The Trouble With Art

Roger Sansi is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He was founding co-convenor (with Jonas Tinius) of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). Jonas Tinius is Scientific Coordinator and Postdoctoral Researcher in Cultural Anthropology on the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism at Saarland University. He was founding co-convenor (with Roger Sansi) of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

Introduction: The Trouble with Art in Anthropology

Roger Sansi and Jonas Tinius

Part I: Philistinism

1 The Philistine Trap. A Para-Ethnography of the Trouble with an Art Centre in Barcelona

Roger Sansi

2 ‘What Has Theatre Ever Done for Us?’ Traditions of Anti-theatricality

Jonas Tinius

3 Both Sides Now: Ambiguity in Art and Anthropology

Eleana Yalouri

Part II: The Contemporary

4 “We’re Saving a Way of Life”: Indigenous Australian Acrylic Painting and its Troubles with the Categories of Art and Value

Fred Myers

5 Longing for the Contemporary of Art

Thomas Fillitz

6 When Multiplicity is not Enough: Questioning Global Art and an Approach to Other Genealogies and Co-design

Giuliana Borea

Part III: Assemblages

7 Co-Ethnographers in the Storm: Investigating Post-socialist Decline with Contemporary Artists

Francisco Martínez

8 An Enduring Interval: The Artwork as a Re-assembling

Kiven Strohm

9 Parasitic Projects and the Politics of Research-Creation

Jennifer Clarke

10 Texture of Nothing

Marina Peterson and Jesse Weaver Shipley