Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment

297 Pages·2001·0.83 MB·English

by  Christopher Pinney

Beyond Aesthetics
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Beyond Aesthetics
Art and the Technologies of Enchantment
Edited by
Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas
Oxford•New York
First published in 2001 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA
© Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas 2001
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1859734596(Cloth)
ISBN 1859734642(Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Nicholas Thomas
1 Romanticism, from Foi Site Poetry to Schubert’sWinterreise 13
James F. Weiner
2 Agency, History and Tradition in The Construction of
‘Classical’ Music: The Debate Over ‘Authentic Performance’ 31
Ian Keen
3 Why Knot? Towards a Theory of Art and Mathematics 57
Susanne Küchler
4 Captivation, Representation, and the Limits of Cognition:
Interpreting Metaphor and Metonymy in Tahitian Tamau 79
Anne D’Alleva
5 What Makes SingoDifferent: North Vanuatu Textiles and the
Theory of Captivation 97
Lissant Bolton
6 The Captivating Agency of Art: Many Ways of Seeing 117
Shirley Campbell
7 The Fame of Trinis: Websites as Traps 137
Daniel Miller
8 Piercing the Skin of the Idol 157
Christopher Pinney
9 The Politics and Personhood of Tibetan Buddhist Icons 181
Clare Harris
–v–
Contents
10 Aboriginal Cultural Production into Art: The Complexity
of Redress 201
Francesca Merlan
11 When the (Oven) Gloves Are Off: The Queen’s Baton – Doing
What to Whom? 235
Charlotte Townsend-Gault
12 The Patent and the Malanggan 259
Marilyn Strathern
Index 287
–vi–
Preface
Is it useful to see art objects, not as bearers of meaning or aesthetic value, but as
forms mediating social action? This book addresses a range of issues in the
anthropology of art in relation to this thesis, in relation to a theory proposing that
former emphases upon significance and aesthetics in the anthropology of art have
proved unproductive, and that art should instead be seen as a special kind of
technology that captivates and ensnares others in the intentionalities of its
producers. This is one of the arguments of Alfred Gell’s posthumously published
Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory (1998), which this collection uses as
a departure point, to re-assess questions of agency and meaning in art.
Most of the chapters of this book are based on drafts presented at a conference
which took place in Canberra in August 1998. This event was intended in part as a
commemoration of the work of Alfred Gell, who had died in January 1997, but
the participants were nevertheless committed to debating Alfred’s work with the
kind of impartial vigour that characterized his own seminar engagements and
writings. Among a number of people who made stimulating contributions and
helped make the conference a success, but who are not represented in this volume,
we must thank Eric Hirsch, Howard Morphy, and especially Simeran Gell.
The conference was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro-
pological Research and the British Academy, and hosted by the Centre for Cross-
Cultural Research at the Australian National University. We are very grateful to
those institutions for making the event possible, and must particularly thank Hilary
Ericksen and Ian Bryson, research assistants at the Centre for Cross-Cultural
Research; Hilary put a great deal of work into the organization of the conference
and supported the initial phases of editorial work; Ian Bryson, who provided further
editorial assistance and co-ordination, has helped us bring the project to fruition.
Thanks also to Kathryn Earle at Berg for her patience and support.
–vii–
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Introduction
Introduction
Nicholas Thomas
In 1973, Anthony Forge observed that the position of the anthropology of art was
‘curious’. He was remarking on the field’s marginality within the discipline, that
seemed incommensurate with the level of interest in ‘primitive art’ outside it. Nearly
thirty years later, the anthropology of art remains ‘curiously’ situated, for different
reasons. Forge’s work helped draw research on art away from antiquarian
museology and into the anthropological mainstream by embedding it within
ethnography; over the 1970s and 1980s, ethnographic studies of indigenous arts
became well-established, and typically focused on questions of communication,
meaning, and the distinctiveness of indigenous ways of seeing and aesthetic
systems. These concerns were still central in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics
(Coote and Shelton 1992), which reflected the state of play in the field, at least
within British anthropology.
What became ‘curious’ was an apparent lack of dialogue between work which
effectively analysed art practices within local ethnographic settings, and emerging
preoccupations with the politics of art, cross-cultural relations, and representation
– debates that for a time had centred upon the famous or notorious 1983
‘Primitivism’ show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Rubin 1983;
McEvilley 1984; Clifford 1988). It was also odd that while anthropologists in every
other possible field within the discipline were addressing social and cultural
phenomena in most imaginable cultural settings, the Coote and Shelton volume
suggested that work on art remained, like Forge’s 1973 collection, confined not
merely to ‘non-Western’ societies but more particularly to certain tribal or formerly
tribal peoples, in other words to those formerly identified as ‘primitive’. In other
words, the ‘anthropology of art’ seemed to have no body of theory, no perspective,
that could be disembedded from the ethnography of indigenous art and applied to
art in general. Anthropologists, certainly, could and did embrace issues around
representation and cultural politics (Marcus and Myers 1997; MacClancy 1997;
Phillips and Steiner 1998), but when they did so they generally drew upon methods
of textual critique and upon issues raised in cultural studies and related fields.
While, in 1994 Morphy was able to provide a coherent (and very valuable) synthesis
of the ‘anthropology of art’, this meant largely an anthropology of style and
meaning in indigenous art.
–1–