Description:
- The book offers a new theory of what mimesis is and how it operates and theorizes mimesis in new contexts: in relation to history, historiography, cultural psychology, art production, tourism, colonialism, and other transcultural encounters.
- The book offers a unified view of mimesis in eight different cultures. Prior studies (Taussig and Harrison for example) examine mimesis mainly in one culture.
- As is evident in the Table of Contents, the book approaches mimesis through a great range of topics and cases.
- The book provides answers to the controversial anthropological question as to what degree cultures are invented or authentic.
- This book is unique in asking how cultural residues in many forms reflect conversations in images between foreign visitors and indigenous peoples. It also asks how, through mimesis in a wide range of mediums, the colonized "look back" from their own frames of reference, retain authorship, and incorporate or define themselves against layers of history, locale factions, or foreign others.
Brief description:
Jeannette Mageo is a psychological anthropologist. Her work focuses on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Since 1980, she has been involved in research and publication on Samoan culture, history, and psychology.
Review Quotes:
"Anthropologists, as scholars and teachers, should welcome these analyses, as mimesis is at the core of our foundational ethnographic method, participant observation, and also is a popular strategy of hands-on, experiential learning within classrooms. As Bell concludes, 'mimesis is profoundly engaging anthropologically because of issues it raises about the nature of cross-culture engagement'. Anthropologist see, anthropologist do." - JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
"...a rich and nuanced thesaurus of instances of mimesis. Common themes are developed across the chapters, skilfully knit together in the Afterword penned by Bell...The impressive internal coherence of the volume and the questions it generates encourage an engagement with this publication beyond its regional specificity." - Anthropos
"This edited collection offers an important contribution to mimesis and its role in transcultural encounters, both in the past and present, in the Pacific region." - Alison Dundon, University of Adelaide, Australia