What makes art valuable? Why in times of crisis do people buy contemporary art? This paper published in the Cardozo Law Review Vol 33 (6) discusses whether or not investment in art can ever be seen as rational, and explores how the contemporary art market is expanding to include not just works of art, but art as a form of cultural practice.
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Culture
Art, Culture and Fantasy
What’s in an event?
Thinking about art events allows us to pose old questions in new ways: “what does art do for us”; “what do we expect from art”; “what do we hope for when we go to an art event”?
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LSE Review of Books: The books that inspired Henrietta Moore
In this new post for the LSE Review of Books, Henrietta Moore discusses the books that inspired her and awoke her interest in anthropology. It all started with stories, in particular Greek and Roman myths: “important for the not-yet-anthropologist was the idealisation of kinship, the hopeless question of family inheritance, the ties of loyalty and their relation to fealty. Can you know your true self and how much of the answer to that question is about origins?
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Moore, Henrietta L. (2012) ‘Avatars and Robots: The Imaginary Present and the Socialities of the Inorganic’ Cambridge Anthropology, 30(1): 48-63.
In this paper I propose a new way of understanding how and why humans are social beings. Humans only become social within specific environments which always include non-human and in-human agents as well. I suggest that what marks human out is the virtual character of their selves and social relations. I end by discussing how robotics and virtual worlds both enhance and augment our exploration of specifically human forms of sociality.
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Thinking about politics and the internet: time to update our perspective
In this piece for openDemocracy.net Henrietta L. Moore and Sabine Selchow introduce their reconceptualisation of the Internet as a set of interactions in process, turning away from mainstream understandings of it as a ‘tool’ and / or ‘space’ that enables political action. This reconceptualisation means that questions about what is happening ‘on’ the Internet, and how the internet is used, by whom, and with what impact on the ‘actual’ world no longer have sufficient analytical purchase.
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Moore, Henrietta L. and Sabine Selchow (2012). ‘Global Civil Society and the Internet 2012: Time to Update Our Perspective’ in: Kaldor, Mary, Henrietta L. Moore and Sabine Selchow (eds). Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Crictial Reflection. Palgrave
This paper suggests an alternative understanding of the Internet and its role in contemporary politics. Rather than taking it as a tool or a space for politics, the paper concpetualises the Internet as a set of interactions in process that constitute the political, and indeed the social and the economic. As such it is not a tool or a space to enable life, but life itself.
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Kaldor, Mary, Henrietta L. Moore and Sabine Selchow (eds) (2012) Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection. Palgrave Macmillan
In this anniversary edition of ‘Global Civil Society’, activists and academics look back on ten years of ‘politics from below’, and ask whether it is merely the critical gaze upon the concept that has changed – or whether there is something genuinely new in kind about the way in which civil society is now operating.
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Moore, Henrietta L. (2011) ‘Intangibles: Culture, Heritage and Identity’ in: Anheier, Helmut and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds). Heritage, Memory & Identity. London: Sage.
A rapid perusal of the usual sources provides definitions of ‘intangible’ as ‘incapable of being perceived by the sense of touch’;'incorporeal or immaterial’;'vague, elusive, fleeting’; ‘not definite to the mind’. Perhaps more arresting is the idea that intangibility applies to assets in the good will of a business. Amusingly, if you search for the term ‘intangible’ on Dictionnary.com, it offers you the option to ‘see images of intangible’. A quick click on that link gives you images relating to intangible cultural heritage in Estonia, Fiji and Vietnam, among other places. A series of further clicks on randomly chosen images from among the same set inevitably results in the response ‘website could not be found’! The intangible appears and disappears, but what remains is a series of questions worth exploring about the links between intangibility, culture, and assets.
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Moore, H. L. (2011). Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ranging from African initiation rituals to Japanese anime, and from sex in virtual worlds to Schubert songs, Henrietta Moore focuses on how best we might approach the relationship between critical thought and politics, as well as the dynamics of intimacy and meaning in contemporary cultural and social life.
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Moore, Henrietta L. (2010). ‘It’s Not All Hardwired’ Prospect, 24 February, Issue 168.
We often imagine the brain as a sort of high-powered, superbly engineered evolutionary computer. But it is actually a wonderfully baroque structure, made up of incompletely integrated units. Read Henrietta L. Moore’s Prospect-article on neuroscience’s bold claims about human culture.
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Moore, H. L. (2007). The Subject of Anthropology: Gender, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
‘The Subject of Anthropology’ draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, Moore demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism.
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Moore, Henrietta L. and and M.A. Vaughan (1994) Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. New York: Heinemann.
Winner of the 1995 Herskovits Prize for the best book published on Africa, African Studies Association, USA
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