One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.
Spis treści
List of Illustrations
Preface
List of Contributors
Introduction: Adventures in the Art Nexus
Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
Chapter 1. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency
Susanne Küchler
Chapter 2. Technologies of Routine and Enchantment
Chris Gosden
Chapter 3. Figuring out Death: Sculpture and Agency at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Tomb of the First Emperor of China
Jeremy Tanner
Chapter 4. The Network of Standard Stoppages
Alfred Gell
Chapter 5. Gell’s Duchamp/Duchamp’s Gell
Simon Dell
Chapter 6. Music: Ontology, Agency, Creativity
Georgina Born
Chapter 7. Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book
Warren Boutcher
Chapter 8. Art, Performance and Time¹s Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art and Agency
Eric Hirsch
Chapter 9. Epilogue
Nicholas Thomas
Bibliography
Index
O autorze
Mark Elliott is Senior Curator for Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Trained as an anthropologist, he now works across archaeological and ethnographic collections, and was co-curator, with Anita Herle and Rebecca Empson, of Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination (2009-10). His research and teaching interests include histories of museum practice in South Asia and Britain, and visual and material representations of Adivasi peoples in India.