Stephanie Bunn
University of St Andrew’s
Can Anthropologists talk about beauty?
Artists and anthropologists have both questions, and challenges or processes to work through. These arise through practice and through inspiration. We could refocus our dialogue at this symposium on the kinds of questions we ask which reveal our common interests with other artist-anthropologists, and could find quite different groupings amongst ourselves, which depend not upon our activities but on our questions. This is the significance and raison-d’ętre of interdisciplinarity.
What I would like to do in this paper is to try to shake up our focus on working practice, and to move the focus to the questions. The kinds of questions I address as an artist-craftsperson and an anthropologist include: What is change, innovation and tradition? What is the relationship between material and artifact. Can there be essence and process? Does image have the power to change poetically? How does form relate to movement? What is the relationship between body object and environment?
I will discuss this in relation to the work of other artists and anthropologists.
