B Luvaas
Biographic Data
| ID | 45838 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Luvaas |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Luvaas |
| SIGNATURE | LUVAAS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Drexel University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0886-8624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Opaque encounters: Leaving the strange strange in ethnographic field photography
Theory, articulated through text, is the primary means through which anthropologists understand the communities we engage through our work. It is a critical part of the discipline, but it is also a mode of abstraction, and extraction, that rips us from the immediacy of sensory experience and too often replicates existing power relationships. This article explores the potential of photography to serve as an alternative mode of theorizing. Building…
Street Atmospheres: Photographing Worlds‐in‐the‐Making in Jakarta
Urban theorists increasingly resort to the language of multiplicity when describing cities, particularly Southeast Asian metropolises like Jakarta, Indonesia. Cities, they argue, are composed of worlds within worlds, fragments that fail to cohere into a whole. This is a useful model, but it fails to account for the felt specificity of a particular place and time. Every city has a distinct atmosphere that separates it from elsewhere and which itse…
Translating Sustainability into Somatic Experience: Renderings of Eco-Cities in Southeast Asia
Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by tra…
Photography
Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand the social and cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout the globe. This entry examines the work anthropologists have done on, and with, photography. It surveys the conclusions anthropologists have rea…
Alien domesticity: Representing home during a pandemic
Cultural geography and the related disciplines of urban sociology and anthropology have long focused their theoretical lenses on the city as a space of lived multiplicity. This photographic essay focuses its lens on the home as such a space. During the pandemic lockdown of 2020-2021, many of us spent more time in our homes than we ever had before, working, teaching, schooling, shopping, and barricading ourselves from the outside world. This essay…
Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta
In the era of social media and digital cameras, street photography, or the candid documentation of everyday life in public space, has seen a resurgence of interest worldwide. What draws people to the genre is its ability to transform the way they see and experience the spaces around them. Street photography, I argue here, is a mode of shadow worlding, a dynamic and collaborative place-making practice in which the places being built are left delib…
Smudged windows: Scenes from home during a pandemic
During the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, the space of home for many of us expanded considerably, from a place of refuge and rest, to the primary location of nearly every event in our lives. This photo essay documents the lived, and felt, experience of life at home in suburban Philadelphia during lockdown. Shot through smudged and hazy windows and depicting ambiguous scenes that are often difficult to identify or figure out, it seeks to document b…
Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass, Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2020)
Review of: Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass , Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2020) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 216 pp., ISBN 978-1-35006-130-9, h/bk, £76.50 ISBN 978-1-35023-795-7, p/bk, £26.09
Intimate alienation: Street photography as a mediation of distance
Street photography, in the last few years, has seen a resurgence of popular interest. Digital cameras, online tutorials, and social media platforms like Instagram and Flickr have introduced the quasi-documentary genre to a new generation of photographers. But this street photography renaissance is not just a consequence of new digital technology; it is also a response to it. Street photography, the author argues, is about getting “out in the worl…
The Philadelphia Look: Exploring Urban Place-Making through Street Style Photography
Is there a Philadelphia look, a shared sartorial sensibility that is distinctive to this city and nowhere else? Does a city imprint itself upon its residents in some discernible, observable way? Are Philadelphians actively engaged in a communal project of place-making through their everyday practices of dress? And if so, what does that project look like? What kinds of aesthetics does it produce, reproduce, and combine?These are some of the questi…
Unbecoming: The aftereffects of autoethnography
Autoethnography is a research methodology that employs conscious becoming as a strategy for producing academic knowledge. As it grows in popularity across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, should those who employ the methodology start thinking through the consequences of such becoming for the person engaging in it? This essay draws from the author's long-term work on street style bloggers to argue that autoethnography is a practi…
The Camera and the Anthropologist: Reflections on Photographic Agency
How does our choice of camera impact the way we see our field sites and carry out our work within them? What kinds of seeing does a particular camera enable or foreclose? This essay draws on recent theoretical interventions in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, as well as the author's last decade of experience producing images in the field, to argue that visual anthropology is a collaborative, co-agentive act between anthropologist and…
Street-style geographies: Re-mapping the fashion blogipelago
When street-style blogs – amateur web journals featuring photographs of stylish pedestrians from around the world – began to pop up on the Internet in 2005, they appeared to challenge the established geographic hierarchies of the global fashion industry. Shot by fashion outsiders with little formal training in photography, they featured a variety of people and places far outside the purview of the industry. Drawing in millions of readers, includi…
Seeing the Street as an Ethnographer and Photographer: A Response to Jerome Crowder's Commentary
What does a fashion influencer look like? Portraits of the Instafamous
The Continuous Labor of Fashion
Ethnography and Street Photography
The Affective Lens
Engaging in ethnographic fieldwork often requires overcoming considerable inertia and fighting back feelings of cynicism and alienation toward the place and people studied. Street photography can be one means of overcoming these setbacks. Requiring its practitioners to get out on the streets and directly engage with the people on them, it can fast track an ethnographer's emotional connection to a place, changing its affective landscape for them a…
Introduction: L eviathan and the Entangled Lives of Species
Forging Deeper into the Wilderness: The State of Visual Anthropology Today
Shooting street style in Indonesia: A photo essay
Street-style blogs have become a major Internet phenomenon in the last few years, luring millions of readers and documenting everyday fashion in diverse cities around the globe. But the Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia, despite an abundance of other varieties of fashion blogs and a population with some of the highest percentages of social media use in the world, remains decidedly off the street style map. This photo essay seeks both to …
Third World No More: Rebranding Indonesian Streetwear
Indonesia is home to dozens of high-end couture designers and thousands of local, independent clothing labels. But despite a rapidly growing garment industry, it remains firmly outside the fashion world map. This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian fashion designers and apparel companies to establish a name for themselves internationally by carefully cultivating distinctive brand identities. It documents and critiques two primary brandin…
Indonesian Fashion Blogs: On the Promotional Subject of Personal Style
Over the last several years, a growing number of bloggers from around the globe have forged themselves into voices of authority within the international fashion scene, challenging the status quo of the fashion world, and creating new possible modes of participation in a notoriously insular industry. But some voices are still largely shut out of the conversation. This article considers the still marginal position of Indonesian fashion bloggers in …
Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: On Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music
Otentitas dan otonomi adalah dua kepentingan yang mendasar bagi musisi indie di seluruh dunia. Artikel ini membahas bagaimana pengaruh dua kepentingan tersebut terhadap sound dan style musik indie di Indonesia, sebuah tempat yang berjarak ribuan mil dari tempat asal musik indie. Artikel ini menguji upaya musisi indie Indonesia untuk menunjukkan otentitas dan otonomi dengan pendekatan satu dari dua strategi: (1) menunjukkan kontinuitas selarah dan…
Material Interventions: Indonesian DIY Fashion and the Regime of the Global Brand
In the global neoliberal economy, material and immaterial production increasingly happen on opposite ends of the world where they are assigned different social and economic value and serve to perpetuate stark inequality between increasingly large, transnational corporations and small, local manufacturers. Not everyone, however, accepts the terms of this arrangement. This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian DIY fashion labels to undermine…
Dislocating Sounds: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop
Anthropologists often read the localization or hybridization of cultural forms as a kind of default mode of resistance against the forces of global capitalism, a means through which marginalized ethnic groups maintain regional distinctiveness in the face of an emergent transnational order. But then what are we to make of musical acts like Mocca and The Upstairs, Indonesian "indie" groups who consciously delocalize their music, who go out of their…
Designer Vandalism: Indonesian Indie Fashion and the Cultural Practice of Cut 'n' Paste
Indonesian independent clothing labels like 347, Triggers Syndicate, and Monik/Celtic routinely appropriate their designs from the vaults of international popular culture. They remix corporate logos, rework the album covers of foreign rock bands, and sample a variety of icons and images from an expansive repertoire of digital material. This is not piracy, such designers insist. Pirates copy their material as closely as they can, whereas these lab…
Unbecoming: The aftereffects of autoethnography
Autoethnography is a research methodology that employs conscious becoming as a strategy for producing academic knowledge. As it grows in popularity across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, should those who employ the methodology start thinking through the consequences of such becoming for the person engaging in it? This essay draws from the author's long-term work on street style bloggers to argue that autoethnography is a practi…
Material Interventions: Indonesian DIY Fashion and the Regime of the Global Brand
In the global neoliberal economy, material and immaterial production increasingly happen on opposite ends of the world where they are assigned different social and economic value and serve to perpetuate stark inequality between increasingly large, transnational corporations and small, local manufacturers. Not everyone, however, accepts the terms of this arrangement. This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian DIY fashion labels to undermine…
Indonesian Fashion Blogs: On the Promotional Subject of Personal Style
Over the last several years, a growing number of bloggers from around the globe have forged themselves into voices of authority within the international fashion scene, challenging the status quo of the fashion world, and creating new possible modes of participation in a notoriously insular industry. But some voices are still largely shut out of the conversation. This article considers the still marginal position of Indonesian fashion bloggers in …
Shadow worlding: Chasing light in Yogyakarta
In the era of social media and digital cameras, street photography, or the candid documentation of everyday life in public space, has seen a resurgence of interest worldwide. What draws people to the genre is its ability to transform the way they see and experience the spaces around them. Street photography, I argue here, is a mode of shadow worlding, a dynamic and collaborative place-making practice in which the places being built are left delib…
The Camera and the Anthropologist: Reflections on Photographic Agency
How does our choice of camera impact the way we see our field sites and carry out our work within them? What kinds of seeing does a particular camera enable or foreclose? This essay draws on recent theoretical interventions in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, as well as the author's last decade of experience producing images in the field, to argue that visual anthropology is a collaborative, co-agentive act between anthropologist and…
The Affective Lens
Engaging in ethnographic fieldwork often requires overcoming considerable inertia and fighting back feelings of cynicism and alienation toward the place and people studied. Street photography can be one means of overcoming these setbacks. Requiring its practitioners to get out on the streets and directly engage with the people on them, it can fast track an ethnographer's emotional connection to a place, changing its affective landscape for them a…
What does a fashion influencer look like? Portraits of the Instafamous
Introduction: L eviathan and the Entangled Lives of Species
Re-producing pop: The aesthetics of ambivalence in a contemporary dance music
Electroclash is an electronic dance music popular in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London between 2001 and 2004. In this article, I use the example of electroclash to demonstrate the significance of media in structuring social reality. I argue that electroclash constitutes a set of aesthetic tactics for living through the confusions and contradictions of life in a media-saturated, increasingly globalized, late capitalist economy. It is p…
The Philadelphia Look: Exploring Urban Place-Making through Street Style Photography
Is there a Philadelphia look, a shared sartorial sensibility that is distinctive to this city and nowhere else? Does a city imprint itself upon its residents in some discernible, observable way? Are Philadelphians actively engaged in a communal project of place-making through their everyday practices of dress? And if so, what does that project look like? What kinds of aesthetics does it produce, reproduce, and combine?These are some of the questi…
Street-style geographies: Re-mapping the fashion blogipelago
When street-style blogs – amateur web journals featuring photographs of stylish pedestrians from around the world – began to pop up on the Internet in 2005, they appeared to challenge the established geographic hierarchies of the global fashion industry. Shot by fashion outsiders with little formal training in photography, they featured a variety of people and places far outside the purview of the industry. Drawing in millions of readers, includi…
Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: On Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music
Otentitas dan otonomi adalah dua kepentingan yang mendasar bagi musisi indie di seluruh dunia. Artikel ini membahas bagaimana pengaruh dua kepentingan tersebut terhadap sound dan style musik indie di Indonesia, sebuah tempat yang berjarak ribuan mil dari tempat asal musik indie. Artikel ini menguji upaya musisi indie Indonesia untuk menunjukkan otentitas dan otonomi dengan pendekatan satu dari dua strategi: (1) menunjukkan kontinuitas selarah dan…
Re-producing pop: The aesthetics of ambivalence in a contemporary dance music
Electroclash is an electronic dance music popular in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London between 2001 and 2004. In this article, I use the example of electroclash to demonstrate the significance of media in structuring social reality. I argue that electroclash constitutes a set of aesthetic tactics for living through the confusions and contradictions of life in a media-saturated, increasingly globalized, late capitalist economy. It is p…
Dislocating Sounds: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop
Anthropologists often read the localization or hybridization of cultural forms as a kind of default mode of resistance against the forces of global capitalism, a means through which marginalized ethnic groups maintain regional distinctiveness in the face of an emergent transnational order. But then what are we to make of musical acts like Mocca and The Upstairs, Indonesian "indie" groups who consciously delocalize their music, who go out of their…
Designer Vandalism: Indonesian Indie Fashion and the Cultural Practice of Cut 'n' Paste
Indonesian independent clothing labels like 347, Triggers Syndicate, and Monik/Celtic routinely appropriate their designs from the vaults of international popular culture. They remix corporate logos, rework the album covers of foreign rock bands, and sample a variety of icons and images from an expansive repertoire of digital material. This is not piracy, such designers insist. Pirates copy their material as closely as they can, whereas these lab…
Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development by Daromir Rudnyckyj
Shooting street style in Indonesia: A photo essay
Street-style blogs have become a major Internet phenomenon in the last few years, luring millions of readers and documenting everyday fashion in diverse cities around the globe. But the Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia, despite an abundance of other varieties of fashion blogs and a population with some of the highest percentages of social media use in the world, remains decidedly off the street style map. This photo essay seeks both to …
Third World No More: Rebranding Indonesian Streetwear
Indonesia is home to dozens of high-end couture designers and thousands of local, independent clothing labels. But despite a rapidly growing garment industry, it remains firmly outside the fashion world map. This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian fashion designers and apparel companies to establish a name for themselves internationally by carefully cultivating distinctive brand identities. It documents and critiques two primary brandin…
Indonesian Fashion Blogs: On the Promotional Subject of Personal Style
Over the last several years, a growing number of bloggers from around the globe have forged themselves into voices of authority within the international fashion scene, challenging the status quo of the fashion world, and creating new possible modes of participation in a notoriously insular industry. But some voices are still largely shut out of the conversation. This article considers the still marginal position of Indonesian fashion bloggers in …
Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: On Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music
Otentitas dan otonomi adalah dua kepentingan yang mendasar bagi musisi indie di seluruh dunia. Artikel ini membahas bagaimana pengaruh dua kepentingan tersebut terhadap sound dan style musik indie di Indonesia, sebuah tempat yang berjarak ribuan mil dari tempat asal musik indie. Artikel ini menguji upaya musisi indie Indonesia untuk menunjukkan otentitas dan otonomi dengan pendekatan satu dari dua strategi: (1) menunjukkan kontinuitas selarah dan…
Material Interventions: Indonesian DIY Fashion and the Regime of the Global Brand
In the global neoliberal economy, material and immaterial production increasingly happen on opposite ends of the world where they are assigned different social and economic value and serve to perpetuate stark inequality between increasingly large, transnational corporations and small, local manufacturers. Not everyone, however, accepts the terms of this arrangement. This article chronicles the efforts of Indonesian DIY fashion labels to undermine…
Forging Deeper into the Wilderness: The State of Visual Anthropology Today
Introduction: L eviathan and the Entangled Lives of Species
Seeing the Street as an Ethnographer and Photographer: A Response to Jerome Crowder's Commentary
What does a fashion influencer look like? Portraits of the Instafamous
The Continuous Labor of Fashion
Ethnography and Street Photography
The Affective Lens
Engaging in ethnographic fieldwork often requires overcoming considerable inertia and fighting back feelings of cynicism and alienation toward the place and people studied. Street photography can be one means of overcoming these setbacks. Requiring its practitioners to get out on the streets and directly engage with the people on them, it can fast track an ethnographer's emotional connection to a place, changing its affective landscape for them a…
Street-style geographies: Re-mapping the fashion blogipelago
When street-style blogs – amateur web journals featuring photographs of stylish pedestrians from around the world – began to pop up on the Internet in 2005, they appeared to challenge the established geographic hierarchies of the global fashion industry. Shot by fashion outsiders with little formal training in photography, they featured a variety of people and places far outside the purview of the industry. Drawing in millions of readers, includi…
Unbecoming: The aftereffects of autoethnography
Autoethnography is a research methodology that employs conscious becoming as a strategy for producing academic knowledge. As it grows in popularity across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, should those who employ the methodology start thinking through the consequences of such becoming for the person engaging in it? This essay draws from the author's long-term work on street style bloggers to argue that autoethnography is a practi…
The Camera and the Anthropologist: Reflections on Photographic Agency
How does our choice of camera impact the way we see our field sites and carry out our work within them? What kinds of seeing does a particular camera enable or foreclose? This essay draws on recent theoretical interventions in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, as well as the author's last decade of experience producing images in the field, to argue that visual anthropology is a collaborative, co-agentive act between anthropologist and…
The Philadelphia Look: Exploring Urban Place-Making through Street Style Photography
Is there a Philadelphia look, a shared sartorial sensibility that is distinctive to this city and nowhere else? Does a city imprint itself upon its residents in some discernible, observable way? Are Philadelphians actively engaged in a communal project of place-making through their everyday practices of dress? And if so, what does that project look like? What kinds of aesthetics does it produce, reproduce, and combine?These are some of the questi…
Smudged windows: Scenes from home during a pandemic
During the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, the space of home for many of us expanded considerably, from a place of refuge and rest, to the primary location of nearly every event in our lives. This photo essay documents the lived, and felt, experience of life at home in suburban Philadelphia during lockdown. Shot through smudged and hazy windows and depicting ambiguous scenes that are often difficult to identify or figure out, it seeks to document b…
Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass, Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2020)
Review of: Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass , Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2020) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 216 pp., ISBN 978-1-35006-130-9, h/bk, £76.50 ISBN 978-1-35023-795-7, p/bk, £26.09
Intimate alienation: Street photography as a mediation of distance
Street photography, in the last few years, has seen a resurgence of popular interest. Digital cameras, online tutorials, and social media platforms like Instagram and Flickr have introduced the quasi-documentary genre to a new generation of photographers. But this street photography renaissance is not just a consequence of new digital technology; it is also a response to it. Street photography, the author argues, is about getting “out in the worl…
Photography
Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand the social and cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout the globe. This entry examines the work anthropologists have done on, and with, photography. It surveys the conclusions anthropologists have rea…
Alien domesticity: Representing home during a pandemic
Cultural geography and the related disciplines of urban sociology and anthropology have long focused their theoretical lenses on the city as a space of lived multiplicity. This photographic essay focuses its lens on the home as such a space. During the pandemic lockdown of 2020-2021, many of us spent more time in our homes than we ever had before, working, teaching, schooling, shopping, and barricading ourselves from the outside world. This essay…
Sociology (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Visual arts (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 works) · Photography (9 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (9 works)