The Face
A Cultural History
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
“An ambitious, entertaining survey of human perception.”—The New York Times
Award-winning historian Fay Bound-Alberti synthesizes over twenty years of research to offer a sweeping cultural history of our most decisive—and sometimes divisive—body part.
What's in a face? And how much power does it hold?
The Face begins in the historical West, where we learn how humans have interpreted faces and connected specific features with ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology, and so much more, setting the stage for the cultural biases that now inform our everyday interactions across the globe. We then watch how new technologies that reflect or alter our face’s appearance have transformed our idea of the Self over time—from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century innovations like digital avatars and face transplants. And throughout, we explore the face as the cultural artifact that it is: a surface that grows, is adorned, and then displayed, influencing who we are and might become as both individuals and members of society.
Readers will walk away with a new understanding of the history, power, and future of the face, alongside its role in modern identity, genetics, technology, and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Bound-Alberti (A Biography of Loneliness) offers a stimulating reconsideration of the long-standing role of the face as a perceived window into a person's inner substance. Arguing that this isn't a natural idea, but a culturally constructed one, she begins with prehistoric cave paintings, noting that, in those artworks, it was animal faces that were realistically portrayed while the humans remained highly abstract. From there she traces the history of the face to its present malleable state (both via online face-tuning and real-world plastic surgery), along the way spotlighting moments when new tech coincided with changes in ideas about what the face reveals about a person. Advances in the art of portraiture during the Renaissance, for example, laid the groundwork for the notion of "facehood"—i.e., "the idea that a single, unique face equates with an individual, named person," and thus that faces can be used as tools for identification. Later, the emergence of photography "democratized" facehood, but also opened new avenues for surveillance. Bound-Alberti's roving narrative touches on everything from eugenics to makeup to the first selfie (taken in 1839 by Philadelphian Robert Cornelius, who could not have foreseen that generations later there would be a perennial online debate about his relative "hotness"). It makes for a fun and thought-provoking rumination on what it means to take each other at face value.
