Libros

¿Por qué la música ha tenido una presencia tan importante en las sociedades antiguas que conocemos? ¿Cuál es el papel de la música en las sociedades cazadoras-recolectoras del Paleolítico superior? ¿Cómo se concretaban estos comportamientos musicales y ceremoniales? ¿Cómo la musicología y la arqueología pueden encontrar la manera de "arqueologizar" muchos de los elementos esenciales que formaron parte de estos comportamientos sociales? La necesidad de afrontar estas cuestiones implicó un estudio etnoarqueomusicológico profundo de los comportamientos musicales y ceremoniales de las sociedades cazadoras-recolectoras alutiiq, yupik e inupiaq de Alaska.
El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar un conjunto de evidencias esenciales que definen los contextos musicales y ceremoniales que se pueden detectar y analizar mediante las técnicas arqueológicas actuales. Los resultados aportan nuevo conocimiento sobre el análisis arqueológico de unos comportamientos sociales poco estudiados hasta hoy.

This book approaches the memory sharing of groups, communities and societies as inevitable struggles over the interpretation of, and authority over, particular stories. Coming to terms with the past in memory work, alone or with others, is always unsteady ground and the activation of memory will always relay imaginations of futures we want to shape and inhabit. The contributors all explore in different ways how citizens can actualize a public and how citizens and groups struggle with their pasts and presents – and other group's understandings – in their work for futures they dream of, or envision. This implies an engagement with the notion of social justice, which in turn entails trial and revision of ideas and procedures of how to share the world. But to share also requires some kind of common ground and distributed power. The anthology thus engages with a range of cases that bring views and voices back in public, demanding justice, recognition, sometimes literally triggering new trials. Some of the memory work is done strategically, in the context of communication for development and social change interventions where NGOs, community-based organizations, governments or UN agencies pursue not just voice and views, but also very material demands for social justice and social change.

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies and their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformation by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists’ use of visual images on cell phones. The authors argue that the seemingly radical newness and alleged immateriality of contemporary speculative capitalism, turns out to be less dramatically new and more grounded in colonial/racial histories of both material and immaterial exploitation than one might at first imagine. Similarly, human interaction with digital media and virtuality, ostensibly a double marker for the contemporary and economically privileged subject, in fact reveals itself in many cases as transgressive of racial, economic and historical categories.

Taking a close look at ordinary people 'telling their own story', Nancy Thumim explores self-representations in contemporary digital culture in settings as diverse as reality TV, online storytelling, and oral histories displayed in museums.