India and Its Visual Cultures: Community, Class and Gender in a Symbolic Landscape

India and Its Visual Cultures is a comprehensive mapping and analysis of contemporary cultural artefacts and visual cultures through different approaches―iconographic, social, political, religious and so on. This book covers various media and their histories by studying visual representational systems, production and consumption of media and culture-specific understandings. Crucial questions about the usage of media in research are also addressed in the book.

In the selection of the subjects and objects of enquiry, there is a constant engagement with the popular and the everyday. The objects are studied with respect to their situatedness in urban space and everyday life. The five sections of the book focus on five aspects of visual culture: camera works, folk/artistry, market signs, pictorial politics and monumental landscapes. With attention to ethnographic detail and anthropology, each section brings an added dimension to the study of visible cultural forms.

Uwe Skoda is Associate Professor in India and South Asia Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. He is currently working on transformations of kingship in Odisha and is broadly interested in the fields of political anthropology and visual culture. He recently coedited a volume on ‘Contemporary Indigeneity and Religion in India’ (International Quarterly in Asian Studies [1–2]: 2015).

Birgit Lettmann is Research Assistant and PhD candidate at HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, Germany. In her PhD theses, she focuses on postmortem photographs of pets, analysing the logics of representation and the human–animal relations, as well as setting them apart from other conservatory practices like taxidermy. Her research interest includes the cultural history of death and grieving rituals and the history of photography.