Roger Sansi – författare

Most scholarship on sorcery and witch-craft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly challenging these views, "Sorcery in the Black Atlantic" takes a longer historical and broader geographical perspective, contending that sorcery is best understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has significant connections to modernity and globalization. A distinguished group of contributors here examine sorcery in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, Cameroon, and Angola. Their insightful essays reveal the way practices and accusations of witchcraft spread throughout the Atlantic world from the age of discovery up to the present, creating an indelible link between sorcery and the rise of global capitalism. Shedding new light on a topic of perennial interest, "Sorcery in the Black Atlantic" will be provocative, compelling reading for historians and anthropologists working in this growing field.

In recent decades, the dialogue between art and anthropology has been both intense and controversial. Art, Anthropology and the Gift provides a much-needed and comprehensive overview of this dialogue, whilst also exploring the reciprocal nature of the two subjects through practice, theory and politics. Fully engaging with anthropology and art theory, this book innovatively argues that art and anthropology don’t just share methodologies, but also deeper intellectual, theoretical and even political concerns, inviting scholars and students alike to look at this contentious relationship in a more critical light. One of the central arguments of the book is that the problem of the ‘gift’ has been central to both anthropological and artistic practice. This very idea connects the different chapters on topics including aesthetics, politics, participation and fieldwork.

In recent decades, the dialogue between art and anthropology has been both intense and controversial. Art, Anthropology and the Gift provides a much-needed and comprehensive overview of this dialogue, whilst also exploring the reciprocal nature of the two subjects through practice, theory and politics. Fully engaging with anthropology and art theory, this book innovatively argues that art and anthropology don’t just share methodologies, but also deeper intellectual, theoretical and even political concerns, inviting scholars and students alike to look at this contentious relationship in a more critical light. One of the central arguments of the book is that the problem of the ‘gift’ has been central to both anthropological and artistic practice. This very idea connects the different chapters on topics including aesthetics, politics, participation and fieldwork.

Why do contemporary art curators define their work as ethnography? How can curation illuminate the practice of contemporary anthropology? Does anthropology risk disappearing as a specific discipline within the general model of the curatorial? The Anthropologist as Curator collects together the research of international scholars working at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art in order to explore these questions. The essays in the book challenge what it means to do ethnographic work, as well as the very definition of the discipline of anthropology in confrontation with the model of the curatorial. The contributors examine these ideas from a variety of angles, and the book includes perspectives from anthropologists who have set up their own exhibitions; those who have conducted fieldwork on the arts, including participatory practices, digital images and sound; and contributors who are currently working in a curatorial capacity at a museum.With case studies from the USA, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and Japan, the book represents an international perspective and is relevant to students and scholars of anthropology, contemporary art, museum studies, curatorial studies and heritage studies.

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.

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.

Why do contemporary art curators define their work as ethnography? How can curation illuminate the practice of contemporary anthropology? Does anthropology risk disappearing as a specific discipline within the general model of the curatorial? The Anthropologist as Curator collects together the research of international scholars working at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art in order to explore these questions. The essays in the book challenge what it means to do ethnographic work, as well as the very definition of the discipline of anthropology in confrontation with the model of the curatorial. The contributors examine these ideas from a variety of angles, and the book includes perspectives from anthropologists who have set up their own exhibitions; those who have conducted fieldwork on the arts, including participatory practices, digital images and sound; and contributors who are currently working in a curatorial capacity at a museum.With case studies from the USA, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and Japan, the book represents an international perspective and is relevant to students and scholars of anthropology, contemporary art, museum studies, curatorial studies and heritage studies.

One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candomble were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.