The Trouble With Art by Roger Sansi

The Trouble With Art by Roger Sansi

Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.

Roger Sansi is a 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 a 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).