| The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life Contributor(s): Jackson, Michael D. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231178182 ISBN-13: 9780231178181 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $41.58 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Art | Criticism & Theory - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Religion | Spirituality |
| Dewey: 201.67 |
| LCCN: 2016012706 |
| Series: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and C |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.9" W x 9.1" (1.05 lbs) 256 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 deploys an extraordinary range of references--from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch--to explore 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Jackson, Michael D.: - Michael D. Jackson (PhD, Anthropology, Cambridge)is Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including At Home in the World (Duke, 2012), Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago, 2013), As Wide as the World is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology (Columbia, 2016), The Varieties of Temporal Experience: Travels in Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Time (Columbia, 2018), and The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Columbia, 2016). |