Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. xii, 179 pages : illustrations; 25 cm.

Summary

1. This book is about first contacts - intercultural spaces invaded and transgressed upon by explorers, both real and fictional.
2. Although the book focuses on British East India's exploration of the Andaman Islands, complete with illustrations, ship's logs, and official published reports, David Tomas uses this study as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion of first contact experiences, like the famous Orson Welles's radio dramatization, "The War of the Worlds," and Western recordings of endangered environmental and ethnographic sounds. Powerfully innovative, this book exposes the brutality one group of people can inflict upon another when they attempt to represent them in writing and photographs.
3. Tomas contends that such unthinking brutality continues today, and planes and automobiles serve as our sailing ships, transporting people from dominant cultures into spaces that rapidly become destabilized.

Series statement

1. Institutional structures of feeling

Uniform title

1. Institutional structures of feeling.

Subject

1. Photography in ethnology > History
2. First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners
3. Andamanese (Indic people) > First contact with Europeans
4. Acculturation
5. Intercultural communication

Contents

1. Ch. 1. Transcultural Space -- Ch. 2. Of Trees and Men -- Ch. 3. Technologies of Representation, Transcultural Space, and Transcultural Beings -- Ch. 4. Sound and Intercultural Contact Spaces -- Ch. 5. Traumatic Photographs, Boundary Phenomena, and Transcultural Space.

Owning institution

1. Columbia University Libraries

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-168) and index.