Anthropology of the Arts ─ A Reader

Featuring classical and contemporary sources from across visual art, performance, sound, music, film and other media,Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader provides a road map to a rich and multidisciplinary understanding of art as a cross-cultural human experience. This accessible introduction to the arts tackles the long-standing focus of the anthropology of art upon just the visual arts. The editors chart new territory, exploring core concepts in anthropology such as social process, meaning, embodiment and value through seminal works from Gell and Geertz to original writing on comics and contemporary street style in Indonesia. As a rich and flexible teaching resource, lecturers are able to build entire upper-level undergraduates and graduate classes around the text. Structured around clear and engaging themes, each chapter offers a set of fascinating sources on the arts in social contexts which span time, space and forms of artistic expression. Students experience cutting-edge contemporary writing alongside excerpts from classic texts to help stimulate interest in a variety of core topics, placing anthropological theory into action and illuminating the wide range of research possibilities in this dynamic field.

Gretchen Bakke is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her work is on contemporary performance art in Eastern Europe, specifically Neue Slowenishe Kunst and other Slovene artists and collectives active since the 1980s. Additionally she publishes on American blockbuster movies and teaches courses on popular culture, film, and the cultural fantasies of the post-human.

Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. Research and teaching interests include Anthropology of Art, Anthropology of Music, Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Ethnographic Methods, and Sound.