Instructor: Z. Nauruzbayeva
Art has been understood and conceptualized in a variety of ways.In Western public culture, art has been commonly regarded in terms of autonomous creativity and individual genius. In former socialist countries, the state emphasized the social obligations of the artist to the collective good. Anthropologists challenged these understandings of art as an activity separate from the everyday life by providing accounts of contexts where creativity is intrinsically connected to ritual life, and artifacts are an expression of the connection to the land and ancestry. In light of trade, colonialism, and more recently, economic globalization, there has been a lot of traffic in people and commodities between these aesthetic and socioeconomic regimes-also the subject of prolific anthropological inquiry. This course offers an exploration of all these discussions, and support an understanding of art as embedded in its surrounding social context rather than existing as a universal self-standing category.
