Erect Men, Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, Race and 'Progress' in Reconstructive Illustrations of Human Evolution.

Erect Men, Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, Race and 'Progress' in Reconstructive Illustrations of Human Evolution. MELANIE G. WIBER. vii+290 pages, 16 figures. 1997. Waterloo (ONT ONT Ontario (old acronym - ON is now frequently used)ONT Optimizing Converged Cisco Networks (cisco CCNP exam)ONT Optical Network TerminalONT Ontario Northland Railway ):Wilfrid Laurier University Press Wilfrid Laurier University Press is a university press that is part of the Wilfrid Laurier University. External linksWilfrid Laurier University Press ; 0-88920-274-5 hardback $44.95.This book focuses on the way in which gender is represented in recentillustrations of human evolution. Wiber seeks to identify theconventions that characterize such illustrations and contextualize con��tex��tu��al��ize?tr.v. con��tex��tu��al��ized, con��tex��tu��al��iz��ing, con��tex��tu��al��iz��esTo place (a word or idea, for example) in a particular context. thesewithin evolutionary thought. The data upon which her research findingsare based is a small sample of images, which she showed to her studentsto see how they interpreted the meanings of the pictures. Keen to revealthe hidden messages in the pictures and the ways in which they reflectstandard conventions of representation in western art, Wiber explores anumber of topics in her chapters, including the underlying assumptionsabout gender in recent theories of human evolution, the ways in whichideas about race, gender and progress have informed the illustrations,the coding of gender attributes and also those which define the'primitive'. and the eroticization of the female images. Sheessentially shows how the convention of an 'erect, ambitions,forward-looking and aesthetically athletic male' (p. 84) prevailsin this genre of illustration. She argues that women and nature areconflated as are men and culture, showing how artists link the rise ofcultural knowledge, ritual, symbolic and artistic expression, religionand technology to the (older, white) male, while female, dark skin, andthe body are codes for the primitive.Wiber's general aim is that people who read her book will endwith a wider interest and sensitivity to the political nature of manydifferent fields of science Fields of science are widely-recognized categories of specialized expertise within science, and typically embody their own terminology and nomenclature.Natural sciencesMain article: Natural science (p. 15). I feel optimistic that she willachieve this, as her discussion about the underlying assumptionsconcerning gender, race and progress in anthropological thought makestimulating reading. based on my own analysis of pictorialreconstructions of human evolution, I agree with many of the pointsWiber makes. For instance, she states that these pictures constitutestorytelling and that the 'power of the story has been enough tosubvert science' (p. 8); that the content of the illustrations is a'mix of knowledge privileged as science, theory masked as naturalstories and stereotype masquerading 1. (networking) masquerading - "NAT" (Linux kernel name).2. (messaging) masquerading - Hiding the names of internal e-mail client and gateway machines from the outside world by rewriting the "From" address and other headers as the message leaves the as legitimate hypotheses' (p.14); that there is an iconographical aspect to the images, which refersto the way they 'attempt to tell a significant story in a way thatutilises pictorial, symbolic and imaginary content in the visualfield' (p. 48); and that 'very definitive patterns prevaildespite the fact that the subject matter encompasses many millennium[sic] and a number of extinct species This page features extinct species, organisms that have become extinct. List of extinct animals List of extinct plants about which we have very littleinformation' (p. 100).Despite these positive features Wiber really should have referred tothe research that has already been done on this area. A number of peoplehave studied pictorial reconstructions and it would have been useful tosee Wiber relate her findings to this work. Some mention of the researchby historians of geology and palaeontology on reconstruction drawingswould also have been helpful. Secondly, there is a lot of discussionabout anthropological thought, which, while very interesting, is oftenexpanded on at the expense of the illustrations themselves. indeed,there are many sections of the text which run for pages and pages wherethere is no mention of a picture, or where the explicit relationshipbetween such discussion and the data is not discussed.There are two reactions one can have to this kind of publication. Onethe one hand, it is encouraging to see an important research topic,formerly neglected, and indeed trivialized, here being addressed. On theother hand, it is disappointing to see that this book-length work on thesubject is based on such a limited amount of data. While Wiberrepeatedly admits that her sample is very small and that much of it isanecdotal, she nevertheless felt that it was enough to justify writing abook. Clearly, this is a discursive rather than a comprehensiveanalytical work, and while there is nothing wrong with this kind oftreatment of particular subjects, this research field needs moresystematic investigation than it receives here.STEPHANIE MOSER Department of Archaeology University of Southampton In the most recent RAE assessment (2001), it has the only engineering faculty in the country to receive the highest rating (5*) across all disciplines.[3] According to The Times Higher Education Supplement sm1@soton.ac.uk