Researching indigenous and marginal peoples – Introduction

Those promoting tourism often seek to highlight that which is unique about their destinations in order to attract tourists. Many countries have beautiful landscapes, rich histories and heritage, and the tourist may come to see linkages of landscape and history across different countries and indeed possibly across continents. However, in the search for the unique, those countries with ethnic minority or other minority groups demarcated by factors other than ethnicity but characterised by special belief systems or ways of life living within their borders (e.g. the Amish) are truly able to offer the tourist a glimpse of something that will not be found in other parts of the world. Accordingly, and being aware that holiday makers are not lay anthropologists and may be seeking little more than an entertainment, minorities and their culture have become in many places a staged show based primarily on song and dance. Indeed, such has been the process that Xie (2011, p. 196) provides an example from the island of Hainan, China, where tourism promoters have created ‘the authentic Chiyou tribe’ to entertain tourists – a tribe developed purely for entertainment based on concepts of the exotic and primitive and only loosely based on the culture of the native Li people. One partial result described by Xie (2011) has been that the Li themselves have become confused as to their own culture

The Shipwrecked Shore and Other Metaphors: what we can learn from occupation of, and representations in, virtual worlds

In cyberspace, one’s body can be represented by one's own description, reality can be disrupted and the plain made beautiful or ‘… the beautiful plain’, (Turkle 1999:643). Our case study (cf Stake 1995) sought to explore the opportunities offered to students when they come to class in a virtual world and a differently created learning space. We consider Bullinghurst and Dünser’s (2012) work on augmenting reality for learners to combine the ‘real and the virtual’ to enable students to deal with the abstract. This paper explores student representations in Second Life, a 3D immersive world (www.secondlife.com), and as we engage, we see that the virtual not only enhances both curriculum and practice, but also an emergent scope for visual hermeneutics as both a digital literacy and analytical research tool. The focus of the case is a first year FoLSC group of students, based in Computing, and a first year module with embedded study and academic skills. Our conclusions suggest that offering learning opportunities in different spaces, can, indeed, disrupt – but in a powerful and positive way

Buddhism, Beauty, and Virtue

The chapter challenges hyperbolic claims about the centrality of appreciation of beauty to Buddhism. Within the texts, attitudes are more mixed, except for a form of 'inner beauty' - the beauty found in the expression of virtues or wisdom in forms of bodily comportment. Inner beauty is a stable presence throughout Buddhist history, practices, and art

Empty hands and precious pictures: post-mortem portrait photographs of children

In an 1882 article on ‘A Grave Subject’, the photographer George Bradforde wrote: How the relatives can bear to look upon these photographs I cannot understand, unless they have a peculiar love of the horrible. For my part I cannot see the necessity of photographing the dead at all. If the departed were truly beloved, nothing that may happen in this world can ever efface the dear features from the mind’s eye: it needs not a cold, crude photograph representing the last dreary stage of humanity to recall those lineaments. Indeed, I should imagine it would in time lead to the forgetting of the pleasant smile or the lightsome laugh, and supply, in place, a ghoul-like resemblance of anything but a pleasant nature (394- 5). This sums up the reasons why photographic portraits of the dead are no longer widespread. Such images would today be viewed as ghoulish and morbid, and a photograph of a dead body now strikes us as bearable only in the form of news images in which horror is the main thrust of the story. Such pictures bear witness to the obscenity of violent death: they are a necessary record of atrocity rather than the portrait of a dead person. Victorian photographs of the dead, however, were for the most part not those of murders or victims of war; they were family members, most commonly children, who had died at home. They are not news photographs distributed widely among strangers, but portraits, commissioned by family members and kept in the home

Recalling All the Olympians: W. B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things,” On the Boiler and the Agenda of National Rebirth

While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’ . . . would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernit

On the Interest in Beauty and Disinterest

Contemporary philosophical attitudes toward beauty are hard to reconcile with its importance in the history of philosophy. Philosophers used to allow it a starring role in their theories of autonomy, morality, or the good life. But today, if beauty is discussed at all, it is often explicitly denied any such importance. This is due, in part, to the thought that beauty is the object of “disinterested pleasure”. In this paper I clarify the notion of disinterest and develop two general strategies for resisting the emphasis on it, in the hopes of getting a clearer view of beauty’s significance. I present and discuss several literary depictions of the encounter with beauty that motivate both strategies. These depictions illustrate the ways in which aesthetic experience can be personally transformative. I argue that they present difficulties for disinterest theories and suggest we abandon the concept of disinterest to focus instead on the special kind of interest beauty fuels. I propose a closer look at the Platonic thought that beauty is the object of love

Beauty and the Beastly Prime Minister

This essay examines the so-called “turn to beauty” in British fiction since the 1990s as a response to the political and social consequences of Thatcherism. Focusing primarily on four texts—Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), Julian Barnes’s England, England, (1998), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)—this essay argues that conceptions of beauty and beastliness delineate possible boundaries to the neoliberalism with which Thatcherism is associated. Two distinct phases of the beauty/beastliness rhetoric are identified: an ironized utopianism in the 1990s; an ambivalent embrace of global humanism in the 2000s

Transatlantic consumptions: disease, fame and literary nationalisms in the Davidson sisters, Southey, and Poe.

This article supplements Lawlor’s Consumption and Literature by demonstrating the complex relationships between disease and literature. Lawlor shows how the consumptive American poetesses, sisters Margaret and Lucretia Davidson, became famous for their consumptive condition and early deaths on both sides of the Atlantic, and were feted as such by prominent (mostly male) literary figures like British Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the Americans Washington Irving and Samuel Finley Breeze Morse. Edgar Allan Poe took the opportunity to convert the issue of American critics fawning over Southey’s praise from the literary motherland of Britain, into a critical space for distinctively American criticism, as dictated by himself. Poe observed that the actual quality of the Davidson sisters’ poetry was poor and that critics both British and American were seduced by the image (highly popular at the time) of consumptive femininity, poetic or not. Poe, perhaps unusually for the period, argued that a distinction should be made between text and biographical context. Lawlor suggests that the literary disease consumption became a lever for Poe to intervene in the national politics of literary criticism at a time when America was attempting to establish a distinctive national and literary-critical identity for itself