Research Catalog

Title

Transcultural space and transcultural beings / David Tomas.

Author

Tomas, David.

Publication

Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 179 pages : illustrations; 25 cm.

Summary

• This book is about first contacts - intercultural spaces invaded and transgressed upon by explorers, both real and fictional.
• 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.
• 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

Institutional structures of feeling

Uniform Title

Institutional structures of feeling.

Subjects

• Photography in ethnology > History
• First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners
• Andamanese (Indic people) > First contact with Europeans
• Acculturation
• Intercultural communication

Bibliography (note)

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

Contents

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.

ISBN

0813319749 (alk. paper)

LCCN

96010224

OCLC

ocm34283026

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries