Gretchen Bakke

Marina Peterson

A comprehensive introduction to the anthropology of the arts, this is the first textbook to go beyond visual art to cover the arts more broadly. Drawing together media such as painting, sound, performance, video, and film, it presents a clear overview of the cross-cultural human experience of art. Introducing students to the basics as well as the latest scholarship, the book features: - 45 chapters which combine classic texts from anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Gell, Franz Boas, and Mary Douglas with recent scholarship by George Marcus, Tim Ingold, Roger Sansi, Christopher Pinney, Georgina Born, and others - Both theoretical and ethnographic readings, with coverage ranging from Bali, Papua New Guinea, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Australia to the United States - Introductory materials, ethnographic exercises, further reading ideas, and alternative suggestions for navigating the content based on medium, geography, theory, or ethnography Designed for classroom use, Anthropology of the Arts is invaluable for teaching and learning. Engaging and accessible, it is essential reading for students in anthropology of art, anthropology of design, anthropology of performance, and related courses.

A Reader

Anthropology of the Arts

Gary McDonogh

Global Downtowns reconsiders one of the defining features of urban life—the energy and exuberance that characterize downtown areas—within a framework of contemporary globalization and change. It analyzes the iconic centers of global cities through individual case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, considering issues of function, population, imagery, and growth. Contributors to the volume use ethnographic and cultural analysis to identify downtowns as products of the activities of planners, power elites, and consumers and as zones of conflict and competition. Whether claiming space on a world stage through architecture, media events, or historical tourism or facing the claims of different social groups for a place at the center, downtowns embody the heritage of the modern city and its future. Essays draw on extensive fieldwork and archival study in Beijing, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dar es Salaam, Dubai, Nashville, Lima, Philadelphia, Mumbai, Havana, Beirut, and Paris, among other cities. They examine the visions of planners and developers, cultural producers, governments, theoreticians, immigrants, and outcasts. Through these perspectives, the book explores questions of space and place, consumption, mediation, and images as well as the processes by which urban elites learn from each other as well as contest local hegemony. Global Downtowns raises important questions for those who work with issues of urban centrality in governance, planning, investment, preservation, and social reform. The volume insists that however important the narratives of individual spaces—theories of American downtowns, images of global souks, or diasporic formations of ethnic enclaves as interconnected nodes—they also must be situated within a larger, dynamic framework of downtowns as centers of modern urban imagination.

Global Downtowns

Building on the lively exchange between anthropology and art that has emerged in recent years, Between Matter and Method makes a bold and creative contribution to this rapidly growing field. Taking an expansive approach to the arts, it finds commonalities in approaches that engage with visual artifacts, sound, performance, improvisation, literature, dance, theater, and design. The book questions current disciplinary boundaries and offers a new model grounded in a shared methodology for interdisciplinary encounter between art and anthropology. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson have gathered together anthropologists whose work is notable for engaging the arts and creative practice in conceptually rigorous and methodologically innovative ways, including Kathleen Stewart, Keith Murphy, Natasha Myers, Stuart McLean, Craig Campbell, and Roger Sansi. Essays span the globe from Indonesia, West Virginia and Los Angeles in the United States, to the Orkney Islands in the UK, and Russia and Spain.

Marina Peterson

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