African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power

Bay, Edna G.; Blier, Suzanne Preston

doi:10.2307/3337617

Cited by 2 publications

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“…In reality it is no longer possible to keep disciplinary specialisations separated by subject matter. As anthropologists, such as Karp (Karp and Lavine 1991), analyse museums and art galleries, art historians increasingly look at indigenous systems of design and architecture (Blier 1995) and anthropologists look at contemporary Art as well as that of classical Greece and the Baroque (Napier 1992). In this process the problematic philosophical relationships between objects, practices and their surroundings have been exposed.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Introduction: Anthro/aesthetics

Losche

1997

Australian J of Anthropology

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Object thing placed before eyes or presented to sense, material thing, thing observed with an optical instrument, or represented in picture, (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1934:780) Walter Benjamin had a gifted eye for objects, those 'things before our eyes'. His work showed that objects were not simple and straightforward material forms but rather had complex connections to the human imagination and to our tumultuous history. In Benjamin's work objects had lives of their own. They lived and died but left traces of existence everywhere. They could, in the proper context, reveal, as if by magic, hidden recesses teeming with life and become animated, communicative beings-ruins, fossils, dreams and wishes (Buck-Morss 1989).From Neapolitan city life and Parisian arcades to children's books:The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book's surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. (Benjamin 1996:435) Benjamin described the lives of the objects that peopled the landscape of European capitalism whose twilight he sought to describe. In particular he problematised the nature of aesthetic objects. His notion of aura, a complex cousin to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism (Marx 1976: 163-78), suggested that a glamorous haze surrounded objects designated as aesthetic. He suggested that the aura of art works was derived from their original usage or placement in ritual and that the experience of aura:1. I thank Kathy Payne and Leslie Stem for their helpful comments on a draft of this essay.

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confidence: 99%

“…On the other, we have specific and often brilliant analyses of particular non-Westem aesthetic systems (e.g. Anderson 1991, Blier 1995, Feld 1990, Morphy 1991) which address the complexity of particular local arenas. All of these analyses raise interesting but unanswered questions about certain models and paradigms of aesthetics.…”

Section: :U)mentioning

confidence: 99%