Distributed Objects

Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University, West London. She works on conversion to Christianity, ethnic citizenship, landscape, resettlement and conservation in Malaysian Borneo, and on artifact-oriented theory and museology more broadly. She is the author of The Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo (2012). Mark Elliott is Curatorial Research Fellow and Exhibitions Coordinator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Trained as an anthropologist, he now works across archaeological and ethnographic collections, and was co-curator, with Anita Herle and Rebecca Empson, of Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination (2009-10). His research and teaching interests include histories of museum practice in South Asia and Britain, and visual and material representations of Adivasi peoples in India.

"Chua and Elliott have pulled together an excellent volume to address a real problem in the interdisciplinary discussions of art - While I think the volume is most useful for those teaching arts-oriented disciplines, it is also a valuable volume for those thinking through curatorial choices in regard to ethnographic and art objects." * Museum Anthropology

• List of Illustrations Preface List of Contributors Introduction: Adventures in the Art Nexus Liana Chua and Mark Elliott Chapter 1. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency Susanne Kuchler Chapter 2. Technologies of Routine and Enchantment Chris Gosden Chapter 3. Figuring out Death: Sculpture and Agency at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Tomb of the First Emperor of China Jeremy Tanner Chapter 4. The Network of Standard Stoppages Alfred Gell Chapter 5. Gell's Duchamp/Duchamp's Gell Simon Dell Chapter 6. Music: Ontology, Agency, Creativity Georgina Born Chapter 7. Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book Warren Boutcher Chapter 8. Art, Performance and Time' s Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art and Agency Eric Hirsch Chapter 9. Epilogue Nicholas Thomas Bibliography Index