Beschreibung
This book is about the yearning for authenticity via art and exoticism.
Exoticism related to art cannot be reduced to primitivism alone and also
encompasses a search in one’s own unconsciousness among other things. The
yearning for authenticity through exoticism is explored in a cultural
anthropological perspective in the realms of Western philosophy ( capita
selecta) and colonial literature, currents of art, and in the appreciation
of Western art conceptions in non-Western societies. An array of firsthand
ethnographic illustrations of art production in Asian and Pacific
societies demonstrates complementary processes in the non-Western world. A
major hypothesis is that exoticism is closely related to, and often
motivated by eroticism, a reason why exoticism should be considered as
gendered. Case studies of the falsification of authentic art, the
de-sacralization of sacred objects, and of the use of natural materials
deriving from endangered species complete the analysis.
Paul van der Grijp is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lyon
( ‘Université Lumière’), France, and a member of both the Anthropological
Research and Study Centre (CREA) in Lyon and the Research and
Documentation Center on Oceania (CREDO) at the Maison Asie-Pacifique in
Marseilles. His previous books include Islanders of the South: Production,
Kinship and Ideology in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga (Leiden: KITLV
Press, 1993), Identity and Development: Tongan Culture, Agriculture and
the Perenniality of the Gift (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), and Passion and
Profit: Towards an Anthropology of Collecting (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006).
