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.

Re-orientates the study of art and anthropology by showing how artistic practice can influence both research and writing in anthropology.

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

Reviews

"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"

Book Information
ISBN 9781474289238
Author Gretchen Bakke
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 367g