The Work of Art

Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17818-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 518 g

Reihe: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

How are we to think of works of art? Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon.

Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson uses an extraordinary range of references—from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch—in exploring the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, Michael D.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Indigene Völker
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Existenzphilosophie, Lebensphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionssoziologie und -psychologie, Spiritualität, Mystik
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kunstethnologie, Musikethnologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PreamblePart 1Worlds Within and Worlds WithoutMelbourne NowThe Elementary Forms of Religious LifeArt as ReligionThe Interplay of Coming Out and Going InConsciousnessFrom Joyce to BeuysProduction and ReproductionAxes of BiasA Visit to the Kunstmuseum BaselPart 2The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula NelsonEcstatic ProfessionsArt and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of ArtTransplantations: The Art of Simryn GillMy Brother's Keeper: The Art of Susan NorrieHeroic Failure: The Art of Sidney NolanUne Vie BrèveThe Pare RevisitedA Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahonPart 3Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul CézanneArt and the UnspeakableMarina Abramovi? and the Shadows of IntersubjectivityExodusMaking It OtherwiseArt and the EverydayThe Work of Art and the Arts of LifeNotesAcknowledgmentsPermissionsIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. internationally renowned for his pioneering use of phenomenological and pragmatist methods in ethnography and for establishing the field of existential anthropology, he is a leading figure in contemporary philosophical anthropology and widely praised for his innovations in ethnographic writing. His most recent books include Walking to Pencarrow: Selected Poems (2016) and The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Wellbeing (2013).