João de Pina-Cabral: World: An Anthropological Examination (2016)

“What do we mean when we refer to world? How does the world relate to the human person? Are the two interdependent and, if so, in what way? What does world mean for an ethnographer or an anthropologist? Much has been said of worlds and worldviews, but do we really know what we mean by these words? Asking these questions and many more, this book explores the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture, and how these shed light on the relationship between humans and the world in the midst of which they find themselves.

As Pina-Cabral shows, recent decades have seen important shifts in the way we relate human thought to human embodiment—the relation between how we think and what we are. The book proposes a novel approach to the human condition: an anthropological outlook that is centered around the notions of personhood and sociality. Through a rich confrontation with ethnographic and historical material, this work contributes to the ongoing task of overcoming the theoretical constraints that have hindered anthropological thinking over the past century.”

Publisher HAU Books, Chicago, 2016
Malinowski Monographs series, 1
Open access
ISBN 9780997367508, 0997367504
232 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML chapters

Branislav Jakovljević: Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945-91 (2016)

“In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment for conceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its own form of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effects argues that a deep relationship existed between the democratization of the arts and industrial democracy, resulting in a culture difficult to classify. The book challenges the assumption that the art emerging in Eastern Europe before 1989 was either “official” or “dissident” art, and shows that the break up of Yugoslavia was not a result of “ancient hatreds” among its peoples but instead came from the distortion and defeat of the idea of self-management.

The case studies include mass performances organized during state holidays; proto-performance art, such as the 1954 production of Waiting for Godot in a former concentration camp in Belgrade; student demonstrations in 1968; and body art pieces by Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and others. Alienation Effects sheds new light on the work of well-known artists and scholars, including early experimental poetry by Slavoj Žižek, as well as performance and conceptual artists that deserve wider, international attention.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISBN 9780472900589
xii+369 pages

Reviews: Jestrović (Contemp Theatre Rev), Goulish (TDR), Tepavac (arcadia), Halilbašić (rezens.tfm), Radosavljević (Modern Drama), Jovićević (Peščanik).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (3 MB)
Images, PDF (HathiTrust)
PDF chapters (Jstor)

John M. MacGregor: The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (1989)

“This pioneering work, the first history of the art of the insane, scrutinizes changes in attitudes toward the art of the mentally ill from a time when it was either ignored or ridiculed, through the era when major figures in the art world discovered the extraordinary power of visual statements by psychotic artists such as Adolf Wölfli and Richard Dadd. John MacGregor draws on his dual training in art history and in psychiatry and psychoanalysis to describe not only this evolution in attitudes but also the significant influence of the art of the mentally ill on the development of modern art as a whole. His detailed narrative, with its strangely beautiful illustrations, introduces us to a fascinating group of people that includes the psychotic artists, both trained and untrained, and the psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, critics, and art historians who encountered their work.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 1989
ISBN 0691040710, 9780691040714
xix+390 pages
via mutewar

Reviews: Aaron H. Esman (Hist Behavioral Sciences), Ellen Handler Spitz (Art Bulletin), Aaron H. Esman (JAPA).

WorldCat

PDF (24 MB)

See also Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922–).