What's in a Price

An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2390791
AutoresH Geismar (0000-0002-3320-593X, Department of Anthropology, University College London,, autor de correspondencia)
Año2001
Volumen6
Número1
Páginas25-47
Fecha de publicación2001-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/135918350100600102
OpenAlexW1971112073
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas42
Referencias citadas23

Typically, the auction house salesroom has been conceived of as an exemplary market: a place in which ultimate price is fixed by persons at a particular moment. This perspective relies on a static a-historical view of an isolated marketplace. This study views the auction sale of tribal art as one part of a wider economic set, within which objects and persons interact to momentarily assign price (or not). It thereby expands the common anthropological use of the notion of a 'tournament' of value (Appadurai, 1986). A brief background to the history of the auction and of the tribal art market precedes an examination of the auction as a 'distributed object' (Gell, 1998): a series of events from catalogue and viewing, to the performance of sale. Within each of these situations, price is shown to be fixed by ambiguous and malleable processes of valuation over space and time

Economics · Microeconomics · Object (grammar · Perspective (graphical · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Valuation (finance · Value (mathematics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Art History and Market Analysis · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science