https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.

ctt9qd8w3

Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell

Liana Chua
Mark Elliott

Copyright Date: 2015

Edition: 1
Published by: Berghahn Books
Pages: 232

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd8w3

Table of Contents

Front Matter (pp. i-iv)

Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)

List of Illustrations (pp. vii-viii)

Preface (pp. ix-x)

Liana Chua and Mark Elliott

Introduction: Adventures in the Art Nexus (pp. 1-24)

Liana Chua and Mark Elliott

Participants at the symposium, Art and Agency: Ten Years On, held in Cambridge at the end of 2008, will

1 de 4
 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd8w3

remember one of the succession of animated debates that took place during the proceedings. Towards the
end of the day, a prominent anthropologist sitting in the audience rose in excitement in response to the final
paper. Im sorry, she began, but Im having a visceral reaction to what youve just said! Minutes later she
was joined by another colleague who professed to feel the same, and there ensued a robust exchange
between them and the speaker at the front of the...

Chapter 1 Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency (pp. 25-38)

Susanne Kchler

There can be no doubt thatArt and Agencyhas paved a new direction for anthropological theory by challenging
the assumed primacy of the social over the material and cultural. The book presents us with the framework for
a theory of the work things do as exponents of thought and as catalysts for imagination and intuition. Rather
than merely mirroring how to be in relation, Alfred Gell shows how things make thinking about thinking
possible and shape the way we see connections in the world spontaneously and effortlessly.

In a move that reminds us of Alfred Gells work as ethnographer...

Chapter 2 Technologies of Routine and of Enchantment (pp. 39-57)

Chris Gosden

Art and Agencycan be seen as an exploration of the manner in which the qualities of people are brought out
by objects and how objects are given power and salience by people. The key questions asked in the latter
part of the book concern both the problem of order and of intelligibility: how are artefacts ordered through
evolving styles, how do such styles link to the broader ordering of culture, and in what ways do both the
ordering of material things and of culture provide the grounds for the intelligibility of the world? Gell critically
discusses Hansons (1983) work...

Chapter 3 Figuring out Death: Sculpture and Agency at the Mausoleum of

Halicarnassus and the Tomb of the First Emperor of China (pp. 58-87)
Jeremy Tanner

This paper explores the potential of Alfred Gells theory of agency for studies in comparative art, by means of
an examination of the role of figurative representation in the tombs of an early Greek and an early Chinese
monarch. Comparative art is a field of enquiry which periodically seems on the point of breaking through to
equivalent disciplinary significance to that of comparative religion or comparative literature. But it seems never
quite to cross the threshold. As a gross generalization, one might say there are two broad approaches, neither
very satisfactory. One would be cross-cultural aesthetics, exemplified by Richard Andersons...

Chapter 4 The Network of Standard Stoppages (c.1985) (pp. 88-113)

Alfred Gell

The topic I intend to discuss in this paper is the representation of duration and the problem of continuity in the

2 de 4
 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd8w3

visual arts, specifically the works of Marcel Duchamp. But before I enlarge on my theme, it may be as well for
me to explain why I think it is one which has a certain anthropological relevance, quite apart from general
cultural interest.

I have two main arguments to put forward on this score. First of all, the formative period of twentieth-century
art (i.e. 18901925) coincides exactly with the formative period of our own subject. The intellectual currents
which...

Chapter 5 Gells Duchamp/Duchamps Gell (pp. 114-129)

Simon Dell

That Marcel Duchamp should have been of interest to Alfred Gell is unsurprising. Artist and anthropologist
shared a measure of contempt for the European tradition of aesthetics, and both opposed this tradition
through sometimes abstract and indeed sometimes abstruse theorizing. Gells engagement is evident in his
account of Duchamps work in the conclusion ofArt and Agencyand is nicely indicated by the choice ofNetwork
of Stoppagesas the illustration for the books cover. Yet this work by Duchamp was also the subject of another
essay by Gell, published in the present volume for the first time; this text...

Chapter 6 Music: Ontology, Agency, Creativity (pp. 130-154)

Georgina Born

It seems that we all have our own Alfred Gell that he is a multiplicity; and thatArt and Agencyis a multiplicity,
as well as being a technology of enchantment (Gell 1992). From the evidence of the conference that forms the
basis for the present volume, Gell left a trail of dyadic relations of attentive intellectual engagement, of honest
and kind exchange. What is striking from the diverse readings and indebted critiques manifest at the
conference is the extraordinarily fertile nature of his work. Cultural objects and artisticoeuvres,as he said,
have indeed no essences, only an indefinite...

Chapter 7 Literary Art and Agency?: Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book
(pp. 155-175)
Warren Boutcher

Let me start with a confession. Before Liana Chua spoke on the first morning of the Art and Agency: Ten
Years On symposium, I did not know how to pronounce Alfred Gells surname. I had never talked in person
to anyone who knew him or his work, either before or after his death, besides one or two friends to whom I
had recommended the name. Yet I had had a relationship with him for about ten years. One day in 1998 I
entered Heffers bookstore in Cambridge to scan, as usual, the various sections for interesting new
publications. I pulled...

Chapter 8 Art, Performance and Times Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art

and Agency (pp. 176-200)
Eric Hirsch

3 de 4
 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd8w3

Comparisons between Aboriginal Australian societies and the societies of Melanesia are long standing in
anthropology. An example is the volume on emplaced myth, comparing and analysing the mythic narratives
and ritual forms of the contiguous regions of Australia and New Guinea (Rumsey and Weiner 2001; cf.
Wagner 1972). The comparisons in this case suggest a considerable period of spatial connection between
areas where myths or ritual forms in Australia, for example, are the transformation of myths and ritual forms in
New Guinea. For three-quarters of their period of human habitation they were a single landmass: even in the
postglacial period...

Chapter 9 Epilogue (pp. 201-206)

Nicholas Thomas

No one could go from the stimulating arguments of this book with a sense that anything in or around the
anthropology of art is settled. The field is certainly fertile, but also confused by disagreement that starts from
the most basic questions of definition. Is art a class of things or a cultural domain available for study, or is it
merely a problematic rubric that offers a route into the investigation of something different? Can or should the
anthropology of art be different to the study of material culture? Is the anthropology that might be brought to
bear upon this...

Notes on Contributors (pp. 207-210)

Index (pp. 211-222)

JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and
to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
2000-2017 ITHAKA. All Rights Reserved. JSTOR, the JSTOR logo, JPASS, and ITHAKA are registered trademarks of ITHAKA.

Seleccionar idioma

4 de 4