In 1975, as a young Peace Corps volunteer, Kevin Bubriski (born 1954) was sent to Nepal's northwest Karnali Zone, the country's remotest and most economically depressed region. He walked the length and breadth of the Karnali, conducting feasibility studies for gravity-flow drinking water systems and overseeing their construction. He also photographed the villagers he lived among, producing an extraordinary series of 35mm and large-format black-and-white images. Over more than three decades, Bubriski has returned many times to Nepal, maintaining his close association with the country and its people. "Images of Nepal 1975-2011" presents this remarkable body of work--photographs that document Nepal's evolution over a 36-year period from a traditional Himalayan culture to the globalized society of today. Both visual anthropology and cultural history, it is also a succinct look at one photographer's aesthetic evolution.

RES 65/66 includes Francesco Pellizzi, “Editorial: RES at 35”; Remo Bodei, “A constellation of words”; Mary Weismantel, “Encounters with dragons”; Z. S. Strother, “A terrifying mimesis”; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Franchising minkisi in Loango”; Karen Overbey, “Seeing through stone”; Noam Andrews, “The space of knowledge”; and other papers.

By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) transformed Nepali society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, and how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, and reconfiguring the ways that people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'.

From April to August 1961, Michael Rockefeller served as sound recordist and photographer on a multidisciplinary expedition to highland New Guinea. In five months he produced over 4,000 black and white negatives. In this catalogue of over 75 photographs, Bubriski explores Rockefeller's journey into the culture and community of the Dani people.

Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics.