GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page i SKILLED VISIONS GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page ii EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of Social-Anthropologists (EASA) 1.LEARNING FIELDS Volume 1 Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology Edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain R. Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers 2.LEARNING FIELDS Volume 2 Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar 3.GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/ALTERITY Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich 4.MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár 5.FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West Simon Harrison 6.SKILLED VISIONS Between Apprenticeship and Standards Cristina Grasseni GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page iii S V KILLED ISIONS Between Apprenticeship and Standards Edited by Cristina Grasseni Berghahn Books New York • Oxford WEST_AND_RAMAN-Piv.qxd:ellen-prelims.qxd 10/23/09 3:33 PM Page iv First published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2009, 2010 Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman First paperback edition published in 2010 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without the written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enduring socialism : explorations of revolution and transformation, restoration and continuation / edited by Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman. -- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hbk : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Post-communism. 2. Socialism. 3. Communism. I. West, Harry G. II. Raman, Parvathi. HX44.5.E63 2008 335--dc22 2008032548 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-464-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-713-6 (paperback) GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page v Contents List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Cristina Grasseni Part I: Skilled Visions and the Ecology of Practice Chapter 1 ‘To have the world at a distance’: Reconsidering the 23 Significance of Vision for Social Anthropology Rane Willerslev Chapter 2 Good Looking: Learning to be a Cattle Breeder 47 Cristina Grasseni Chapter 3 Icons and Transvestites: Notes on Irony, Cognition 67 and Visual Skill Francesco Ronzon Part II: Positioning Gestures of Design in Art, Architecture and Laboratories Chapter 4 Seeing and Drawing: the Role of Play in 91 Medical Imaging Simon Cohn Chapter 5 Learning within the Workplaces of Artists, 106 Anthropologists and Architects: Making Stories for Drawings and Writings Wendy Gunn Chapter 6 Maps and Plans in ‘Learning to See’: the London 125 Underground and Chartres Cathedral as Examples of Performing Design David Turnbull GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page vi vi ◆ Contents Part III: The Social Schooling of the Eye in Scientific and Medical Settings Chapter 7 CT Suite: Visual Apprenticeship in the Age of the 145 Mechanical Viewbox Barry Saunders Chapter 8 Training the Naturalist’s Eye in the Eighteenth 166 Century: Perfect Global Visions and Local Blind Spots Daniela Bleichmar Chapter 9 Navigating the Brainscape: When Knowing 191 Becomes Seeing Andreas Roepstorff Epilogue Envisioning Skills: Insight, Hindsight, and 207 Second Sight Michael Herzfeld Notes on Contributors 219 Index 221 GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page vii List of Figures 1.1 Hunters with dead elk 28 1.2 Hunter’s container for sewing materials made from swans’ feet 35 1.3 Yukaghir dressed in traditional hunting clothing 38 2.1 Durham Ox (1802), engraving by I. Whessel after an oil painting by John Boultbee (1753–1812) 52 2.2 Traits from the linear model for the morphological evaluation of dairy cows compared with relevant traits of a Plastictoy cow 56 2.3 Semen advert for the bull ‘Playboy’ 57 2.4 Model of the ideal Italian cow of the Brown breed 57 2.5 Plastic toy cow made in China for Schleich, Germany, 2001 57 2.6 Trophies of cattle fairs 63 3.1 Backstage at a drag queen performance 70 3.2 A drag queen poses with a girl from the audience during a pause in the performance 75 3.3 A page from the Italian drag queen calendar, 2004 77 5.1 ‘Pyramid, sphere and cube’ (2003), a photograph by David Nash 111 5.2 ‘Journey line’ (2004), a drawing by David Nash 112 5.3 ‘Thinking of tree branches …’, a page from Jan’s sketchbook 119 6.1 The London Underground Map: Beck’s last version 1959 127 6.2 Stingemore’s last map 1932 128 6.3 London Transport Board’s ‘improvements’ 1935 129 6.4 Chartre’s messiness and incompleteness 132 6.5 Cathedrals result from the work of many men 133 GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page viii viii ◆ List of Figures 6.6 Modern templates exactly like medieval ones in use by stonemasons at Melbourne University 134 6.7 A Masons’ lodge 135 6.8 The plan of St Gall 820 AD 136 6.9 The master mason and the clients talking 138 7.1 Pedagogy at the viewbox 148 7.2 A teaching conference 150 7.3 Hanging films 155 8.1 Portrait of Georg Everhard Rumphius 167 8.2 Georg Dyonisius Ehret’s illustration of the twenty-four classes of the Linnaean botanical system, 1736 171 8.3 First plate of Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica(Stockholm, 1751) 172 8.4 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville, Conchyliologie (Paris, 1742), plate 15 174 8.5 The image of a butterfly that opened Moses Harris’ The Aurelian 174 8.6 Portrait of Albertus Seba 177 8.7 Engraved frontispiece of Rumphius’s Amboinese curiosity cabinet (Amsterdam, 1705) 178 8.8 Rumphius, Georg Everhard, De Amboinsche rariteitkamer (Amsterdam, 1705), plate 7 and page 39 179 8.9 Vicente Albán, Cuadros de mestizaje (Quito, 1783) 181–83 8.10 Luis Thiebaut, 1799, A Painting of the Natural, Civil, and Geographical History of the Kingdom of Peru 184 9.1 Statistical parametric mapping of increased activity caused by the first condition, superimposed on a standard brain 196 9.2 Statistical parametric mapping of increased activity caused by the second condition 197 9.3 The final illustration of the activity caused by the first condition 200 9.4 The final illustration of the activity caused by the second condition 202 GRASSENI-Pi-226.qxd 12/19/06 5:18 PM Page 1 Introduction Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards Cristina Grasseni The object we see … is dependent upon who we are and what we recognize from past experience. (R. Arnheim, Visual Thinking) Towards a Rehabilitation of Vision Anthropologists are ready to address a yet untapped problem that is ripe for discussion: the issue of the rehabilitation of vision. The aim of this book is to propose a new concept of vision that allows us to recontextualise the critique of visualism in the wider contemporary debate on practice and the construction of knowledge. Skilled Visionsexplores the training of vision in professional, scientific and everyday settings, providing a comprehensive spectrum of case studies in relevant contexts. Local and indigenous knowledge is profiled not as a given, but in its making and in its complex relation with the hegemony of the sociotechnical network. By maintaining an ethnographic approach, the aim is to provide practical case studies that are at once accessible, critical and informative. As a whole, this work builds upon the recent literature on the anthropology of the senses: it does not consider vision as an isolated given but within its interplay with the other senses, and with the role of mutual gestuality. Moreover, it explores vision as a ductile,