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3 books match the query 'Amateurs'
Amateurs in North American Archaeology
Changing PerspectivesEdited by Andrew L. Christenson
University of Utah Press, 2025
Interrogates the boundaries between amateur and professional archaeology
Until the mid-twentieth century, professional archaeologists readily worked alongside amateur or avocational archaeologists—those who did not have an academic, professional, or governmental affiliation. However, the gulf between professionals and amateurs has grown in recent decades, and amateurs are now often viewed more warily and are even conflated with looters. Amateurs in North American Archaeology traces the trajectory of this change, noting its implications for archaeological studies across the continent.
The volume’s contributors discuss time periods, noteworthy individuals, archaeological societies, and geographical regions, offering a wide-ranging perspective on a topic that is frequently overlooked. Though the book evaluates the past, it also makes crucial claims for the future of effective, inclusive archaeological study, emphasizing the importance of diverse perspectives and alternate interpretations.
Until the mid-twentieth century, professional archaeologists readily worked alongside amateur or avocational archaeologists—those who did not have an academic, professional, or governmental affiliation. However, the gulf between professionals and amateurs has grown in recent decades, and amateurs are now often viewed more warily and are even conflated with looters. Amateurs in North American Archaeology traces the trajectory of this change, noting its implications for archaeological studies across the continent.
The volume’s contributors discuss time periods, noteworthy individuals, archaeological societies, and geographical regions, offering a wide-ranging perspective on a topic that is frequently overlooked. Though the book evaluates the past, it also makes crucial claims for the future of effective, inclusive archaeological study, emphasizing the importance of diverse perspectives and alternate interpretations.
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Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination
Grace Seiberling
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In 1851, when photographs were first shown at the Great Exhibition of Arts and Industry, photography was primarily a hobby for well-to-do amateurs. These early photographers were members of the intellectual and aristocratic elite. They had the means, the education, and the leisure to pursue this new art-science with ardent seriousness. They formed societies, such as the Photographic Society and the Photographic Exchange Club, and published journals for the purpose of sharing their discoveries, exchanging photographs, and publicizing the medium. In this highly original and sensitive book about the birth and transformation of photography in Victorian England, Grace Seiberling explores the work of thirty-three amateur photographers. She describes how they affected the development of the medium and set technical, subject, and compositional standards for future generations of photographers.
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Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre
Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s–1940sMan He
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Modern Chinese theatre once entailed a variety of forms, but now it primarily refers to spoken drama, or huaju. Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre looks beyond scripts to examine visuality, acoustics, and performance between the two World Wars, the period when huaju gained canonical status. The backstage in this study expands from being a physical place offstage to a culturally and historically constructed social network that encompasses theatre networks, academies, and government institutions—as well as the collective work of dramatists, amateurs, and cultural entrepreneurs. Early huaju was not a mere imitation of Western realist theatre, as it is commonly understood, but a creative synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetics. Charting huaju’s evolution from American colleges to China’s coastal cities and then to its rural hinterland, Man He demonstrates how the formation of modern Chinese theatre challenges dominant understandings of modernism and brings China to the center of discussions on transnational modernities and world theatres.
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