Articles with the keyword art
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Complementarity between Art and Anthropology: Experiences among kolam makers in South India
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(2) 2009: 58-69
Abstract
As their first daily task, women in South India draw geometrical images, kolams,
in front of their homes to greet the deities. These images engender and reinforce
moods in the community, they construct feminine gender and they define the
landscape as social. The paper describes how the employment of an artistic
practice—photography—can affect the understanding of the kolam, an artistic
practice in itself. Photography has a key role in that it has been used as a tool
during field work, as well as in the presentation of research in the form of
photographic essays. The expressive aspects in particular of this media are
considered as means to address visual and sensory experience and as
complementary to analytical texts. It is suggested that the use of artistic practice,
in dialogue with texts, productively engages the tension between the sensory and
the discursive, between intimacy and distance. The aim is to contribute to
anthropological understandings of, and approaches to, images, aesthetics and
artistic practice. The aesthetic aspect of the kolam is presented as local social
aesthetics; an appreciation founded in local morality, and continuously reproduced
as well as contested in a social environment.Keywords aesthetics, art, gender, kolam, photography, South India, visual anthropology