Presentation. Disciplinary Canibalisms: Between Art History and Anthropology: Museums, Collections and Representations

Abstract

Based on the book Canibalismes disciplinaires, by Thierry Dufrêne e Anne-Christine Taylor, and inspired by the Art History and Anthropolohy Symposium organized by the Quai Branly Museum at Paris in 2006, as well as the 30th anniversary of the much-discussed 1989 exposition Magiciens de La Terre, in its repercussions to museums and art expositions in both France and non-European countries, this dossier welcomed investigations made by Art Historians, Social Scientists and Museologists who are concerned with relations, connections, conflicts and contradictions operated by contemporaneous narratives and representations produced at an intersection between Anthropology and Art, favoring objects, processes, events and institutions that drift between these fields in a process of mutual cannibalism between anthropology and art. It privileged objects, processes, events and institutions that navigate between the two areas, in a process of mutual cannibalism between these two disciplinary practices. In these intersections, museology is the third key of this relationship as it operates with the of objects, investing them in singular and field-specific processes, embraced by the notion of musealization, a symbolic and creative act that produces meanings and creates values.