Skilled Visions ― Between Apprenticeship And Standards

Editor Grasseni (anthropology, U. of Bergamo) and her contributors use case studies and maintain an ethnographic approach in their essays on the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of vision to provide new contexts for the critique of visualism in the debate on practice and the construction of knowledge. They examine the training of vision in a variety of settings and consider local knowledge not as a given but in its complex relationship with the overarching (and overwhelming) socio-technical network. Topics include the significance of vision in social anthropology, getting sight skills in cattle breeding, tying irony to cognition and cognition to visual skill, recognizing the role of play in medieval imaging, learning in workplaces, mapping and learning to see, and schooling the eye in scientific and medical settings, including developing new and appropriate ideas about insight, hindsight and second sight. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Cristina Grasseni is a Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University (the Netherlands).