Aesthetics and anthropology

"Aesthetics and Anthropology" is a collection of contributions by an international and interdisciplinary team of authors from the fields of anthropology, performance studies, curatorial studies and the arts. The title refers to the paths that lead to the in-betweens and the beyonds of aura and trace in the representation of life that is performed in aesthetic reflexivity. Aesthetic reflexivity refers not only to the authors' attempts at an interdisciplinary encounter with one another, but also to their encounter with the readers, and with the recipients of an intended message in an aesthetic dialogue. Our approach is innovative in that it looks upon aesthetics as a "topos of the living". We seek to capture the present discourse of ethnographic and aesthetic disciplinary "turns" with the intent of bringing them together in theory and practice. Here, academics and artists approach one another's respective forms of representation in a "Gesamtkunstwerk" of texts and images. The book presents experimental approaches and interdisciplinary "turns", and hoped-for interactions between anthropologists and artists, and recipients of aesthetic encounters. We believe this is presently the most