Dear colleagues,
Please see below call for papers for a panel at the RAI's 2018 conference ‘Art, Materiality and Representation’ to be held at the British Museum and SOAS University of London, 1-3 June 2018. The deadline for proposing papers is 8 January 2018.
PANEL 22: DOING, MAKING, COLLABORATING: ART AS ANTHROPOLOGY
Convened by Dr Joost Fontein (Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh and Director, British Institute in Eastern Africa) and
Dr Constance Smith (Social Anthropology, University of Manchester)
This panel asks what art can do for anthropology, rather than what anthropological approaches can bring to an understanding of art. It will explore forms of collaboration between art and anthropology that foreground performance, practice, exhibition and event.
In recent years, a growing literature on questions of materiality, agency and the contingency of people and things has been reshaping the anthropology of art (e.g. Gell 1998; Ingold 2013). Much of this literature draws on a wider reconsideration of materials, things and stuff as vital and active in the world, rather than inert objects representative of human meaning (Latour 1993; Bennett 2009; Miller 2005). This work pushes debates around art objects and art practice beyond ideas of representation, ritual use or symbolic meaning and asks instead what it is that art does: how it mediates and transforms social relations in an ongoing – sometimes fraught – process.
Yet despite the renewed theoretical focus on doing over meaning, agency over representation, this has rarely translated into new methods or ways of working. Texts remain at the heart of the academic project, in which semantics, narrative and interpretation endure. This panel will explore how critical engagements between scholars and cultural actors such as artists and performers - for whom making and practice, as much as representation and narrative, are the everyday tools of sense-making - may re-energise debates about the relationship between art and anthropology.
We invite proposals for papers that explore forms of intellectual enquiry and collaboration that foreground performance, practice, exhibition and event. We welcome papers exploring research-orientated, creative or curatorial collaborations between scholarship and the arts, in the broadest sense.
To propose a paper, please go to https://nomadit.co.uk/rai/events/rai2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6071 and follow the 'Propose paper' link.
For further information, please contact [log in to unmask]
Best wishes,
Constance Smith
--
Dr Constance Smith
Hallsworth Research Fellow
Social Anthropology
University of Manchester
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