Table Of ContentGRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page i
SKILLED VISIONS
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EASA Series
Published in Association with the European Association
of Social-Anthropologists (EASA)
1.LEARNING FIELDS
Volume 1
Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology
Edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain R. Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers
2.LEARNING FIELDS
Volume 2
Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology
Education
Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar
3.GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/ALTERITY
Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich
4.MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES
Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine
Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár
5.FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES
Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West
Simon Harrison
6.SKILLED VISIONS
Between Apprenticeship and Standards
Cristina Grasseni
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S V
KILLED ISIONS
Between Apprenticeship and Standards
Edited by
Cristina Grasseni
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
WEST_AND_RAMAN-Piv.qxd:ellen-prelims.qxd 10/23/09 3:33 PM Page iv
First published in 2009 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2009, 2010 Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman
First paperback edition published in 2010
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without the written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Enduring socialism : explorations of revolution and transformation,
restoration and continuation / edited by Harry G. West and Parvathi
Raman. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hbk : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Post-communism. 2. Socialism. 3. Communism. I. West, Harry G.
II. Raman, Parvathi.
HX44.5.E63 2008
335--dc22
2008032548
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Printed on acid-free paper.
ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (paperback)
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Introduction 1
Cristina Grasseni
Part I: Skilled Visions and the Ecology of Practice
Chapter 1 ‘To have the world at a distance’: Reconsidering the 23
Significance of Vision for Social Anthropology
Rane Willerslev
Chapter 2 Good Looking: Learning to be a Cattle Breeder 47
Cristina Grasseni
Chapter 3 Icons and Transvestites: Notes on Irony, Cognition 67
and Visual Skill
Francesco Ronzon
Part II: Positioning Gestures of Design in Art, Architecture
and Laboratories
Chapter 4 Seeing and Drawing: the Role of Play in 91
Medical Imaging
Simon Cohn
Chapter 5 Learning within the Workplaces of Artists, 106
Anthropologists and Architects: Making Stories
for Drawings and Writings
Wendy Gunn
Chapter 6 Maps and Plans in ‘Learning to See’: the London 125
Underground and Chartres Cathedral as Examples
of Performing Design
David Turnbull
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vi ◆ Contents
Part III: The Social Schooling of the Eye in Scientific
and Medical Settings
Chapter 7 CT Suite: Visual Apprenticeship in the Age of the 145
Mechanical Viewbox
Barry Saunders
Chapter 8 Training the Naturalist’s Eye in the Eighteenth 166
Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local
Blind Spots
Daniela Bleichmar
Chapter 9 Navigating the Brainscape: When Knowing 191
Becomes Seeing
Andreas Roepstorff
Epilogue Envisioning Skills: Insight, Hindsight, and 207
Second Sight
Michael Herzfeld
Notes on Contributors 219
Index 221
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List of Figures
1.1 Hunters with dead elk 28
1.2 Hunter’s container for sewing materials made from swans’ feet 35
1.3 Yukaghir dressed in traditional hunting clothing 38
2.1 Durham Ox (1802), engraving by I. Whessel after an oil painting
by John Boultbee (1753–1812) 52
2.2 Traits from the linear model for the morphological evaluation of
dairy cows compared with relevant traits of a Plastictoy cow 56
2.3 Semen advert for the bull ‘Playboy’ 57
2.4 Model of the ideal Italian cow of the Brown breed 57
2.5 Plastic toy cow made in China for Schleich, Germany, 2001 57
2.6 Trophies of cattle fairs 63
3.1 Backstage at a drag queen performance 70
3.2 A drag queen poses with a girl from the audience during
a pause in the performance 75
3.3 A page from the Italian drag queen calendar, 2004 77
5.1 ‘Pyramid, sphere and cube’ (2003), a photograph by David Nash 111
5.2 ‘Journey line’ (2004), a drawing by David Nash 112
5.3 ‘Thinking of tree branches …’, a page from Jan’s sketchbook 119
6.1 The London Underground Map: Beck’s last version 1959 127
6.2 Stingemore’s last map 1932 128
6.3 London Transport Board’s ‘improvements’ 1935 129
6.4 Chartre’s messiness and incompleteness 132
6.5 Cathedrals result from the work of many men 133
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viii ◆ List of Figures
6.6 Modern templates exactly like medieval ones in use by
stonemasons at Melbourne University 134
6.7 A Masons’ lodge 135
6.8 The plan of St Gall 820 AD 136
6.9 The master mason and the clients talking 138
7.1 Pedagogy at the viewbox 148
7.2 A teaching conference 150
7.3 Hanging films 155
8.1 Portrait of Georg Everhard Rumphius 167
8.2 Georg Dyonisius Ehret’s illustration of the twenty-four classes
of the Linnaean botanical system, 1736 171
8.3 First plate of Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica(Stockholm, 1751) 172
8.4 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville, Conchyliologie
(Paris, 1742), plate 15 174
8.5 The image of a butterfly that opened Moses Harris’ The Aurelian 174
8.6 Portrait of Albertus Seba 177
8.7 Engraved frontispiece of Rumphius’s Amboinese curiosity
cabinet (Amsterdam, 1705) 178
8.8 Rumphius, Georg Everhard, De Amboinsche rariteitkamer
(Amsterdam, 1705), plate 7 and page 39 179
8.9 Vicente Albán, Cuadros de mestizaje (Quito, 1783) 181–83
8.10 Luis Thiebaut, 1799, A Painting of the Natural, Civil, and
Geographical History of the Kingdom of Peru 184
9.1 Statistical parametric mapping of increased activity caused
by the first condition, superimposed on a standard brain 196
9.2 Statistical parametric mapping of increased activity caused
by the second condition 197
9.3 The final illustration of the activity caused by the first
condition 200
9.4 The final illustration of the activity caused by the second
condition 202
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Introduction
Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship
and Standards
Cristina Grasseni
The object we see …
is dependent upon who we are
and what we recognize from past experience.
(R. Arnheim, Visual Thinking)
Towards a Rehabilitation of Vision
Anthropologists are ready to address a yet untapped problem that is ripe for
discussion: the issue of the rehabilitation of vision. The aim of this book is to
propose a new concept of vision that allows us to recontextualise the critique
of visualism in the wider contemporary debate on practice and the
construction of knowledge. Skilled Visionsexplores the training of vision in
professional, scientific and everyday settings, providing a comprehensive
spectrum of case studies in relevant contexts. Local and indigenous
knowledge is profiled not as a given, but in its making and in its complex
relation with the hegemony of the sociotechnical network. By maintaining an
ethnographic approach, the aim is to provide practical case studies that are at
once accessible, critical and informative. As a whole, this work builds upon
the recent literature on the anthropology of the senses: it does not consider
vision as an isolated given but within its interplay with the other senses, and
with the role of mutual gestuality. Moreover, it explores vision as a ductile,
