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E-book Living with Monsters : Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters

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Penilaian

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"Did you hear a single thing Uncle said to you, Sarah? A single damn thing?” Marvin shook his head in exasperation. “Don’t go looking for things unless you want them to find you.” These quotes are extracts from some of the chapters that follow, and they superbly condense what we mean by Living with Mon-sters. There is a fundamental distinction between the monsters you will meet on these pages and the ones you may have met already on film and TV screens or on the pages of books, comics, and zines. The latter are usually fictional. Everybody agrees that they are metaphors or symbols, that they “stand for” something else. Take zombies for example. Not only are they one of the most prolific monsters of contemporary popular culture,1 but they have been interpreted to stand for anything from labor ex-ploitation, the appropriation of female bodies, drug epidemics, the horror of killing during the Vietnam War, mindless con-sumerism, brain-washing, and the threat of contagion to apoc-alyptic visions including Y2K, nuclear disaster, alien invasion, and climate change.2 The monsters of popular culture are de-vices employed artistically to express contemporary concerns in a particular genre — horror first and foremost but often mixed with other genres from romance and comedy to western. Monsters in anthropology have much in common with their fictional cousins, but they are also distinctly different. A major aim of this introduction is to contour these differences in more detail. In a nutshell, though, we understand monsters as non-human social actors who are other-than-the norm, al-ways contingent on the humans they haunt, the times and the places in which they operate, and with a profound aware-ness of social rules, taxonomies, and classificatory schema that they then subvert — including, naturally, this very defi-nition. (Musharbash 2021)Crucially, the monsters our authors are concerned with, for the most part, are understood to be real by those they haunt. When anthropologists are doing fieldwork, they often meet people who are living with monsters. This brings with it difficulties for the people themselves, who need to figure out how to live their lives alongside often terrifying and meddlesome beings, and quite a different set of difficulties for the anthropologists. Living with people who live alongside monsters is a poignant example of how participant observation often entails studying people who see the world differently than you do.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

398.2 MUS l

Penerbit

New York : Punctum books., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

319 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781685710835

Klasifikasi

398.2

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Folk Literature, Fairy Tales, Myth, Mythology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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