1st Edition
The Trouble With Art An Anthropology Beyond Philistinism
Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.
Introduction: The Trouble with Art in Anthropology
Roger Sansi and Jonas Tinius
Part I: Philistinism
1 The Philistine Trap. A Para-Ethnography of the Trouble with an Art Centre in Barcelona
Roger Sansi
2 ‘What Has Theatre Ever Done for Us?’ Traditions of Anti-theatricality
Jonas Tinius
3 Both Sides Now: Ambiguity in Art and Anthropology
Eleana Yalouri
Part II: The Contemporary
4 “We’re Saving a Way of Life”: Indigenous Australian Acrylic Painting and its Troubles with the Categories of Art and Value
Fred Myers
5 Longing for the Contemporary of Art
Thomas Fillitz
6 When Multiplicity is not Enough: Questioning Global Art and an Approach to Other Genealogies and Co-design
Giuliana Borea
Part III: Assemblages
7 Co-Ethnographers in the Storm: Investigating Post-socialist Decline with Contemporary Artists
Francisco Martínez
8 An Enduring Interval: The Artwork as a Re-assembling
Kiven Strohm
9 Parasitic Projects and the Politics of Research-Creation
Jennifer Clarke
10 Texture of Nothing
Marina Peterson and Jesse Weaver Shipley
Biography
Roger Sansi is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He was founding co-convenor (with Jonas Tinius) of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).
Jonas Tinius is Scientific Coordinator and Postdoctoral Researcher in Cultural Anthropology on the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism at Saarland University. He was founding co-convenor (with Roger Sansi) of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).
