Distributed Objects

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred GellsArt and Agencyis a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue withArt and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gells work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

Liana Chua is Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She works on conversion to Christianity, ethnic citizenship, landscape, resettlement and conservation in Malaysian Borneo, and on artifact-oriented theory and museology more broadly. She is the author ofThe Christianity of Culture: Conversion, Ethnic Citizenship, and the Matter of Religion in Malaysian Borneo(2012).

List of Illustrations
Preface
List of Contributors

Introduction: Adventures in the Art Nexus
Liana Chua and Mark Elliott

Chapter 1. Threads of Thought: Reflections onArt and Agency
Susanne Küchler

Chapter 2. Technologies of Routine and Enchantment
Chris Gosden

Chapter 3. Figuring out Death: Sculpture and Agency at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Tomb of the First Emperor of China
Jeremy Tanner

Chapter 4. The Network of Standard Stoppages
Alfred Gell

Chapter 5. Gells Duchamp/Duchamps Gell
Simon Dell

Chapter 6. Music: Ontology, Agency, Creativity
Georgina Born

Chapter 7. Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book
Warren Boutcher

Chapter 8.Art, Performance and Time¹s Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art and Agency
Eric Hirsch

Chapter 9. Epilogue
Nicholas Thomas

Bibliography
Index