Customer Reviews

Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text (Cornerstone Books)

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Dr Kersenboom, as dancer, theorist, and master storyteller, provides a radical new schema (at least for the West) for cultural representation. Her ideas are based primarily on the threefold Tamil model (word, sound, image) and the handful of Western theorists (Jakobson, Goranzon, Bourdieu) whose theories are flexible and open-ended enough to harmonize. What we get is a well-written and inspiring work that redefines textual reality and leaves the broken shards of western philology, hermeneutics, and empiricism in its wake. Well, perhaps that's a bit too categorical, but the book does make a strong case for anthropologists to invert the practice of their research. If all Western field resesarchers could, approximating Dr. Kersenboom, start "tabula rasa" - doing their fieldwork first, and THEN coming back to the West and finding the texts (from the arts, classics, rhetoric, and in general a broad range of fields) that support their knowledge, rather than learning the standard ethnographic format and then plugging their field experience into this template - we might have a lot more interesting and emancipatory anthropology going on. Through an arrangement with Philips electronics, Kersenboom has also provided an accompanying interactive CD that, though dated, shows some of the promise of multimedia applications to ethnography - as it provides the proof for this new paradigm in its skillful 'prayogam', or application, of the emic categories.

This excelent book is a true must for anthroplogists facing problems with just writing texts. The pioneer Kersenboom shows with this book and the CDi a new aproach in the so often static science of anthropolgy. Interactive representations are something anthropologists could learn a lot from.
wonderfully written.