Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love

Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love

Author: Makiko Nishitani

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0824883608

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Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.


Book Synopsis Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love by : Makiko Nishitani

Download or read book Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love written by Makiko Nishitani and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.


Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love

Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love

Author: Makiko Nishitani

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 082488177X

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Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.


Book Synopsis Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love by : Makiko Nishitani

Download or read book Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love written by Makiko Nishitani and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.


Middle-Class Dharma

Middle-Class Dharma

Author: Jennifer D. Ortegren

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0197530796

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""You have to come to my wedding," Kavita told me, turning to face me where I sat next to her on the couch. "You can come with the other people from the street. You will get everything you need for your *research* there." "I will come, I will come!" I replied enthusiastically. I had only met Kavita and her two younger sisters, Arthi and Deepti (see Figure 2.1), mere minutes before this invitation was extended. I had initially come to Pulan that day in October 2012 to meet another woman, Heena, whose family rents a room on the third story of Kavita's family's home. Heena and I had been sitting in the furniture refurbishing store she operates with her husband on the main street of Pulan when Deepti, Kavita's youngest sister, passed by. Heena introduced us and told me to go with Deepti to meet her family. When we reached the family's three-story house-the largest in the gali-Deepti led me past the empty rooms on the ground floor, which I would eventually begin renting, to the second-story living room. There, we found Kavita and Arthi organizing clothing and jewelry they had purchased earlier in the day for the upcoming wedding festivities. Kavita made room for me to sit next to her on the couch and began asking me about myself. I immediately warmed to her because of her open, friendly smile and sharp, staccato Hindi, which I delighted in being able to understand. I explained that I had come to India to study how women's lives are different in rural and urban areas, and Kavita assured me that she and her family could help. She noted that her parents had come to Udaipur from Ram Nagar, a large village thirty-five kilometers north of the city, and that the family would be returning for her and her older brother Krishna's weddings the following month. Their weddings would be held five days apart to help reduce the difficulties of family members traveling from outside Udaipur. Prompted by the description of my research, Kavita commented on differences that she recognized between the village and the city. The biggest difference, she suggested, was the experience of caste, namely that in the village, people from different jatis live separately, whereas in the city, people are "mixed." As I would come to learn when visiting Ram Nagar for various functions, there is a fair amount of caste and religious diversity in the village. Although spatial and ritual segregation was rather strictly maintained during religious observances, it is likely more flexible in everyday life. The segregation during ritual functions-the occasions for which Kavita also traveled to the village-likely informed her sense of a lack of "mixing" in the village as. The majority of residents in the area of Ram Nagar where the family maintains a home were also from the Mali (lit: gardener) jati, although Mali was not a majority jati in Pulan"--


Book Synopsis Middle-Class Dharma by : Jennifer D. Ortegren

Download or read book Middle-Class Dharma written by Jennifer D. Ortegren and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""You have to come to my wedding," Kavita told me, turning to face me where I sat next to her on the couch. "You can come with the other people from the street. You will get everything you need for your *research* there." "I will come, I will come!" I replied enthusiastically. I had only met Kavita and her two younger sisters, Arthi and Deepti (see Figure 2.1), mere minutes before this invitation was extended. I had initially come to Pulan that day in October 2012 to meet another woman, Heena, whose family rents a room on the third story of Kavita's family's home. Heena and I had been sitting in the furniture refurbishing store she operates with her husband on the main street of Pulan when Deepti, Kavita's youngest sister, passed by. Heena introduced us and told me to go with Deepti to meet her family. When we reached the family's three-story house-the largest in the gali-Deepti led me past the empty rooms on the ground floor, which I would eventually begin renting, to the second-story living room. There, we found Kavita and Arthi organizing clothing and jewelry they had purchased earlier in the day for the upcoming wedding festivities. Kavita made room for me to sit next to her on the couch and began asking me about myself. I immediately warmed to her because of her open, friendly smile and sharp, staccato Hindi, which I delighted in being able to understand. I explained that I had come to India to study how women's lives are different in rural and urban areas, and Kavita assured me that she and her family could help. She noted that her parents had come to Udaipur from Ram Nagar, a large village thirty-five kilometers north of the city, and that the family would be returning for her and her older brother Krishna's weddings the following month. Their weddings would be held five days apart to help reduce the difficulties of family members traveling from outside Udaipur. Prompted by the description of my research, Kavita commented on differences that she recognized between the village and the city. The biggest difference, she suggested, was the experience of caste, namely that in the village, people from different jatis live separately, whereas in the city, people are "mixed." As I would come to learn when visiting Ram Nagar for various functions, there is a fair amount of caste and religious diversity in the village. Although spatial and ritual segregation was rather strictly maintained during religious observances, it is likely more flexible in everyday life. The segregation during ritual functions-the occasions for which Kavita also traveled to the village-likely informed her sense of a lack of "mixing" in the village as. The majority of residents in the area of Ram Nagar where the family maintains a home were also from the Mali (lit: gardener) jati, although Mali was not a majority jati in Pulan"--


Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family

Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family

Author: Anni Kajanus

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1137509104

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This book explores the children of Chinese single-child families who go to study abroad and in particular the increase in Chinese familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China.


Book Synopsis Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family by : Anni Kajanus

Download or read book Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family written by Anni Kajanus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the children of Chinese single-child families who go to study abroad and in particular the increase in Chinese familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China.


Bollywood

Bollywood

Author: Tejaswini Ganti

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0415583845

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'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world. In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema narrative style, main themes, and key genres of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters.


Book Synopsis Bollywood by : Tejaswini Ganti

Download or read book Bollywood written by Tejaswini Ganti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world. In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema narrative style, main themes, and key genres of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters.


Changing Patterns of European Family Life

Changing Patterns of European Family Life

Author: Katja Boh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-09

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1000920178

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Originally published in 1989, this cross-national study investigates the role and pattern of family life in fourteen countries in contemporary Europe. Providing a wealth of information on European families, it is a key source for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the family at that time. The contributors argue that, far from withering away, the family remained a very important social unit which continued to have considerable influence on other social institutions such as the state and the labour market. The central theme is the interrelation between changes in production and working life on one hand, and changes in family life and reproduction on the other. The contributors focus on the pressures and contradictions produced by the division of functions between family and work, and on problems which have arisen as a consequence of the sometimes incompatible and even conflicting demands of the two institutions. They show that the evolution of the nuclear family model in Europe had led to a great diversity of family patterns, and conclude that the family in modern European societies still had a contribution to make which no other institution could provide.


Book Synopsis Changing Patterns of European Family Life by : Katja Boh

Download or read book Changing Patterns of European Family Life written by Katja Boh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1989, this cross-national study investigates the role and pattern of family life in fourteen countries in contemporary Europe. Providing a wealth of information on European families, it is a key source for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the family at that time. The contributors argue that, far from withering away, the family remained a very important social unit which continued to have considerable influence on other social institutions such as the state and the labour market. The central theme is the interrelation between changes in production and working life on one hand, and changes in family life and reproduction on the other. The contributors focus on the pressures and contradictions produced by the division of functions between family and work, and on problems which have arisen as a consequence of the sometimes incompatible and even conflicting demands of the two institutions. They show that the evolution of the nuclear family model in Europe had led to a great diversity of family patterns, and conclude that the family in modern European societies still had a contribution to make which no other institution could provide.


Answer the Call

Answer the Call

Author: Aimee Carrillo Rowe

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1452940398

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What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other. Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”


Book Synopsis Answer the Call by : Aimee Carrillo Rowe

Download or read book Answer the Call written by Aimee Carrillo Rowe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other. Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”


Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation

Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation

Author: Robert Blumenfeld

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780879103262

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(Limelight). A must for both the aspiring and seasoned artist. Uniquely geared to the work of theatre and film artists, this book, for the first time, sets out clearly and concisely the ideas, principles, and character typology of various psychological schools from Freudian, Kleinian, and Jungian to contemporary developments. The practical uses and applications of their theories are graphically demonstrated throughout the book by means of numerous examples and in-depth analyses drawn from classic and contemporary theatrical and cinematic literature. Stanislavskian methods are also discussed. An immensely useful, essential tool for character creation and analysis. Features a foreword by noted acting teacher Alice Spivak.


Book Synopsis Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation by : Robert Blumenfeld

Download or read book Tools and Techniques for Character Interpretation written by Robert Blumenfeld and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Limelight). A must for both the aspiring and seasoned artist. Uniquely geared to the work of theatre and film artists, this book, for the first time, sets out clearly and concisely the ideas, principles, and character typology of various psychological schools from Freudian, Kleinian, and Jungian to contemporary developments. The practical uses and applications of their theories are graphically demonstrated throughout the book by means of numerous examples and in-depth analyses drawn from classic and contemporary theatrical and cinematic literature. Stanislavskian methods are also discussed. An immensely useful, essential tool for character creation and analysis. Features a foreword by noted acting teacher Alice Spivak.


The Mind and the Market

The Mind and the Market

Author: Jerry Z. Muller

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0307428990

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Capitalism has never been a subject for economists alone. Philosophers, politicians, poets and social scientists have debated the cultural, moral, and political effects of capitalism for centuries, and their claims have been many and diverse. The Mind and the Market is a remarkable history of how the idea of capitalism has developed in Western thought. Ranging across an ideological spectrum that includes Hobbes, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Marx, and Matthew Arnold, as well as twentieth-century communist, fascist, and neoliberal intellectuals, historian Jerry Muller examines a fascinating thread of ideas about the ramifications of capitalism and its future implications. This is an engaging and accessible history of ideas that reverberate throughout everyday life.


Book Synopsis The Mind and the Market by : Jerry Z. Muller

Download or read book The Mind and the Market written by Jerry Z. Muller and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism has never been a subject for economists alone. Philosophers, politicians, poets and social scientists have debated the cultural, moral, and political effects of capitalism for centuries, and their claims have been many and diverse. The Mind and the Market is a remarkable history of how the idea of capitalism has developed in Western thought. Ranging across an ideological spectrum that includes Hobbes, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Marx, and Matthew Arnold, as well as twentieth-century communist, fascist, and neoliberal intellectuals, historian Jerry Muller examines a fascinating thread of ideas about the ramifications of capitalism and its future implications. This is an engaging and accessible history of ideas that reverberate throughout everyday life.


Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution

Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution

Author: Pedram Partovi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1315385619

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Critics and academics have generally dismissed the commercial productions of the late Pahlavi era, best known for their songs and melodramatic plots, as shallow, derivative ‘entertainment’. Instead, they have concentrated on the more recent internationally acclaimed art films, claiming that these constitute Iranian ‘national' cinema, despite few Iranians having seen them. Film discourse, and even fan talk, have long attempted to marginalize the mainstream releases of the 1960s and 1970s with the moniker filmfarsi, ironically asserting that such popular favorites were culturally inauthentic. This book challenges the idea that filmfarsi is detached from the past and present of Iranians. Far from being escapist Hollywood fare merely translated into Persian, it claims that the better films of this supposed genre must be taken as both a subject of, and source for, modern Iranian history. It argues that they have an appeal that relies on their ability to rearticulate traditional courtly and religious ideas and forms to problematize in unexpectedly complex and sophisticated ways the modernist agenda that secular nationalist elites wished to impose on their viewers. Taken seriously, these films raise questions about standard treatments of Iran's modern history. By writing popular films into Iranian history, this book advocates both a fresh approach to the study of Iranian cinema, as well as a rethinking of the modernity/tradition binary that has organized the historiography of the recent past. It will appeal to those interested in Iranian cinema, Iranian history and culture, and, more broadly, readers dissatisfied with a dichotomous approach to modernity.


Book Synopsis Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution by : Pedram Partovi

Download or read book Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution written by Pedram Partovi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics and academics have generally dismissed the commercial productions of the late Pahlavi era, best known for their songs and melodramatic plots, as shallow, derivative ‘entertainment’. Instead, they have concentrated on the more recent internationally acclaimed art films, claiming that these constitute Iranian ‘national' cinema, despite few Iranians having seen them. Film discourse, and even fan talk, have long attempted to marginalize the mainstream releases of the 1960s and 1970s with the moniker filmfarsi, ironically asserting that such popular favorites were culturally inauthentic. This book challenges the idea that filmfarsi is detached from the past and present of Iranians. Far from being escapist Hollywood fare merely translated into Persian, it claims that the better films of this supposed genre must be taken as both a subject of, and source for, modern Iranian history. It argues that they have an appeal that relies on their ability to rearticulate traditional courtly and religious ideas and forms to problematize in unexpectedly complex and sophisticated ways the modernist agenda that secular nationalist elites wished to impose on their viewers. Taken seriously, these films raise questions about standard treatments of Iran's modern history. By writing popular films into Iranian history, this book advocates both a fresh approach to the study of Iranian cinema, as well as a rethinking of the modernity/tradition binary that has organized the historiography of the recent past. It will appeal to those interested in Iranian cinema, Iranian history and culture, and, more broadly, readers dissatisfied with a dichotomous approach to modernity.