Stephen F. Eisenman

Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies

Abstract Race, long discounted in Andean ethnography as relatively unimportant, is a social fact of great salience in the Andes. This essay introduces the articles in the special issue on race in the Andes with an overview of the interrelated intellectual histories of racism in the Andes, Europe and North America, from colonial proto-racism, to the totalising theories of the 19th century, to the heterogeneous ‘neo-racism’ found in the Andes today, in which both these earlier ideas and contemporary cultural racisms are at home. It concludes with a discussion of an oppositional ideology found in some indigenous communities, in which race is somatic but not biological in origin.

Aesthetics, Ethnicity, and the History of Art

Part of a symposium providing a range of critical perspectives on aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art. The writer examines how two etchings of the Regensburg synagogue by Albrecht Altdorfer both encode a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict and foreclose on it through the image of “disappearing” Jews. She contends that the etchings can be read as formative and constitutive of the new “science” in early modern European ethnography that grounded itself on the ontological absence of Jews. She concludes that a critique of this ethnography makes it possible to rethink Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict as a genealogy of the power of the “rational” and the “technical” rather than as something incomprehensible, instinctive, and ahistorical.

The Real “Swinish Multitude”

1. Preface Humans today live as if they, alone among species, are entitled to life, liberty, and happiness. By killing, consuming, and in many other ways exploiting animals, they implicitly deny these creatures are like themselves: sentient, emotional, and empathetic beings who have close family ties, possess culture, use tools, and communicate with each other. In fact, as generations of researchers dating back to Charles Darwin have demonstrated, many nonhuman animals, including nearly all those we eat, wear, ride, experiment upon, or keep as pets, have these capacities to a greater or lesser degree.2 Surveys suggest that most people in the US readily accept these findings.3 Animals therefore should enjoy many of the same basic rights as humans.4 If they don’t—and if the degree of animal exploitation and killing

In Search of the Primitive: Gauguin, Morris and Imperialist Culture

The article highlights the common structural logic that underlies the art and thoughts of Paul Gaugin a French artist and William Morris, an English poet and artist. Both rejected the classical tradition and sought inspiration from alternative traditions far removed from the classical past.

Criticizing animal experimentation, at my peril

Initiatives leading to even modest reduction in animal use at major U.S. universities are likely to continue to face strong opposition. At least, thats the conclusion the author draws from his efforts at Northwestern University. In fact, despite a growing body of evidence that animal-based research is flawed at best and misleading or un-scientific at worst its use is growing at Northwestern and elsewhere. Moreover, recent discoveries concerning animal consciousness and emotion have not led to notable improvements in the conditions in which AWA protected animals live at the Chicago vivarium. There, animals languish in featureless rooms or sterile cages without access to daylight and with little opportunity to express their natural behaviors and aptitudes. The writers public exposure of these conditions led to a fierce backlash. Unless there is a significant change in laboratory and university culture, change will only come when the marketplace and funding agencies demand better and more reliable, non-animal models for the testing of drug toxicity and effectiveness.

Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion from a World History of Art

Abstract The creation of a World History of Art has to this point been handicapped by dependence upon a model of cultural relativism derived from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Only by establishing clear criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of objects from a WHA can the field establish a sound basis for further expansion.

Review of The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Mondernism by Briony Fer

Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of Line Klaus Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeil in Italien Melissa Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics; Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury, eds., Rethinking Boucher John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism