About the Book
Building on the lively exchange between anthropology and art that has emerged in recent years, Between Matter and Method makes a bold and creative contribution to this rapidly growing field. Taking an expansive approach to the arts, it finds commonalities in approaches that engage with visual artifacts, sound, performance, improvisation, literature, dance, theater, and design. The book questions current disciplinary boundaries and offers a new model grounded in a shared methodology for interdisciplinary encounter between art and anthropology. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson have gathered together anthropologists whose work is notable for engaging the arts and creative practice in conceptually rigorous and methodologically innovative ways, including Kathleen Stewart, Keith Murphy, Natasha Myers, Stuart McLean, Craig Campbell, and Roger Sansi. Essays span the globe from Indonesia, West Virginia and Los Angeles in the United States, to the Orkney Islands in the UK, and Russia and Spain.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements This is an Introduction (Natasha Myers, York University, Canada) List of Illustrations List of Contributors Formless Matters, a User's Guide (Gretchen Bakke, MCGill University, Canada and Marina Peterson, University of Texas, USA) 1. ‘Labyrinth of Linkages' – Cinema, Anthropology, and the Essayistic Impulse (Rachel Thompson, Harvard University, USA)2. Mattering Compositions (Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas, USA)3. On Misanthropology (punk, art, species-hate), (Shane Greene, Indiana University, USA)4. Notes Toward Critical Ethnographic Scores: Anthropology and Improvisation Training in a Breached World (Joe Dumit, University of California, USA)5. Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-natural History of a Black Oak Savannah (Natasha Myers, York University, Canada)6. Art, Design, and Ethical Forms of Ethnographic Intervention (Keith Murphy, University of California, USA) 7. The Recursivity of the Gift in Art and Anthropology (Roger Sansi, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)Interlude: Another World in This World8. A report from the archives of the Monument to Eternal Return: Comgar (Craig Campbell, University of Texas, USA) 9. Wind Matters (Marina Peterson, Ohio University, USA)10. The Comparative Method: A Novella (Gretchen Bakke, MCGill University, Canada)11. Audible Observatories: Notes on Performances (Lina Dib, Rice University, USA and Concordia University, Canada)This is an Index (Shane Greene, Indiana University, USA)12. Blubberbomb (Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, USA)This is a Title (Gretchen Bakke, MCGill University, Canada and Marina Peterson, University of Texas, USA)Bibliography
About the Author :
Gretchen Bakke, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, McGill University, Canada Marina Peterson, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Arts, Ohio University, USA
Review :
"This volume of exuberant essays is infused with the demonstration of the close alignment of creative practices with modes of anthropological writing. Here a thematic emphasis on doing or making has produced an array of essay experiments representing among the most imaginative and grounded anthropologists working today. - George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine, USA
Take a walk. Be sure to bring along this excellent book. Let its ideas and tones wash over what you see and hear. Things may begin to show their seams, revealing stitchwork to trace, new knots to make, the threads of little worlds to come. - Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University, USA
This weird and wonderful book will make you think differently about art, about anthropology, and about their unexpected intersections and collusions. If what we are doing becomes material, the authors of this work-in-common seem to be saying, we are also making art. Thisis the sort of book you might press into someone else’s hands. It’s a book that asks after, gestures towards and teaches you how to sense, the “muted registers of being and becoming” that are hidden in plain sight. - Lisa Stevenson, McGill University, Canada"
