culture area will be nowhere, I think, in the world of knowledge, the sciences and arts, if it does not first defy the European monopoly of the scientific method established in modern times.1 These words are by the anthropologist J. P. S. Uberoi, but they can also be used to adumbrate one of the starting points from which the cultural critic and histo-rian Ashis Nandy has set about investigating the "vestigal dialects " that have remai…
Introduction
The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and 'Popular' Politics in India, 1878-1995
On living in the kal(i)yug
Nagda in Madhya Pradesh is the site of a large viscose rayon factory employing significant numbers of workers from surrounding villages. Pollution and health and safety issues in and around the factory have been key concerns for several decades and this, combined with the continuous shift system and division of labour, embodies industry as the apparently (negative) antithesis of the rural. This is certainly the perspective of local high-caste vil…
The Burden (And Freedom) of Photography
A secret of their own country
In the 1920s, W.E. Gladstone Solomon, the nationalist sympathising director of Bombay's J.J. School of Art, provided a remarkable description of that institution's blossoming hybridity: '... the Western buildings in which different departments of the School are housed almost seem, to knowledgeable eyes, to have been draped by the hands of their Indian students with invisible "saris" ... in the depths of their dark eyes are the fires of enlightenm…
Notes from the Surface of the Image
Photography's Other Histories
Things Happen
Four Types of Visual Culture
The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains, and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of "things.
Colonialism and Culture
Addressed to academics and advanced students in all fields of the social sciences and humanities, this Handbook is at once a synthesis of advances in the field, with a comprehensive coverage of the scholarly literature, and a collection of
The prosthetic eye
Much discussion of photography's relation to 'evidence' insists on imprisoning it within a dichotomy of 'truth' and ' falsehood'. The narrative developed here combines a Peircean assumption concerning photography's ineluctable 'indexicality' with a Kittlerian preoccupation with the 'data ratios' of different recording media. Analogue photography's chemical infrastructure forms a ground upon which a historical understanding of its protean technolo…
Creole Europe
In the introduction to his first book, Place, Taste and Tradition, Bernard Smith noted that Winckelmann wrote up the results of his explorations in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the same year that, “Wolfe captured Quebec and Clive consolidated the gains of the battle of Plassey” (Smith 1945: 16). Smith then suggested that “the relation[ship] between the commercial policy that led to imperialist expansion and the archaeological investiga…
Optic‐Clash
This chapter contains sections titled: Darshan: Devotion and Reciprocity Nazar: Looking as Poison and Cure Inter-Ocularity: In Search of the Secular? A Historicized Visuality Somatics and Subjectivity References
Art (28 works) · Sociology (25 works) · History (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (14 works) · History (13 works) · Visual arts (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works)