Anthropology and Art History: from intersection to indistinction?

Who ?

Section d'histoire de l'art, Faculté des lettres, Université de Lausanne

When ?

11-14 June 2025

Where ?

Campus de Dorigny, Université de Lausanne

For whom ?

Masters, doctoral students and post-docs

How much ?

CHF 100.-

ECTS ?

Non-credit course, certificate of attendance issued

Language ?

English and partially French

The four days of this Summer School, organized by Maria Stavrinaki (Université de Lausanne) in cooperation with Caroline van Eck (Cambridge University), will be organized through seminars of art and architecture historians and anthropologists from Switzerland, England, France, Belgium and the United States. Confirmed or expected speakers will be:

• Caroline van Eck, Cambridge University
• Teresa Castro, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Vincent Debaene, Université de Genève
• Michael Kunichika, Amherst College
• Giordana Charuty, EHESS
• Alfredo Thiermann, EPFL
• Emanuele Quinz, Université Paris 8
• Steven Jacobs, Ghent University
• Jérémie Koering, Université de Fribourg
• Zoe Strother (via zoom), Columbia University
• Anselm Franke, Zürich University of the Arts

This summer school is open to Masters, PhD and postdocs. 

Its relationship with anthropology has determined the history of art since the end of the 19th century, that is to say since its institutionalization and its crystallization as a discipline. Since then, this relationship has remained almost uninterrupted and, for the past thirty years, has become increasingly assertive. In order to conduct a rigorous reflection on our methods, procedures, heuristic values, jargon, consecrations and other disciplinary automatisms, we propose to concentrate our work sessions in this four-day Summer School (June 11-14) on the period that begins in the immediate post-war period, in 1945, and extends to the present day. In the increasingly closed world of the post-war period, and thanks to the dynamics of democratization and the diffusion of knowledge, as well as the transformation of disciplines into "studies", the interaction between anthropology and art history is experiencing its richest and most complex phase.

The relationship between the two disciplines is clearly achieved through a third party: the practice of the artists themselves, who, continuing the work of undermining the autonomy of art carried out by different avant-gardes, do not simply open their action to the cultural continuum, but often theorize it in terms of cultural anthropology (Independent Group, Cobra, radical architecture, conceptual art, etc.). Conversely, anthropologists extend and displace the first intuitions of the anthropologist Raymond Firth, who broke with the reading of objects as indices of the evolution and diffusion of culture to see them as intentional and significant ordered forms. According to this perspective, art is only the Western historical condensation of a universal aesthetic activity, which can be understood in turn through the resources of formalism, the psychology of art or categories such as “style”. In this context, writings such as those of Meyer Schapiro and Ernst Gombrich play the role of mediators. New Art History, with its roots in cultural and social history (Michael Baxandall) and the dissociation of art history from the primacy of “text” and “literacy,” make it more assimilable by anthropology. Notions such as the “cultural eye” are imposed, that is, the need to extract the material culture specific to anthropology from simple functionalism in order to find therein formal intentionality, individual exception, historical particularity, and even an affirmation of “taste.” These impulses are important for the liberation of anthropology from the fear of "primitivism": being interested in the art of cultures that have not theorized art does not necessarily mean primitivizing them, but on the contrary extracting them from this other primitivism, more insidious, of the stereotypical, impersonal and permanent artifact.

The advent of “cultural studies” and “visual studies” in the era of postmodernism, through their very opposition to the autonomy and specificity of works of art, completes the dilution of history in culture. Then, the expansion of the intersections between the two disciplines increases thanks to the explosion of new “ontologies”: animism, agency, magic, “doing”, the human and the non-human, are only some of the notions that run through discourses today, from the most solid to the flimsiest. The formation of “Bildwissenschaft” in German-speaking countries was a powerful vector of the absorption of anthropological notions by art history. One could even say that the writings of Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp, ​​etc. produce an undifferentiation of two disciplines, because they seriously question the very notion of history. This is what other writings of art history, and significant exhibitions will also do, this time through postcolonial studies. These epistemological dynamics occur at the same time as the globalization of artistic practices and exhibitions today: the “great South” and the “great North” meet in a field where art history and anthropology are becoming increasingly indistinct.

Some of the themes developed will be the following:

• The "patterns": a nomadic concept between the history of art, anthropology and cybernetics (Mead, Bateson).

• The theory of “Gestalt” and “behaviorism” allowing anthropology and art history to intersect again in the hope of constituting a universal language, based on “patterns” or “structures” and supposed to allow the mastery of the unprecedented profusion of cultural data, as well as the perception and administration of a world which, in the middle of the Cold War, seems to escape all control.

• Mixed disciplinary identities: Robert Goldwater, both anthropologist and art historian; Luc de Heusch, both anthropologist and member of the COBRA group.

• The structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, etc.: frictions with history, rejection of abstraction, recovery by art history.

• African Studies: abolition of the duality of the anthropology of art and art history?

• Energetics of gestures: from the thermodynamic model of anthropologist Leslie White to Tim Ingold’s “doing”.

• Alfred Gell’s Agency and Technology of Enchantment: Engine of the Epistemological Continuum and Appropriation by Artists.

• Animism or the “Ethnography of White”: return to the exhibitions of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

• Ecology, in its conflictual relationship with technology, adopting entropic visions, of great importance for art from 1950 (through Lévi-Strauss); or maintaining complementary and ultimately analogical relationships with technology (this is the case with Bateson).

• Artists/architects-anthropologists (radical architecture, conceptual art, postcolonial postmodernism, etc.).

A provisional programme will be published soon.

CHF 100.-

Price includes :

• Tuition fees
• Lunches
• Coffee breaks
• Two aperitifs

Your application must include : 

• a CV
• a cover letter explaining how participation in the summer school fits in with your academic career.

The deadline for applications is 10 April 2025.