Art of Anthropology

The Art of Anthropology collects together the most influential of Gell's writings which span the past two decades with a new introductory chapter written by Gell. The essays vividly demonstrate Gell's theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of current anthropological enquiry. A central theme of the essays is Gel's highly original exploration of diagrammatic imagery as the site where social relations and cognitive processes converge and crystallise. Gell tracks this imagery across studies of tribal market transactions dance forms the iconicity of language and his most recent and groundbreaking analyses of artworks.Written with Gell's characteristic fluidity and grace and generously illustrated with Gell's original drawings and diagrams the book will interest art historians sociologists and geographers no less than anthropologists challenging as it does established ideas about exchange representation aesthetics cognition and spatial and temporal processes.