A sophisticated analysis of the Romanian folk traditions expressed in Brancusi's sculpture by a leading student of the illustrious Romanian artist and his works.

This collection of essays is based on 35 years of Edith Balas's scholarship of Constantin Brancusi, the twentieth century's most influential sculptor. In her 1987 book, Brancusi and Romanian Folk Traditions, Balas convincingly demonstrated that Brancusi's sculpture is rooted in his Romanian peasant origins, his artisan training, and the folklore familiar to him. The present collection of essays explores how this giant also related to his Parisian environment.

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Why should anthropologists draw? The answer proposed in this groundbreaking volume is that drawing uniquely brings together ways of making, observing and describing. In twelve chapters, a team of authors from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia explore the potential of a graphic anthropology to change the way we think about creativity and perception, to grasp the dynamics of improvisatory practice, and to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the flows of materials involved in the generation of things. Drawing on expertise in fields ranging from craftwork, martial arts, and dance to observational cinema and experimental film, they ask what it means to follow materials, to learn movements and to draw lines. Along the way, they contribute to key debates on what happens in making, the relation between design and performance, how people acquire bodily skills, the place of movement in human self-awareness, the relation between walking and imagination, and the perception of time. This book will appeal not just to social, cultural and visual anthropologists but to archaeologists and students of material culture, as well as to scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences with interests in perception, creativity and material culture.

A selective work that documents the formative impact of the region's earlier history. Includes reference aids and bibliographies, general and descriptive histories of the land, peoples, and economies, and works depicting intellectual and cultural life.