Overview

In recent decades, the dialogue between art and anthropology has been both intense and controversial. Art, Anthropology and the Gift provides a much-needed and comprehensive overview of this dialogue, whilst also exploring the reciprocal nature of the two subjects through practice, theory and politics. Fully engaging with anthropology and art theory, this book innovatively argues that art and anthropology don’t just share methodologies, but also deeper intellectual, theoretical and even political concerns, inviting scholars and students alike to look at this contentious relationship in a more critical light. One of the central arguments of the book is that the problem of the ‘gift’ has been central to both anthropological and artistic practice. This very idea connects the different chapters on topics including aesthetics, politics, participation and fieldwork.

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9780857857811

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Reviews

Sansi has written the most comprehensive assessment yet of the considerable history, present, and hoped for future relationship between ethnographic and artistic practices. The remarkable fecundity of 'the gift', all these many decades after Mauss, still seems to define the bridge on which a common sense of experiment can be forged. With originality, Sansi extends this bridge to the relevance of both for contemporary political action. -- George Marcus, University of California, Irvine, USA Art, Anthropology and the Gift not only demonstrates the continuities of method between contemporary art and anthropology, but also makes an invaluable contribution to this emergent field in elaborating continuities of concern-intellectual, theoretical, and political-and the substantive productivity of these continuities for both fields. In so doing it invites readers to understand both contemporary art and anthropology in new ways. -- Pamela Smart, Binghamton University, USA Sansi gives us a story of links between art, anthropology, and social theory. He invites us to appreciate their multiplicity and subtlety while, at the same time, suggesting a clear central line of connections to read the logic of this complexity. This is the idea of art as gift, which has been the key in the artistic imagination of alterity from George Bataille and Guy Debord to contemporary art, and, in longer term, of discussions of aesthetics form Kant to Ranci re. A must-read for the history of anthropology and the history of art. -- Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, University of Cambridge, UK This exciting book presents an important and cogent argument for a renewed engagement between anthropology and contemporary art. Using a range of examples from contemporary Spanish art, it suggests the two fields share a common concern for a political engagement with the social and - radically - an ambition for performing new possible worlds. -- Christopher Wright, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Sansi's book offers an excellent set of questions worthy of being studied in depth by all those interested in research and praxis in relation to participatory democracy and art theory. Each chapter provides an excellent basis for further debates ... and may provide an excellent support for students and teachers in visual art postgraduate courses and undergraduate programmes. - International Journal of Education Through Art A groundbreaking volume in its innovative engagement with conceptualisations within both art and anthropology ... Sansi's insightful and sophisticated analysis makes this book an excellent read for all concerned with both the theoretical and practical developments in the dialogues between [the disciplines]. - Anthropos Art, Anthropology and the Gift is a refreshing look-through the lens of the gift-at the complex relationship between art and anthropology. ... [the book] makes an important, overdue contribution to anthropology and will interest scholars and students in visual culture studies, visual art and art history, and performance studies. Its brilliant engagement with politics and utopia-dystopia through the notion of the gift will beckon anthropologists to work across disciplines and to (re)envision what an engaged an interventionist anthropology might look like. - American Anthropologist

Author Information

Roger Sansi is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

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