Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture - Softcover

Cantwell, Robert S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807844241 ISBN 13: 9780807844243

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993

Synopsis

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by how we create and perpetuate our representations of folklife and culture. Ethnomimesis is Robert Cantwell's word for the process by which we take cultural influences, traditions, and practices to ourselves and then manifest them to others. Ethnomimesis is an element of ordinary social communication, but springing out of it, too, is that extraordinary summoning up that produces our literature, our art, and our music. In the broadest sense, ethnomimesis is the representation of culture. Using such diverse cultural artifacts as King Lear and an eighteenth-century English manor garden to deepen our understanding of ethnomimesis, Cantwell then explores at length the representation of culture in our national museum, the Smithsonian, focusing especially on the Festival of American Folklife. Like many other such exhibitions, the Festival enacts presentations of culture across the boundaries of rank and class, race and ethnicity, gender and the life cycle. Like the concept of 'folklife' itself, Cantwell argues, the Festival stands where ethnomimesis finds its creative source, at the cultural frontier between self and other. That boundary, and the energy that accumulates there, runs through the many, varied 'exhibits' of this book.

About this title

Book Description:

"Represents in many ways scholarship at its most imaginative and creative--and interpretative--and what books ought to be. . . . This is a book to dream with, and on, and should be read by all of us who are interested in culture, folklore, the Folk Festival--or the human community."-- Journal of Popular Culture

From the Back Cover:

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by how we create and perpetuate our representations of folklife and culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0807844241
• ISBN 13: 9780807844243
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 346