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Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art History Converge

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Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia

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Abstract

Many insightful reflections from history and philosophy of art could be stitched together to engender an anxious train of thinking not only about art as a process and cultural product but also about its relevance in reading society and politics. Among numerous articulations on the commonsense of art, we often hear that there cannot be a formulaic vantage point to judge art, that art is essentially about a mode of experiential expression or an expression of blissful imagination and therefore is embedded in a field of subjectivism. Within this popular commonsense, a sociologist might deem these relationships and conditions too messy to decipher in a way that would make sociological sense. Such a pronounced absence of art in sociology and anthropology and anxieties about art’s reliability in reading society and its politics are the foundation of this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A sense of this divide exists in other parts of the world too. At times one hopes about a possible bridge across this divide that might lead to a hybrid field of art practice. See Schneider and Wright (2013).

  2. 2.

    We dwell upon a collective exploration on the limits and possibilities in sociology and social anthropology in South Asia in Ravi Kumar, Dev Nath Pathak, and Sasanka Perera eds., Sociology and Social Anthropology in South Asia: Histories and Practices (Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2018).

  3. 3.

    In our perception, the situation in academic sociology is no different. In fact, we do not find it useful to maintain the spurious division between sociology and social anthropology in the present project as well as in the way we see the world around us. The unison of sociology and social anthropology in postcolonial South Asia appears in some of our other pursuits, such as op cit Kumar et al. We have dealt with the anxieties of the visual in social sciences with a focus on visual, performance, and other cultural expressions more clearly in Pathak and Perera eds., Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (Routledge, London, 2017).

  4. 4.

    See Kumar et al. (2018).

  5. 5.

    In the present scenario, Christopher Pinney and Roma Chatterji are among the exceptional few approaching visuals of aesthetic significance within an anthropological sensibility, among others, who have shown the relevance of arts as areas of investigation transgressing the works of art themselves and venturing into domains of social sciences. These others include Tapati Guha Thakurta, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Geeta Kapoor, Jagath Weerasinghe, Iftikhar Dadi, and Salima Hashmi. Interestingly, prior to ‘filed work’ becoming an anthropological fetish, one of the pioneers of Indian sociology/anthropology, Radhakamal Mukherjee wrote the interesting text, The Culture and Art of India (Mushiram Manoharlal Publisher) in the broader South Asian context. But Mukherjee’s interests have not been followed-up in the practices of post-independent anthropology and sociology in South Asia.

  6. 6.

    Lecture organized by the Department of Sociology, South Asian University as part of the ‘Reading South Asia Lecture Series 2013’ on 26 August 2013.

  7. 7.

    For more information on the work of Naiza Khan, please visit http://naizakhan.com/ (accessed 19 August 2018).

  8. 8.

    For more information on the discussion on Naiza Khan’s artwork in public space and the Sadam Hussein poster phenomenon, see Dadi (2009).

  9. 9.

    The works are titled Muslims are meat-eaters, they prefer food containing salt. Hindus on the other hand prefer a sweet taste and I at least, have never seen or heard of such wonderful people. For more details, see the essay by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, in the catalog, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space. New York: Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012.

  10. 10.

    For more details on this, see Weerasinghe (2005) and Perera (2016).

  11. 11.

    Emphasis in the original.

  12. 12.

    See Pathak (2016). In the larger context, there has been a realization about the ethnographic turn in art practice and sharedness of what is typically called fieldwork in anthropology; see Schneider and Wright (2010).

  13. 13.

    For more along this line, see Pathak (2018).

  14. 14.

    SAARC or South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was established with seven nation states that make up South Asia in 1985 as a regional collective for cooperation in trade, culture, security, and regional cooperation. Afghanistan joined the group in 2007. Today, SAARC remains as a classic example of an ineffective regional grouping.

  15. 15.

    An effort of similar kind was accomplished in Perera (2018) and Rajendran (2018).

  16. 16.

    To reiterate, we have made an intervention along this line in Pathak and Perera (2018) unearthing the possible intersections of performance studies, art, cultural studies, anthropology, and communication studies.

  17. 17.

    For a glimpse of the transformations in art and its practices along the lines of social changes, see Turner (2005).

  18. 18.

    For more information and visuals on Subodh Gupta’s work, please visit https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/subodh_gupta.htm (accessed 19 August 2018).

  19. 19.

    For more information and visuals on Rashid Rana’s work, please visit https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/rashid_rana.htm (accessed 19 August 2018).

  20. 20.

    For more information and visuals on Anoli Perera’s work, please visit http://anoliperera.com/ (accessed 19 August 2018).

  21. 21.

    An unusual and path-breaking work in anthropology along this line is Roma Chatterji’s work on the transformation in folk art of Bengal. See Chatterji (2012). Besides, similar issues have been dealt with in the collection of essays edited by Ramaswamy (2003) suggesting a change in the technologically mediated regime of seeing and seen.

  22. 22.

    See Perera’s 2011 book, Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts for a discussion of art and politics with a focus on Sri Lanka (Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and Theertha International Artists’ Collective).

  23. 23.

    Dadi notes, in the context of arts in Muslim South Asia, “the exploration of the ‘popular’, or the ‘everyday’ (which) still awaits detailed study” (2010: 218).

  24. 24.

    In Hashmi’s book (2002), Chishti’s work has been identified as Gadani.

  25. 25.

    Text message by Ruby Chishti via Messenger, 15 August 2018.

  26. 26.

    http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fish-bandu-manamperi/

  27. 27.

    http://theerthaperformanceplatform.com/index.php/performances/dead-fish-bandu-manamperi/

  28. 28.

    For more along this line, see Taussig (1993).

  29. 29.

    On the dynamics of local, see Pathak (2017) and Pathak and Perera (2018).

  30. 30.

    For more in this conversation, see http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interviews-sp-837925570/756-to-be-partisan-unsettled-and-alert-conversation-with-geeta-kapur-#ftn_artnotes1_7 (accessed on 31 July 2018).

  31. 31.

    See https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=0&Eid=207 (accessed on 31 July 2018).

  32. 32.

    For more information on these networks and their politics, see Sasanka Perera, ‘Re-imagining and Re-narrating South Asia: Artists’ Travel and the Practice of Visual Art as a New Experiential Cartography’ pp. 251–274. In, Dev Nath Pathak ed., Another South Asia! (Delhi: Primus, 2018).

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Along this line, pondering upon the disciplinary silos on the ways of seeing and knowing, and possible redemptions, see Dhar et al. (2018).

  35. 35.

    This important aspect is given a detailed deliberation in the latter part of this introduction. The mainstay of the idea behind New Sociology of Art comes from Eduardo de la Fuente’s (2007) detailed perusal of the developments in sociology and art history.

  36. 36.

    For more on this dispute, particularly in the context of German Sociology, which runs the agenda of puncturing ‘hypostatized configuration of science’ and aids in overcoming the delimiting impact of scientism, see Adorno et al. (1981).

  37. 37.

    See Feyerabend (2010).

  38. 38.

    Bertrand Russell eloquently places a radically subjective notion of experience in the inception of scientific epistemology starting with Rene Descartes’s meditations. See Russell (2013).

  39. 39.

    This thought-provoking work of Gouldner underlined a crisis in the prevalent ways of doing (teaching, researching, and writing) sociology and advocated an imperative for a ‘new’, more reflexive, sociology, which could steer clear of the dominant ways. See Gouldner (1970).

  40. 40.

    There have been a few noticeable attempts to systematically understand the contribution of Mukerjee to sociology in Indian context. See, for example, Thakur (2015).

  41. 41.

    See, for example, Das (1993) and Deshpande (1994). We have dealt with these crises in the broader ambit of South Asia in Kumar et al. (2018).

  42. 42.

    See Madan (2003).

  43. 43.

    Many name Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, both published in the 1980s (1982 and 1984, respectively), as two significant works underlining the common ground for art history, sociology, and cultural studies.

  44. 44.

    Becker quoted in Eduardo de la Fuente’s (2007: 411).

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  1. South Asian University, New Delhi, India

    Sasanka Perera & Dev Nath Pathak

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Perera, S., Pathak, D.N. (2019). Intersections and Implications: When Anthropology, Art Practice, and Art History Converge. In: Perera, S., Pathak, D.N. (eds) Intersections of Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05852-4_1

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