Studiegids

Content

This course offers an introduction in the different domains of Anthropology of Art and the main research topics, discussions, and methods. Every class treats a specific theme from different angels or perspectives, introducing key concepts that are situated and explored with texts, artistic expressions, and contemporary discussions.

The goal of the classes is to reflect on the global dimensions of art creation and art production through different case studies from World Art studies and non-Western Art at the one hand. At the other hand the course offers methods to enable students to reflect on their own position in the world, focusing on self-reflexivity and sensitivity for ethnocentric visions, and to contextualize, situate and position their work in a broader cultural and historical framework.  

Themes and concepts that are addressed are:  

- anthropological methods: participant-observation, fieldwork, ethnography, co-creation

- ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, self-reflexivity, atomistic and pluriform self-image

- epistemology, ontologie, anthropocentrism and the post-Anthropocene: multispecies ethnography, non human personhood – plant relatives, plant blindness-foraging, ancestral wisdom

- the power of storytelling – myth – non-linear time concepts

- the plurivers and decolonisation

- artistic co-creation: artistic research, activism, long-term engagements, intersubjectivity

- The Origins of Art and World Art Studies: feminism, World Art History, Palaeolithic art, geometric pattern, visual regularity, symbolic code, abstract thought, symbolism, exchange or trade, shamanism, trance dance, hallucinations, anthropo-zoomorphic representations, origins of rock art, magico-religious paradigm, hunter-gatherers, fertility symbols, early forms of pornography, neuro art history, mirror neurons.

- Rituals: rite of intensification, revitalization rituals, rites of passage, life cycle, transformation, initiation, ritual death, rebirth, communitas, betwixt and between, anti-structure, transition, crisis, pre liminal, liminal, post liminal, liminoid, naming ceremony, menarche rituals, myths, storytelling, embodied/carnal knowledge, burial, funeral, ancestor, ancestor cults

- Body Modifications: tattoo, scarification, consumer culture, commodification, individual identity, group identity, the Gaze, self-expression, self-objectivation, body positivism

- Portraiture: remembrance, personality, generic portrait, emblematic portrait, representational portrait, idiosyncratic physiognomic likeness, the lens of likeness

- A History of Othering: Othering, Imperialism, extractivism, colonialism, cultural Darwinism, classification, panopticon, linear development model, progress, racism, sexism / feminism, modernity, constructed primitivism, diorama, exotism, freak show, Human Zoo, negative mirror to construct the self, cancel culture, idealized self, ethnocentrism / middle-class European culture as standard, monolithic mindset, monoculture, multiple narratives, multiple histories, gender fluidity and queer auto-theory

- Decolonization and artistic practices: Cartesian model, ontological dualism, construction of subjectivity, universalism, modernity, canon, Coloniality of Being, otherness, binaries, relationality, worlding, pluriverse, interdependence, singularization, individuation, onto-epistemologies, Sentipensar, decolonization, ancestrality, cosmology

- artistic remakes of the Archive: archive fever, the limits of the archive, multiple narratives

Course material

All the presentations and many inspiring texts are available on Toledo.

Language of instruction: more information

English

Format: more information

Colleges, with a wide range of audio-visual materials, and room for interaction and discussions.

The course consists of presentations and an online reader with required readings. Additional readings are available for further exploration.