Arts in the Margins of World Encounters (Curating and Interpreting Culture)

'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people-such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves-, a wide variety of art forms-like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theatre performances-, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. 

The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds.

'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.

Willemijn de Jong is a researcher and has taught anthropology as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. She has also taught at the Universities of Bern and Vienna. She was awarded grants by the Swiss National Science Foundation for national and international research projects she has headed. In recent years she has worked on textiles, art, fashion and globalization, and she was a guest curator at the Museum der Kulturen Basel. She has published widely in German, and her publications in English include "Rice Rituals, Kinship Identities and Ethnicity in Central Flores" in 'Food and Kinship in Southeast Asia' (2007), and "Red Threads in Flores" in 'The Common Thread: The Warp and Weft of Thinking' (2016). She recently co-edited the publication to the exhibition at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, both with the title 'Striking Patterns: Global Traces in Local Ikat Fashion' (2016), and 'Urban Dreams: Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso' (2018).

Eriko Aoki is Professor of Anthropology at Ryukoku University, Japan. She was granted a D.Phil. by the Australian National University in 1996. She has conducted anthropological research on poetic language, gift exchanges, and rituals in Central Flores, Indonesia, since 1979, and on children of ethnic minorities, coal-mining societies, Indonesian nursing labour immigrants, and art brut in Japan since the late 1990s. Her theoretical interests are semiotics, fetishism, modernity, and enchantment. Her publications include "'Center' and 'Periphery' in Oral Historiography of a Peripheral Area in Southeast Indonesia" in 'Globalization in Southeast Asia' (Berghahn Books 2003) and "Entangled Democracy, Decentralization and Lifeworld in Flores under Global Trends" in 'Foundations for Local Governance: Decentralization in Comparative Perspective' (Springer 2008). She also published a single-authored book in Japanese.

John Clammer is Professor of Sociology in the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at O.P. Jindal Global University (Delhi, India). He previously taught at Sophia University (Tokyo) for almost two decades, and prior to that at the National University of Singapore. Dr Clammer has been a visiting professor or fellow at universities around the world including the United Nations University, Kent, Oxford, Handong, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Murdoch, Pondicherry, and the Bauhaus Universität Weimar. He has also been a fellow of the Institutes of Advanced Studies at Warwick University and at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Professor Clammer's work has encompassed many fields including sociological and anthropological theory, the sociology of religion, solidarity economy, and the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia and Japan. His recent work has been on the sociology of art and the interface of culture and development, includes monographs like 'Culture, Development and Social Theory', 'Towards an Integrated Social Development, Art, Culture and International Development', 'Vision and Society: Towards a Sociology and Anthropology from Art', and the co-edited volume 'The Aesthetics of Development: Art, Culture and Social Transformation', as well as the forthcoming 'Cultural Rights and Justice: Sustainable Development, the Arts and the Body'.