ABSTRACT
The focus stays on art and anthropology, and no solution to the presumed universal/particular divide is proposed in relation to “contemporary art” and “anthropology,” other than to present and discuss the great range of variation found in the projects in this volume, and to decenter centrally held notions of the two fields. Philippe Descola has proposed a fourfold scheme of ontologies to understand human cultures, i.e., animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism. Indeed, the Western tradition saw that which cannot be translated as opaque residue of non-Western irrationality. In the present, and after moves towards a radicalized notion of difference, it is precisely in these radically different ontologies that alterity must be acknowledged. Global exchanges between different contemporary arts and anthropologies could also be thought of as a kind of gift exchange, of delayed returns within incomplete encounters, the gift here used as metaphor and conceptual tool to understand both artistic production and art/anthropology traffic, as proposed recently by Roger Sansi.
