Art history and cultural difference: Alfred Gell's anthropology of art

Art History

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 524-551

  Rampley, Matthew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249425264     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00475.x     Document Type: Review

References (93)

1. On such universal histories, see Dan Karlholm, Handböckernas konsthistoria: Om Skapandet av "Allmän Konsthistoria" I Tyskland under 1800-Talet, Stockholm, 1996
2. Carol Doyon, Les histoires générales de l'art, Laval, 1991.
3. An obvious example might be Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art, London, 1982.
4. Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, London, 1950.
5. On the critique of Hegel, see Ernst Gombrich, 'In Search of Cultural History', in Gombrich, Ideals and Idols, London, 1979, 24-59
6. and 'The Father of Art History: A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)', in Gombrich, Tributes. Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition, Oxford, 1984, 51-70.
7. This was evident both in early survey texts, such as Oskar Münsterberg, Japans Kunst, Braunschweig, 1908
8. and also in later ones, such as J. Edward Kidder, The Art of Japan, Milan, 1984.
9. An exception to this tendency can be found in Bonnie Wade, Imaging Sound. An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India, Chicago, 1998. Wade explores the role of music and the representation of music in the courts of the Mughal rulers.
10. See the Abbé Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, Paris, 1747.
11. More generally, see Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art, Chicago, 2001.
12. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Cambridge, 1986
13. and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford, 1990.
14. See, too, the contributions of Joanna Overing and Peter Gow to the debate 'Aesthetics is a Cross-Cultural Category', in Tim Ingold, ed., Key Debates in Anthropology, London, 1996, 260-6 and 271-5.
15. There have been dissenting voices: see, for example, Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics, Cambridge, 2001
16. and, more recently, Paul Crowther, 'Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting Culture', British Journal of Aesthetics, 44:4, 2004, 361-77.
17. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, Art as a Cultural System', in Glifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, 3rd edn, London, 2000, 94-120.
18. James Elkins, Stories of Art, London, 2003.
19. See, too, 'Why It is Not Possible to Write the Art History of Non-Western Countries', in Jan Bakoš, ed., Minulost' v Prítomnosti: Súčasné Umenie a Umeleckohistorické Myty, Bratislava, 2003, 229-55.
20. See, for example, Quintilian's history of Greek sculpture (Institutio Oratoria, 12.10.1-10) in J.J. Pollitt, ed., The Art of Ancient Greece. Sources and Documents, Cambridge, 1990, 221-3.
21. Elkins, Stories of Art, 115
22. Qādī Ahmad, Calligraphers and Painters, trans. V. Minorsky, Washington, 1959.
23. See, for example, Hal Foster, 'The Artist as Ethnographer', in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, 1996, 171-203
24. Alex Coles, ed., Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, London, 2000. 'Erroneously' because the privileging of cultural alterity should not to be equated with ethnography per se. Debates over the cross-cultural applicability of 'art' and 'aesthetic experience' have taken place within ethnography and anthropology in the same way that they have in philosophy, cultural studies and art history.
25. See Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, London, 1997.
26. On the comparative study with Japan, see 'Comparisons and Conclusions', in Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance. Culture and Society in Italy, Cambridge, 1986, 248-56.
27. On the profession of painting in China, see James Cahill, The Painter's Practice. How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China, New York, 1994.
28. See, for example, Timon Screech, The Shogun's Painted Culture. Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States 1760-1829, London, 2000.
29. Richard Anderson, Calliope's Sisters. A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art, London, 1990.
30. Anderson, Calliope's Sisters, 241.
31. David Summers, Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London, 2003.
32. Similar points have been made by James Elkins, review of David Summers, Real Spaces, in Art Bulletin, 86:2, 2003, 232-7.
33. Donald Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', in Donald Davidson, Essays on Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, 1984, 183-98.
34. See Bourdieu, Distinction.
35. An account of Gell's intellectual development and career can be found in Alan Macfarlane, 'Alfred Gell (1945-1997)', Proceedings of the British Academy, 120, 2003,123-47.
36. Alfred Gell, Metamorphoses of the Cassowaries. Umeda Society, Language and Ritual, London, 1975
37. The Anthropology of Time. Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images, Oxford, 1992
38. Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia, Oxford, 1993
39. Art and Agency, Oxford, 1998
40. The Art of Anthropology. Essays and Diagrams, ed. Eric Hirsch, London, 1999.
41. Gell, Art and Agency, 9.
42. See David Beech and John Roberts, eds, The Philistine Controversy, London, 2003.
43. Gell, The Art of Anthropology, 161.
44. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art, Cambridge, 1997.
45. Gell, Wrapping in Images, 36.
46. Gell, 'Technology and Magic', in Jonathan Benthall, ed., The Best of "Anthropology Today", London, 2002, 282.
47. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility' (second version), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3: 1935-1938, Cambridge, Mass, 2002, 101-133.
48. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge, 2000, 46-7.
49. Gregory Bateson, 'Redundancy and Coding', in Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago, 2000, 416-31.
50. Bateson, 'Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art', in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 101-125, esp. 120 ff.
51. Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, London, 1979.
52. A detailed discussion of this issue can be found in Karel Arnaut, 'A Pragmatic Impulse in the Anthropology of Art? Alfred Gell and the Semiotics of Social Objects', Journal des Africanistes, 71: 2, 2001, 191-208.
53. Michael Polányi, The Tacit Dimension, New York, 1966.
54. Roy Wagner, 'The Fractal Person', in M. Strathern and M. Godelier, eds, Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, Cambridge, 1991, 159-73.
55. See, for example, Ross Bowden, 'A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency', Oceania, 70:4, 2004, 309-328.
56. See Pillow, Sublime Understanding. Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel, Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
57. Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy, London, 1971, 127-88.
58. For a critical reading of this model, see Briankle Chang, Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange, Minneapolis, 1996.
59. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago, 1994, 153.
60. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, Cambridge, 1989.
61. Suzanne Küchler, 'Why Knot? A Theory of Art and Mathematics', in Christopher Pinney, ed., Beyond Aesthetics. Art and the Technology of Enchantment, Oxford, 2001, 57-77.
62. Küchler, 'Why Knot? A Theory of Art and Mathematics', 71.
63. Küchler, 'Why Knot? A Theory of Art and Mathematics', 73.
64. Bowden, 'A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency'.
65. See, for example, Arthur Danto, 'The Artworld', Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, 571-84.
66. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Ithaca, 1964.
67. The article by Coote is: '"Marvels of Everyday Vision": the Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Cattlekeeping Nilotes', in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, eds, Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford, 1992, 245-73.
68. See Victor Burgin, 'The End of Art Theory', in Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, London, 1986, 140-215
69. Craig Owens, 'Representation, Appropriation and Power', in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, Los Angeles, 1992, 88-113.
70. David Freedberg, The Power of Images, Chicago, 1989.
71. Wolfgang Kemp, Der Betrachter ist im Bild, Berlin, 1992.
72. For a general outline of the arguments over the meaning of magic, science and technology, see Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality, Cambridge, 1990.
73. The distinctions drawn by Freedberg fall into a sequence of representational 'types' common to many authors. A discussion of these can be found in Richard Parmentier, 'The Pragmatic Semiotics of Culture', Semiotica, 116, 1997, 1-114, esp. 63-89.
74. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility'.
75. See Matthew Rampley, 'Iconology of the Interval. Aby Warburg's Legacy', Word and Image, 17:4, 2001, 303-324.
76. See Julius von Schlosser, Tote Blicke, Berlin, [1910] 1993.
77. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London, 1989.
78. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Image, Music, Text, London, 1977, 142-8
79. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
80. See in particular Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Harmondsworth, 1993
81. Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, Cambridge, 1913
82. Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. M. Steinberg, Ithaca, [1896] 1995.
83. see Susan Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, Princeton, 1995.
84. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Harmondsworth, 1991, 330.
85. See, for example, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, London and New Haven, [1934] 1979.
86. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author'.
87. See, for example, Foucault's reading of Las Meniñas in The Order of Things, 3-16
88. Jean-Pierre Oudart, 'Notes for a Theory of Representation' [1971] in Nick Browne, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma. Vol. 3: 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation, London, 1990, 203-212
89. or Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze, London, 1983.
90. For a critique of Barthes, see Peter Lamarque, 'The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy', British Journal of Aesthetics, 40:4, 1990, 319-31.
91. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, London and New Haven, 1985.
92. Vasari cited in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1660, Oxford, 1940, 90.
93. Ernst Grosse, Die Anfänge der Kunst, Tübingen, 1894, 9.