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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.
“…profound scholarly reflections on the distributed effects of Alfred Gell’s endeavor to identify an anthropological theory of …a captivating pendant piece to Gell’s original publication. Itis not meant as a guidebook to understanding Gell’s work; rather it is a collection of complex studies that capture distinct engagements with Gell’s ideas around an anthropology of art.“ · Material World
“Chua and Elliott have pulled together an excellent volume to address a real problem in the interdisciplinary discussions of art… While I think the volume is most useful for those teaching arts-oriented disciplines, it is also a valuable volume for those thinking through curatorial choices in regard to ethnographic and art objects.” · Museum Anthropology
Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She works on conversion to Christianity, ethnic citizenship, landscape, resettlement and conservation in Malaysian Borneo, and on artifact-oriented theory and museology more broadly. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012).
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