Suspended in 2025/26
AN383 Half Unit
Anthropology, Art, and Poetics
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Prof Michael Scott
Availability
This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Erasmus Reciprocal Programme of Study, Exchange Programme for Students from University of California, Berkeley, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course is freely available to General Course students. It does not require permission.
Requisites
Mutually exclusive courses:
This course cannot be taken with AN283 at any time on the same degree programme.
Course content
‘Art’ and ‘poetics’ – practices of making and creating – are prolific, diverse, fluid, and mutable. Nowadays, anything can become art, and art can be as many things as there are people who make and study it. The broad theme of this course will be the historical and ongoing nexus between art and anthropology. We will discover how anthropology has informed the theory and practice of art and vice versa.
Topics covered will include: art and the anthropology of modernity; the significance of qualifiers attached to the category art (e.g., ‘primitive’, ‘fine’, ‘sacred’, 'commerical', ‘decorative’, ‘practical’); art and alternative modernities; Surrealism and anthropology; class, race, and gender in relation to art; the concept of ethnoaesthetics; economies of value; the ethnographic study of artists and art-making; the concept of art worlds; art and agency; the ethnography of art collecting and curation; the works of artist ethnographers and ethnographer artists; ways of decolonizing art; problems of cultural appropriation; intellectual property; and modes of relational and collaborative poetics.
Teaching
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
Formative assessment
Essay (1500 words)
Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.
Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.
Indicative reading
- Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Coote, Jeremy and Anthony Shelton, eds. 1994. Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Danto, Arthur C. 1989. Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections. New York: Prestel.
- Fillitz, Thomas and Paul Van Der Grijp, eds. 2018. An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Kisin, Eugenia and Fred R. Myers. 2019. The Anthropology of Art, After the End of Art: Contesting the Art-Culture System. Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 317-34.
- Morphy, Howard. 2007. Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories. Oxford: Berg.
- Myers, Fred R. 2000. Around and about modernity: some comments on themes of primitivism and modernism. In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup, pp. 13-25. Toronto: University Toronto Press.
- Schneider, Arnd, ed. 2017. Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words)
Key facts
Department: Anthropology
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 6
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: Unavailable
Average class size 2024/25: Unavailable
Capped 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.