Bøger af Roger Sansi

Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn't necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.

One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candombl were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.