ANTH 3031 - Art and Performance

Goals: To study humans as social and cultural beings. To examine the topic using various approaches—emphasizing the ways that humans make, remake and represent meanings and behaviors in social and cultural contexts. To discuss anthropological approaches to research and the ethnographies that sociocultural anthropologists typically produce.

Content: How do anthropologists understand the nature and purpose of art and performance? Are these universal categories of human behavior or are they unique to Western modernist and postmodernist activities and theoretical assumptions? Does it make sense to discuss art as an autonomous sphere of action outside of religion, ritual, medicine, tourism, or other forms of practice? How might representations that we encounter in painting, sculpture, or performance align with ethnographic depictions? How are identity, difference, and cultural values produced and reproduced by both art and anthropology? How might art forms or performances be used as political protest and what might such creations offer that other practices do not? These are just some of the many questions we will discuss this semester. Ultimately, our goal is to interrogate the notion of art as we have come to conceptualize it in the West as a way to expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Credits: 4