Review of African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work edited by Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee, 2013 (original) (raw)
Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work, is a highly reflective collection of essays about the work of constructing art history out of interviews. Designed to unsettle and open up the relationship between interviews and scholarship it speaks to the work of anthropology by aiming to better understand the nature of the interview process itself, how we produce and convey meanings from interviews and related documents. While it will be of particular interest to anthropologists working as museum curators it will be equally useful to any professional whose craft largely depends upon interviews. Each of the contributors considers the importance of being self-reflective about the nature of the interview process and how narratives about art and artists are strategically used not only by those who write about African art but by the artists themselves. Patrick McNaughton, a senior Africanist scholar, sets the tone by revisiting his work with Mande blacksmiths and a hunter's bard. He considers how one's agenda informs how we identify and collaborate with certain individuals rather than others and how and why one pursues certain issues and not others. Paradigmatic of the book's purpose as a whole, McNaughton emphasizes how these issues have significant implications for a reflective evaluation of anthropology as work in terms of how our intellectual livelihoods are constructed through the narratives we weave, or for that
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