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In: Art, Literature and Poetry, From the editors, Notes from the Field, Objects and visual analyses

Christopher Pinney, UCL Anthropology I recently came across M.N. Srinivas’ observation that his enthusiastic engagement with photography, during his fieldwork in Mysore in the late 1940s, earned him the nickname “chamara man”. He notes that in Kannada chamara denotes whisks made of the long hair from a yak’s tails usedContinue Reading

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Christopher Pinney, UCL Anthropology   The recent events in Paris have focused attention on the complex relationship between different varieties of Islam and the image. Historians will rightly point to a French tradition of anti-clerical satire that reaches back to Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage of 1771, and which providesContinue Reading

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In: Notes from the Field

Christopher Pinney, UCL Anthropology Salman Rushdie once suggested in an interview that in India you can traverse several centuries just by crossing the road.  Perhaps another way into the same question was provided by Malraux, (inevitably) more poetically in his Anti-Memoirs (“…in war, in museums real or imaginary, in culture,Continue Reading

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Christopher Pinney, Dept of Anthropology, UCL The name is Studio Suhag. The location is a small industrial town in central India, exactly half-way between Mumbai and Delhi. The photographer is Suresh Punjabi. The images are scanned from medium-format negatives recently retrieved from Suresh’s monsoon damaged godown.  He calls it aContinue Reading