Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies

This edited volume de-familiarizes European conceptions of artistry and thinks its history anew. It represents a rethinking on a global stage of some of the most fundamental assumptions in what were once arguably helpful methodological tools in art history. As chapters in this book demonstrate, the category of artisanal knowledge opens up the history of culture, allowing discourse to be freed from a narrative of cultural development without excluding Art with a capital A from consideration. Our shared inquiry, approached through many different case studies involving many kinds of data and contexts, focuses attention on methodological aspects. Each chapter provides a sustained meditation on artisanal knowledge that includes intellectual, social, economic, and political factors without relying on universals, monolithic categories, hierarchies of genre and medium, or the use of binaries, least of all the global/local binary. As different as they are from one another, all the chapters in this book ask about various connectivities among peoples, ideas, things. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, cultural studies, colonial studies, religious studies, and anthropology.