ABSTRACT
Alfred Gell’s enduring interest in art as a meaningful yet elusive human activity is well known to all who knew him. In his latest work, and sadly the swansong of his ‘oeuvre’, he has constructed a significant treatise on art, or as he more boldly declares, on the ‘anthropology of art’. Artistic production occurs within a social group, following specific patterns of form and style, encoding intelligible meanings, and judged to be doing so by a rehearsed group of consumers. In Art and Agency Alfred unveils his most cherished of principles, that anthropology is fundamentally about social relationships, resolutely planting the British flag, boldly emblazoned with ‘social anthropology’ upon the contested ground of what would constitute an ‘anthropology of art’. Anthropology is arguably the most eclectic of the social sciences, taking up the insights offered by other disciplines and shaping them to better enable us to address the questions posed by the complexities found in human societies.
