Kenneth M George
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 74891 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kenneth M George |
| NOMBRES | Kenneth M |
| APELLIDO | George |
| FIRMA | GEORGE K M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9915-3992 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 171 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy
‘Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy’ is part of a collective experiment in digital composition published within this double special issue of TAJA. Our aim has been to ignite and enable novel forms of social analysis. We invited contributors to creatively rethink the form of the academic article with us and built a custom-designed website to host the results. All original research contributions in this collection are made up of two part…
Readers of the 'Lost' Purana
The Hindu texts known as caste puranas (jāti purāṇas) provide the mythopolitical foundation for many of India’s castes. These puranas may be said to ‘gather’ a community audience, and such castes themselves may be thought of as object-oriented gatherings whose affective, ideological, and custodial attachments to their respective jati puranas also include the deification of these texts as revered objects. A caste does more than interpret such a pu…
Technophany and Its Publics
The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in whichtechnē(crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using "technophany" as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of …
Demanding Images
Reviewed by: Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia by Karen Strassler Kenneth M. George Karen Strassler. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 368 pp. Reckoned in terms of its broadest ambitions and reach, Karen Strassler's Demanding Images is a welcome and absorbing ethnographic study of "the protean and unpredictable nature of political c…
After All
This essay, one of more than a dozen in this volume to honor the late Mary Margaret Steedly, takes the place of an afterword for this memorial collection that constitute a multi-voiced appreciation of Steedly by her colleagues and students. Steedly was always a voracious and discerning reader, and her capacity to read widely and well was behind the artful, writerly style that she cultivated, and that made such an impression on her students, colle…
Spirited Politics
Tools and world-making in the worship of Vishwakarma
Across India, and much of the rest of South and Southeast Asia as well, \ntools, machines, and other instruments are periodically set down or \nstilled to become the focus of worship. This worship is associated often \n– though not always – with the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or ‘Maker of \nthe Universe.’ Our essay, based on preliminary ethnographic and archival \nresearch in India, gathers together myths about tools as well as anthropological \nac…
No Ethics Without Things
Just as recognition and pursuit of the human good take place in language and action, so too do they unfold in encounter with the material and visual. The ethical crises, projects, and striving we see in everyday religious life are worked out not just in the intersubjective play and politics of language but also in encounter with, in dwelling with, material and visual substances and forms. This essay considers the material conditions that make pos…
The Art of Secularism
This work is a book review considering the title The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India by Karin Zitzewitz
Producing Indonesia
Unsur[e] Kaligrafi
Tulisan ini melukiskan beberapa kecemasan yang menimpa pelukis Aceh, A.D. Pirous dan \npublik yang dibayangkannya, menjelang pameran besar—yang dimaksudkan sebagai sebuah \nretrospeksi—pada bulan Maret 2002, di Galeri Nasional, Jakarta. Kecemasan ini berakar \ndalam beragam bahasa, ortografi dan wacana yang belum baku. Keadaan ‘goyah’ ini tampak \nketika ‘Kesenian Islam Indonesia Kontemporer’ dipertunjukkan, dipromosikan, dan \ndidiskusikan secar…
Picturing Islam
Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur'anic Art in Indonesia
What predicaments and crises are posed, whose interests are served, and what discourses are advanced when artists use the Qur'an for aesthetic projects? This essay throws light on some of the ethical and ideological energies that have animated today's Muslim art publics by looking at the anxiety and outcry in Indonesia's art world over the use of Qur'anic script in fashion and in painting. I argue that moments of panic or outrage may afford us a …
Ethical pleasure, visualdzikir, and artistic subjectivity in contemporary indonesia
Drawing from a long-term ethnographic collaboration with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, this article examines the mingling of art and religion for what it may tell us about subjectivity and the senses in a predominantly Muslim public culture. Recent statements describe subjectivity as the site of a social actor's sensibility, reflexivity, and judgment and as an annex to prevailing social, cultural, and ideological circumstances. Following some …
Creative Reckonings
Art and Identity Politics
Twenty years ago, Ulf Hannerz nudged cultural anthropologists to consider the places most in need of ethnographic work. 'Where are the least-understood cultures now?' he asked. 'In Lagos or Paris, San Francisco or Bombay', replied Hannerz, '[in] cities with slums and skyscrapers. ... They are the cultures of cities, nations, and the world system, rather than of villages or bands.' Work in these places, Hannerz continued, should help us see in all…
Powers of blessing from the wilderness and from heaven
Spirited Politics
The essays in Spirited Politics throw light on predicaments that spring from the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism in contemporary Southeast Asian public life. Covering material from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the contributors explore the calamities and ironies of Southeast Asian identity politics, examining the ways in which religion and politics are made to serve each other
Colonial "Reformation" in the Highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1892-1995
Colonial "Reformation" in the Highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, 1892-1995. Albert Schrauwers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 279 pp
Personal and Folk Narrative as Cultural Representation
The Domestication of Desire
High Art Down Home
High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of. Local Art Market. Stuart Planner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xiii. 250 pp., index, bibliography, notes, glossary, appendixes, tables, figures
Objects on the loose
The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do \nwith things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors \nand commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic \nand disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical \nwritings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and those \nof his collaborators in the Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspe…
Signature work
Recent statements on globalization, the social life of objects, and the open-endedness of self-definition offer fresh angles of approach in the ethnographic apprehension of contemporary art worlds. They are brought together here in an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia. Modernist ideas about art, authenticity, and painterly subjectivity not only inform the expert systems that oversee the 'artn…
Designs on Indonesia's Muslim Communities
On october 15, 1991, Haji Muhammad Soeharto, President of Indonesia, became the first official calligrapher for theAl-Qur'an Mushaf Istiqlal-The National Independence Illuminated Qur'an-by inking in the initial letter of theBasmallahin the opening sura (Al-Fatihah, the prologue; see Fig. 1). Four years later, just after commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, he put the finishing touch to the closing sura of the Qur'an …
From Grammar to Politics
Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur'anic Art in Indonesia
What predicaments and crises are posed, whose interests are served, and what discourses are advanced when artists use the Qur'an for aesthetic projects? This essay throws light on some of the ethical and ideological energies that have animated today's Muslim art publics by looking at the anxiety and outcry in Indonesia's art world over the use of Qur'anic script in fashion and in painting. I argue that moments of panic or outrage may afford us a …
Showing Signs of Violence
Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society
IntroductionListening to people making music is a way to listen in on the making of social relationships.Music does not transcend the strains of social life, but as a set of practices tuned to and tuned by the flux and flow of human relationships, it is necessarily bound to them.As social practice, musicmaking events take place within a field of cultural and historical particularities.Yet because they are always immersed in human situations, musi…
Headhunting, History, and Exchange in Upland Sulawesi
A few weeks after the rice harvest of 1985, drums, song, and loud cries echoed through the headwaters of the Salu Mambi, celebrating the ambush of seven victims in regions downstream. Several bands of headhunters had returned with their bloodless trophies to renew the fertility of their terraces and the prosperity of their households. If such forays appear to be troubling anachronisms in Indonesia's aging New Order, they also display the surprisi…
No Ethics Without Things
Just as recognition and pursuit of the human good take place in language and action, so too do they unfold in encounter with the material and visual. The ethical crises, projects, and striving we see in everyday religious life are worked out not just in the intersubjective play and politics of language but also in encounter with, in dwelling with, material and visual substances and forms. This essay considers the material conditions that make pos…
Designs on Indonesia's Muslim Communities
On october 15, 1991, Haji Muhammad Soeharto, President of Indonesia, became the first official calligrapher for theAl-Qur'an Mushaf Istiqlal-The National Independence Illuminated Qur'an-by inking in the initial letter of theBasmallahin the opening sura (Al-Fatihah, the prologue; see Fig. 1). Four years later, just after commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, he put the finishing touch to the closing sura of the Qur'an …
Signature work
Recent statements on globalization, the social life of objects, and the open-endedness of self-definition offer fresh angles of approach in the ethnographic apprehension of contemporary art worlds. They are brought together here in an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia. Modernist ideas about art, authenticity, and painterly subjectivity not only inform the expert systems that oversee the 'artn…
Felling a Song with a New Ax
Kenneth M. George, Felling a Song with a New Ax: Writing and the Reshaping of Ritual Song Performance in Upland Sulawesi, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 103, No. 407 (Jan. - Mar., 1990), pp. 3-23
Lyric, history, and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi
This article explores how a minority religious community in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, brings meaning, history, and polity into being through the lyric discourse of headhunting ritual. The discussion shows how divergent interpretations of a single song work as tactical modes of understanding, as ways to "read with the polity." In one case, a villager reads the lyrics in such a way as to link the ritual headhunt to the intercultural tensions of…
Some Things That Have Happened toThe Sun After September 1965
As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loy…
Dark Trembling
Kenneth M. George, Dark Trembling: Ethnographic Notes on Secrecy and Concealment in Highland Sulawesi, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4, Controversy: Hegemony and the Anthropological Encounter (Oct., 1993), pp. 230-239
Tools and world-making in the worship of Vishwakarma
Across India, and much of the rest of South and Southeast Asia as well, \ntools, machines, and other instruments are periodically set down or \nstilled to become the focus of worship. This worship is associated often \n– though not always – with the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or ‘Maker of \nthe Universe.’ Our essay, based on preliminary ethnographic and archival \nresearch in India, gathers together myths about tools as well as anthropological \nac…
Ethical pleasure, visualdzikir, and artistic subjectivity in contemporary indonesia
Drawing from a long-term ethnographic collaboration with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, this article examines the mingling of art and religion for what it may tell us about subjectivity and the senses in a predominantly Muslim public culture. Recent statements describe subjectivity as the site of a social actor's sensibility, reflexivity, and judgment and as an annex to prevailing social, cultural, and ideological circumstances. Following some …
Objects on the loose
The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do \nwith things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors \nand commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic \nand disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical \nwritings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and those \nof his collaborators in the Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspe…
The Thread of Life
Technophany and Its Publics
The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in whichtechnē(crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using "technophany" as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of …
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: MarginalIty In an Out-of-the-Way Place. ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. xvi + 350 pp., photographs, notes, references, index
Felling a Song with a New Ax
Kenneth M. George, Felling a Song with a New Ax: Writing and the Reshaping of Ritual Song Performance in Upland Sulawesi, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 103, No. 407 (Jan. - Mar., 1990), pp. 3-23
Headhunting, History, and Exchange in Upland Sulawesi
A few weeks after the rice harvest of 1985, drums, song, and loud cries echoed through the headwaters of the Salu Mambi, celebrating the ambush of seven victims in regions downstream. Several bands of headhunters had returned with their bloodless trophies to renew the fertility of their terraces and the prosperity of their households. If such forays appear to be troubling anachronisms in Indonesia's aging New Order, they also display the surprisi…
Tidikawa
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Dark Trembling
Kenneth M. George, Dark Trembling: Ethnographic Notes on Secrecy and Concealment in Highland Sulawesi, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4, Controversy: Hegemony and the Anthropological Encounter (Oct., 1993), pp. 230-239
Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society
IntroductionListening to people making music is a way to listen in on the making of social relationships.Music does not transcend the strains of social life, but as a set of practices tuned to and tuned by the flux and flow of human relationships, it is necessarily bound to them.As social practice, musicmaking events take place within a field of cultural and historical particularities.Yet because they are always immersed in human situations, musi…
Lyric, history, and allegory, or the end of headhunting ritual in upland Sulawesi
This article explores how a minority religious community in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia, brings meaning, history, and polity into being through the lyric discourse of headhunting ritual. The discussion shows how divergent interpretations of a single song work as tactical modes of understanding, as ways to "read with the polity." In one case, a villager reads the lyrics in such a way as to link the ritual headhunt to the intercultural tensions of…
People of the Source
Violence, solace, and ritual
The Play of Time
This book provides both an ethnographic study of the organization of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of field work with the Kodi people of the island of Sumba, it focuses on Kodi calendrical rituals, exchange transactions, and confrontations with the historical forces of the colonial and postcolonial world. The book explores the cont…
From Grammar to Politics
Showing Signs of Violence
This book has to do with the language and cultural politics of ritual violence in a minority religious community in highland Sulawesi, Indonesia. More particularly, it is about headhunting ceremonies and their stubborn presence in the contemporary social life of a marginal, upland enclave, an enclave that has suffered the wounds of social and cultural dislocation just by staying in place. No longer so remotely situated from the centers of state a…
Fragile Traditions
Showing Signs of Violence
Writing the past, Inscribing the Future
Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile—working through this writing of a colonized past to…
After Returning to Some Places
Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. viii. 293 pp., illustrations, index, contributors
About the House
About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hughjones, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 300 pp., figures, notes, photographs, references, contributors, index
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: MarginalIty In an Out-of-the-Way Place. ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. xvi + 350 pp., photographs, notes, references, index
Some Things That Have Happened toThe Sun After September 1965
As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loy…
Designs on Indonesia's Muslim Communities
On october 15, 1991, Haji Muhammad Soeharto, President of Indonesia, became the first official calligrapher for theAl-Qur'an Mushaf Istiqlal-The National Independence Illuminated Qur'an-by inking in the initial letter of theBasmallahin the opening sura (Al-Fatihah, the prologue; see Fig. 1). Four years later, just after commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, he put the finishing touch to the closing sura of the Qur'an …
The Thread of Life
Objects on the loose
The essays gathered for this special theme issue of Ethnos have to do \nwith things and their social circumstances. Though the contributors \nand commentators in 'Objects on the Loose' work in different ethnographic \nand disciplinary precincts, and draw from a diverse set of theoretical \nwritings, we share a common debt to the essays of Arjun Appadurai and those \nof his collaborators in the Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspe…
Signature work
Recent statements on globalization, the social life of objects, and the open-endedness of self-definition offer fresh angles of approach in the ethnographic apprehension of contemporary art worlds. They are brought together here in an exploration of art forgeries, connoisseurship, value, and exchange in Bandung, Indonesia. Modernist ideas about art, authenticity, and painterly subjectivity not only inform the expert systems that oversee the 'artn…
The Domestication of Desire
High Art Down Home
High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnography of. Local Art Market. Stuart Planner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xiii. 250 pp., index, bibliography, notes, glossary, appendixes, tables, figures
Personal and Folk Narrative as Cultural Representation
History (25 obras) · Art (23 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Asian Studies and History (21 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Art history (13 obras) · History (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Aesthetics (11 obras)