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Material culture and the problem of agency

Material culture and the problem of agency Am J Cult Sociol https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0054-6 REVIEW ESSAY Fiona Greenland Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018 In the months between his grim diagnosis and his death, Alfred Gell sat down to write the book that would seal his intellectual legacy. By this time, 1996, Gell was 51 years old and widely respected for his path-breaking studies of art, ritual, and symbols in Melanesian societies. His final book, published posthumously, became the repository of his remaining thoughts, of long-simmering ideas thrust to the front burner and brought to the boil in 258 pages. Gell’s previous work asked bold questions about art and human relations, and he broke a few windows in the house of established anthropological theory. This last book set the roof on fire. Its incendiary sits squarely in the title: Art and Agency, signaling a fundamental re- thinking of the relationship between two elements absolutely central to human culture. Partly because he wrote the book so quickly and partly because his thinking was always unconventional, Gell’s core thesis in Art and Agency is difficult to distill. Readers with a passing knowledge of the argument will probably associate with it a line such as ‘‘Objects have agency’’ or http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Cultural Sociology Springer Journals

Material culture and the problem of agency

Greenland, Fiona
American Journal of Cultural Sociology , Volume OnlineFirst – Feb 5, 2018
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References (4)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature
Subject
Social Sciences; Social Sciences, general; Sociology, general; Sociology of Culture; Media Sociology
ISSN
2049-7113
eISSN
2049-7121
DOI
10.1057/s41290-017-0054-6
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Am J Cult Sociol https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0054-6 REVIEW ESSAY Fiona Greenland Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018 In the months between his grim diagnosis and his death, Alfred Gell sat down to write the book that would seal his intellectual legacy. By this time, 1996, Gell was 51 years old and widely respected for his path-breaking studies of art, ritual, and symbols in Melanesian societies. His final book, published posthumously, became the repository of his remaining thoughts, of long-simmering ideas thrust to the front burner and brought to the boil in 258 pages. Gell’s previous work asked bold questions about art and human relations, and he broke a few windows in the house of established anthropological theory. This last book set the roof on fire. Its incendiary sits squarely in the title: Art and Agency, signaling a fundamental re- thinking of the relationship between two elements absolutely central to human culture. Partly because he wrote the book so quickly and partly because his thinking was always unconventional, Gell’s core thesis in Art and Agency is difficult to distill. Readers with a passing knowledge of the argument will probably associate with it a line such as ‘‘Objects have agency’’ or

Journal

American Journal of Cultural Sociology – Springer Journals

Published: Feb 5, 2018

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