Suspended in 2025/26
AN483      Half Unit
Anthropology, Art, and Poetics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

‘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.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

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 4 of term.

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.

Essay (100%, 3500 words)