Rupert Cox – författare

This book challenges the perception of Japan as a ‘copying culture’ through a series of detailed ethnographic and historical case studies. It addresses a question about why the West has had such a fascination for the adeptness with which the Japanese apparently assimilate all things foreign and at the same time such a fear of their skill at artificially remaking and automating the world around them. Countering the idea of a Japan that deviously or ingenuously copies others, it elucidates the history of creative exchanges with the outside world and the particular myths, philosophies and concepts which are emblematic of the origins and originality of copying in Japan. The volume demonstrates the diversity and creativity of copying in the Japanese context through the translation of a series of otherwise loosely related ideas and concepts into objects, images, texts and practices of reproduction, which include: shamanic theatre, puppetry, tea utensils, Kyoto town houses, architectural models, genres of painting, calligraphy, and poetry, ‘sample’ food displays, and the fashion and car industries.

The tea ceremony and the martial arts are intimately linked in the popular and historical imagination with Zen Buddhism, and Japanese culture. They are commonly interpreted as religio-aesthetic pursuits which express core spiritual values through bodily gesture and the creation of highly valued objects. Ideally, the experience of practising the Zen arts culminates in enlightenment.This book challenges that long-held view and proposes that the Zen arts should be understood as part of a literary and visual history of representing Japanese culture through the arts. Cox argues that these texts and images emerged fully as systems for representing the arts during the modern period, produced within Japan as a form of cultural nationalism and outside Japan as part of an orientalist discourse.Practitioners' experiences are in fact rarely referred to in terms of Zen or art, but instead are spatially and socially grounded. Combining anthropological description with historical criticism, Cox shows that the Zen arts are best understood in terms of a dynamic relationship between an aesthetic discourse on art and culture and the social and embodied experiences of those who participate in them.

This book challenges the perception of Japan as a ‘copying culture’ through a series of detailed ethnographic and historical case studies. It addresses a question about why the West has had such a fascination for the adeptness with which the Japanese apparently assimilate all things foreign and at the same time such a fear of their skill at artificially remaking and automating the world around them. Countering the idea of a Japan that deviously or ingenuously copies others, it elucidates the history of creative exchanges with the outside world and the particular myths, philosophies and concepts which are emblematic of the origins and originality of copying in Japan. The volume demonstrates the diversity and creativity of copying in the Japanese context through the translation of a series of otherwise loosely related ideas and concepts into objects, images, texts and practices of reproduction, which include: shamanic theatre, puppetry, tea utensils, Kyoto town houses, architectural models, genres of painting, calligraphy, and poetry, ‘sample’ food displays, and the fashion and car industries.

The tea ceremony and the martial arts are intimately linked in the popular and historical imagination with Zen Buddhism, and Japanese culture. They are commonly interpreted as religio-aesthetic pursuits which express core spiritual values through bodily gesture and the creation of highly valued objects. Ideally, the experience of practising the Zen arts culminates in enlightenment.This book challenges that long-held view and proposes that the Zen arts should be understood as part of a literary and visual history of representing Japanese culture through the arts. Cox argues that these texts and images emerged fully as systems for representing the arts during the modern period, produced within Japan as a form of cultural nationalism and outside Japan as part of an orientalist discourse.Practitioners' experiences are in fact rarely referred to in terms of Zen or art, but instead are spatially and socially grounded. Combining anthropological description with historical criticism, Cox shows that the Zen arts are best understood in terms of a dynamic relationship between an aesthetic discourse on art and culture and the social and embodied experiences of those who participate in them.

Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology is about the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more creative forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth. The volume brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual and sound studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural and textual forms which it demonstrates through an accompanying DVD. The book and DVD make an argument for a necessary, critical development in anthropological ways of knowing that take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices.

Routledge International Handbook of Visual Research Methods in Anthropology approaches the question of method through conceptualisations of the visual world as light, sight, images and technologies of imaging that can be analysed and described through a range of visual practices in the course of anthropological research.The aim of the book is to move beyond making a case for the importance of “the visual” via its notional arrangement as a subject and means of study in anthropology by showing how it is applied as a way of doing anthropological research through the explication of a series of examples. Employing an innovative structure for a handbook, each contribution is orientated around a single distinguishing concept and together the contributions addresses the following three issues: How to see through images by treating the visual as a form of knowledge made visible. A second group of entries is concerned with how to see through time by approaching the visual as a modality for representing duration and rendering legible what may no longer be available to vision. Finally, a third group of entries deals with the visual at a phenomenal level, as a medium that we see in.This handbook is a timely and useful resource for both students and researchers of anthropology at this time because the discipline's long-standing, theoretical and empirically rich practical engagements with visual methods provide valuable insights for the social sciences into current transmutations of “the visual” into “the multimodal”, the “non-representational” and “the sensory”. The importance of these areas as well as of digital research more generally makes visual methods ever more important for social scientists; hence, this handbook is also valuable for those studying general research methods courses and in related fields such as sociology, health studies and social work.