When referring to the art of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world, people often think of traditional art forms. Contemporary artists from cultures and countries outside Europe are highly critical of this common Western expectation that non-Western cultures should above all be traditional. The contributors (artists, curators and scientists) try to point out that there's also modern art outside Europe and pay attention to the relationship between the old and the new.

While the importance of the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art has long been recognized, the discussion has tended to be among scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia; until now, scholarship and experiences from other regions have been largely absent from mainstream debate. Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters rectifies this by offering a ground-breaking new approach to the subject. Entirely dedicated to perspectives from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the book advances our understanding of the connections between anthropology and contemporary art on a global scale. Across ten chapters, a range of anthropologists, artists, and curators from countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Bhutan, Nigeria, Chile, Ecuador, and the Philippines discuss encounters between anthropology and contemporary art from their points of view, presenting readers with new vantage points and perspectives. Arnd Schneider, a leading scholar in the field, draws together the various threads to provide readers with a clear conceptual and theoretical narrative. The first to map the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art from a global perspective, this is a key text for students and academics in areas such as anthropology, visual anthropology, anthropology of art, art history, and curatorial studies.

'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people—such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves—, a wide variety of art forms—like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theatre performances—, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds. 'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.

How Chinese is contemporary Chinese art? Treasured by collectors, critics, and art world cognoscenti, this art developed within an avant-garde that looked West to find a language to strike out against government control. Traditionally, Chinese artistic expression has been related to the structure and function of the Chinese language and the assumptions of Chinese natural cosmology. Is contemporary Chinese art rooted in these traditions or is it an example of cultural self-colonization? Contributors to this volume address this question, going beyond the more obvious political and social commentaries on contemporary Chinese art to find resonances between contemporary artistic ideas and the indigenous sources of Chinese cultural self-understanding. Focusing in particular on the acclaimed artist Xu Bing, this book looks at how he and his peers have navigated between two different cultural sites to establish a third place, a place from which to appropriate Western ideas and use them to address centuries-old Chinese cultural issues within a Chinese cultural discourse.

The aim of each volume of this series Guides to Information Sources is to reduce the time which needs to be spent on patient searching and to recommend the best starting point and sources most likely to yield the desired information. The criteria for selection provide a way into a subject to those new to the field and assists in identifying major new or possibly unexplored sources to those who already have some acquaintance with it. The series attempts to achieve evaluation through a careful selection of sources and through the comments provided on those sources.

Scholars throughout the world have come together again in a second book to share their most successful teaching practices and concerns in the areas of cross-cultural studies and international education. Many disciplines are represented and diverse subjects are discussed: science literacy and worldview perspective; second-language acquisition, student mobility, and international universities; teacher professional development and government programs for disadvantaged children; zoos, industrial paintings, and dress designs as cultural artifacts. Presentations on these topics are the result of papers given at the annual meeting of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture, founded 10 years ago in Rome, Italy. The organization regularly attracts some 100 scholars and practitioners in the fields of education, literacy, language learning, communication and (inter-)cultural studies from all five continents to its annual congress in Rome. These conferences, as well as this up-to-date compilation of multi-disciplinary academic papers, are meant to highlight the growing need for culturally sensitive education that draws on the strengths of both traditional teaching methods and technology-rich forms of instruction, as well as a host of national and international programs designed to empower teachers and students alike. Engaged educators, whose research and/or critical discourse in classrooms all over the world has given rise to the present volume, thus hope to share with a wider audience how they impart knowledge, foster skills, and nurture qualities in the next generation of global citizens that will enable them to negotiate their personal and professional lives in our modern world. Even though communities may no longer be characterized by physical distances as barriers to communicative interchanges, perceived and real rifts between different cultures are nevertheless coming alarmingly close to preventing meaningful communication from bringing about true understanding at the individual and societal levels. The ontogenesis of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture is seen here clearly in the perspectives and presentations of diverse academics who are dedicated to teaching and learning toward the greater goal, as Matthew Arnold said in Literature and Science, of “knowing ourselves and the world.”

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Mystique of Connoisseurship2. The Universality Principle3. The Night Side of Man4. Anonymity and Timelessness5. Power Plays6. Objets d'Art and Ethnographic Artifacts7. From Signature to Pedigree8. A Case in PointAfterwordNotesReferences CitedIllustration Credits Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.