Alfred Antony Francis Gell, (; June 12, 1945 – January 28, 1997) was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

, language, symbolism and

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized ...

. He was trained by

Edmund Leach Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropologi ...

(MPhil,

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III of England, Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world' ...

) and

Raymond Firth Sir Raymond William Firth (25 March 1901 – 22 February 2002) was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies (social organization) is separated from the idealized rules of behaviou ...

(PhD,

London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public university, public research university located in London, England and a constituent college of the federal University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidn ...

) and did his fieldwork in

Melanesia Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Va ...

and tribal

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. Gell taught at the London School of Economics, among other places. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy. He died of cancer in 1997, at the age of 51.

Thought

In his 1998 book ''Art and Agency'', Gell formulated an influential theory of art based on abductive reasoning. Gell argues that

in general (although his attention focuses on visual artifacts, like the prows of the boats of the Trobriand islands) acts on its users, i.e. achieves agency, through a sort of technical virtuosity. Art can enchant the viewer, who is always a blind viewer, because "the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology" (the title of a previous essay on aesthetics by Gell is ''The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology'', 1992). Gell closely follows different forms of effectiveness of 'technical virtuosity' of the artist. For him it comes to a stylistic virtuosity, able to get some sort of ''living presence response'', reacting to works of art as if they were living beings or even people acting (''agency''), entering into a personal relationship with them, triggering love, hate, desire or fear. In this way for Gell works of art, in all cultures, are able to create shared common sense, especially through reasoning with abduction, which already in Aristotle is a less strong inference than induction and deduction, more intuitive and concise. Gell takes it from the linguist

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...

as a case of synthetic inference, where you are in very strange circumstances, which could be explained by the supposition that it is a case obedient to some rule, and therefore we adopt such a supposition.Gell, 1998, 18 Artworks therefore mediate social agency by using the logical mechanism of abduction: those who observe the works of art do abductions about the intentions of those who produced them, or even just exposed them to public use. The logical mechanism of aesthetical abduction for Gell is a transcultural one. In his seminal works, "The Enchantment of Technology and the Technology of Enchantment" (1992), and ''Art and Agency'' (1998) he draws together the ways of acting in idolatry, fetishism, and witchcraft with contemporary Western art to illustrate the commonalities in how objects mediate and act on social relations.

Selected bibliography

*1975 ''Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda Society, Language and Ritual''. London: Athlone. *1980 The Gods at Play: Vertigo and Possession in Muria Religion，''Man, New Series'', Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 219–248. *1982 The Market Wheel: Symbolic Aspects of an Indian Tribal Market，''Man, New Series'', Vol. 17, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), pp. 470–491. *1992a Under the Sign of the Cassowary. In ''Shooting the Sun: Ritual and Meaning in the West Sepik''. B. Juillerat, ed. pp. 125–143. Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution Press. *1992b The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In ''Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics''. J. Coote and A. Shelton, eds. pp. 40–66. Oxford: Clarendon. *1992c ''The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images''. Oxford: Berg. *1993 ''Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia''. Oxford: Clarendon. *1995 On Coote's "Marvels of Everyday Vision". ''Social Analysis'', 38: 18-31. *1995 The Language of the Forest: Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda. In ''The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space''. E. Hirsch and M. O'Hanlon, eds. pp. 232–254. Oxford: Clarendon. *1996 Vogel's Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps. ''Journal of Material Culture'', 1:15-38. *1998 ''Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory''. Oxford: Clarendon. *1999 ''The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams''. E. Hirsch, ed. London: Athlone.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gell, Alfred British anthropologists Cultural anthropologists Alumni of the London School of Economics Academics of the London School of Economics Visual anthropologists Anthropologists of religion Anthropology writers 1945 births 1997 deaths Fellows of the British Academy 20th-century anthropologists

Thought

Selected bibliography

See also

References