Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures

✍ Scribed by Haidy Geismar (Editor), Ton Otto (Editor), Cameron David Warner (Editor)

• Publisher: UCL Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 366
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Nothing lasts forever. This common experience is the source of much anxiety but also hope. The concept of impermanence or continuous change opens up a range of timely questions and discussions that speak to globally shared experiences of transformation and concerns for the future. Impermanence engages with an emergent body of social theory emphasizing flux and transformation, and brings this into a dialogue with other traditions of thought and practice, notably Buddhism that has sustained a long-lasting and sophisticated meditation on impermanence. In cases drawn from all over the world, this volume investigates the significance of impermanence in such diverse contexts as social death, atheism, alcoholism, migration, ritual, fashion, oncology, museums, cultural heritage and art. The authors draw on a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, Buddhist studies, cultural geography and museology. This volume also includes numerous photographs, artworks and poems that evocatively communicate notions and experiences of impermanence.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Halftitle
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
1 Introduction: thinking about impermanence across cultures
Part 1 Living with and against impermanence
2 Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness
3 Disinheriting social death: towardsan ethnographic theory of impermanence
4 Atheist endings: imagining having been in contemporary Kyrgyzstan
5 Encountering impermanence, making change: a case study of attachment and alcoholism in Thailand
6 Holding on and letting go: Tanzanian Indians’ responses to impermanence
Part 2 States of being and becoming
7 A Melanesian impermanence
8 ‘We are not an emblem’: impermanence and materiality in Asmat lifeworlds
9 The unmaking and remaking of cultural worlds: reinventing ritual on Baluan Island, Papua New Guinea
10 ‘Do what you think about’: fashionable responses to the end of Tibet
Part 3 Structures and practices of care
11 Negotiating impermanence: care and the medical imaginary among people with cancer
12 Caring for the social (in museums)
13 Transitional sites and ‘material memory’: impermanence and Ireland’s derelict Magdalene Laundries
14 Photos and artist statement
Part 4 Curating impermanence
15 ‘Neurosis of the sterile egg’ – permanence and paradox: museum strategies for the representation of Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art
16 Culturing impermanence at themuseum: the metabolic collection
17 Screenshooting impermanence
18 ‘Museum of Impermanence’: the making of an exhibition
19 Epilogue: self unhinged
Index
Back Cover