Whitney Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 3622798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Whitney Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Whitney |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University Illinois |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-3298-8973 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 498 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Translating community voices to build meaningful engagement
Background: Understanding community perspectives on barriers and facilitators of meaningful engagement, equitable decision making, and sustainable community improvement is critical for advancing health equity. Community Health Workers can make significant contributions to research teams, as they are bridges into communities and bring unique perspectives. This study describes community voices on barriers to authentic engagement and insights on str…
The Acheulean hand-axe
Looking for Nothing
The essay examines "evenly suspended attention" as a complement to-even an alternative for-the "close looking" often advocated as the ideal of art-historical attentiveness, as recommended by many art historians to their students and to the public. After considering the introspective psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and natural and social histories of "selective attention," it contrasts the psychoanalytic recommendation actively to suspend it. …
The Earliest Dated Pictures in the Dispersal of Psychologically Modern Humans
The paper reports the discovery in 2018 of a Middle Paleolithic painted rock shelter (dubbed “The Hunter’s Shelter”) in the remote upper reaches of the Wadi Defeit in far southeastern Egypt (just north of the climatologically significant latitude 22° N) by a team from the University of California at Berkeley. The paintings depict two elephants being attacked by encircling human beings wielding spears, in dangerous procedures documented by ethnohi…
Mobility
Mobility is one of Leo Bersani's hardest-working terms, ubiquitous in his many studies of sexuality, art, and culture. This essay examines the valences of the term with specific reference to Bersani's application of it in visual analyses, notably in his 1985 book on ancient Assyrian narrative sculptures, The Forms of Violence (with photographs by Ulysse Dutoit
Visuality and Virtuality
General Theory of Visual Culture
Centering trauma‐informed approaches in schools within a social justice framework
Growing evidence establishing the prevalence and educational consequences of childhood trauma has led to a national focus on equipping schools to support the specific needs of students who have experienced trauma. Despite clear evidence of disproportionate trauma exposure among students of color, most models of trauma‐informed schools do not explicitly address the intersection of race and trauma within their system‐level efforts to help staff rea…
Whitney Davis and Justin Underhill. Review of "Scale and the Incas" by Andrew James Hamilton
Triple Cross
Review Article| February 01 2020 Triple Cross: Binarisms and Binds in Epistemology of the Closet Whitney Davis Whitney Davis Whitney Davis is Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art and Chair of the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective (Princeton, 2017). Search for other works by this aut…
Jackson Pollock's Mural in the light of photography
A General Theory of Visual Culture
What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis c…
Neuro, Neuro on the Wall
Binding and Unbinding the Mondrian Stimulus
This paper considers the use of the ‘Mondrian Stimulus’, invented by Edwin H. Land of the Polaroid Corporation, in various investigations in the visual neuropsychology, the neuroaesthetics, and the social psychology of aesthetic response to works of visual art (notably, investigations by Semir Zeki and A. Michael Noll). What difference does it make—in the set-up of these investigations and in our interpretation of their putative results—that the …
Reading-In
The German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) was one of the most protean and influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. In part based on his book Primitive Art (1927), this essay considers his theory of the beholder's share in constructing the significance of visual form and in interpreting its meaning. Boas's analysis of what he called "contradictions" between his indigenous informants' exegeses of form lay at the heart o…
A Thin Red Line. Die Präsenz prähistorischer Bildlichkeit
Einwegbilder
Bildkritik befasst sich üblicherweise mit Bildern, die aufbewahrt und gehütet, archiviert und dokumentiert werden. Was aber ist mit Bildern, denen kein dauerhafter Wert zugebilligt wird? Einwegbilder generieren ihren Wert in der kurzen Dauer, in der sie ihre Funktion erfüllen. Ihnen scheinen eindeutige und ausschließliche Rezeptions- und Gebrauchsweisen eingeschrieben zu sein. Eintrittskarten werden entwertet, Briefmarken abgestempelt, Plakate üb…
Scale and Pictoriality in Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture
Sculpture and Ideas
Climatic variability and pictorial oscillation
World Series
Many practitioners of ‘world art studies’ are sceptical of systematic global models of world art history and of material and visual culture developed by such recent writers as John Onians and David Summers, though such models were common in art history in the past. The article distinguishes two theories of history in ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ world art history respectively, identified with the historiography of George Kubler and Michel Foucault res…
Queer Family Romance in Collecting Visual Culture
The essay presents a model of "queer family romance" (adapted from Freud's concept of family romance) in historical practices of collecting visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though queer collections of visual culture and queer family romance are independent variables, the essay addresses their intersection. The first part briefly outlines how queer collections, regardless of the stylistic and iconographic affiliations of …
Queer Beauty
The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, se…
Subjectivity and Objectivity in High and Historical Formalism
High formalism (often identified with the criticism of modern arts) can be defined by the reification of pure formality, the promotion of close looking, and the decontextualization of "the object," its disaggregation from the archaeological and architectural assemblages in which all artifacts are usually found. It is avowedly subjective. By contrast, historical formalism (often identified with the archaeology of art in premodern and non-Western t…
How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age
July 01 2006 How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age Whitney Davis Whitney Davis Whitney Davis is Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Whitney Davis Whitney Davis is Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author o…
The Signs of All Times
The Archaeology of Perception
The Economic and Social Context of Southern San Rock Art [and Comments and Reply]
This paper suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding southern San rock art. The traditional explanations have been either innatist or functionalist. To escape the tautology of the former and the restrictions of the latter it is suggested that the articulation between the art and the social relations of production be sought. This articulation was expressed in the activities of medicine men, whose symbolic work acted upon the reproduct…
Women's Work
Art for Art's Sake in the Paleolithic [and Comments and Reply]
The Origins of Image Making
Although often mythologized as sudden, primal, and spontaneous, image making is a predictable adaptation which should be coherently situated in the overall trajectory of hominid evolution. It was a distinctive and specific cultural achievement but one that can be derived logically from simple and archaic perceptual and cognitive processes. In the view presented here, image making originated in the discovery of the representational capacity of lin…
Social Norms, the Self, and Sociobiology
A. I. Hallowell tried to turn anthropology towards a sociobiology while the former field was still strongly opposed to any consideration of the evolution of human behavior. His work is of more than historical interest, however, because he stressed the evolution of the human ability to internalize social norms and evaluate self and others in terms of them. This ability is the basis of our species's trait of cultural rather than biological adaptati…
The deconstruction of intentionality in archaeology
All (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the things that were by the evidence of the things that are, as battered and fragmented by centuries of collapse, decay, wear and breaking. And from the things that were, all (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the people who were, to grasp the human meanings that were held in those things. The unthinking assumptions, common to old and new programmes for good archaeology, that go with this commo…
Winckelmann Divided
The discipline of art history is often said to have been invented in the writing of J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768). In his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1754) and History of Ancient Art (1764), Winckelmann dealt with the homoerotic meanings of Greco-Roman arts in complex ways. To do so, he imagined a split between his subjective position as an observer with specific erotic and political interests and his obj…
The Ancient Art of Northern Asia
World Series
Many practitioners of ‘world art studies’ are sceptical of systematic global models of world art history and of material and visual culture developed by such recent writers as John Onians and David Summers, though such models were common in art history in the past. The article distinguishes two theories of history in ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ world art history respectively, identified with the historiography of George Kubler and Michel Foucault res…
Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920
This paper considers the general structural logic of homoerotic art collections from the later eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, focusing on their collation of contemporary with non‐modern (usually classical Greek and Roman or Italian Renaissance) arts. The mere appreciation of a homoerotically attractive work of art, such as a sculptural depiction of a beautiful and desirable male body, whether contemporary or not, did not necessarily…
Representation and knowledge in the prehistoric rock art of Africa
Reading-In
The German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) was one of the most protean and influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. In part based on his book Primitive Art (1927), this essay considers his theory of the beholder's share in constructing the significance of visual form and in interpreting its meaning. Boas's analysis of what he called "contradictions" between his indigenous informants' exegeses of form lay at the heart o…
Subjectivity and Objectivity in High and Historical Formalism
High formalism (often identified with the criticism of modern arts) can be defined by the reification of pure formality, the promotion of close looking, and the decontextualization of "the object," its disaggregation from the archaeological and architectural assemblages in which all artifacts are usually found. It is avowedly subjective. By contrast, historical formalism (often identified with the archaeology of art in premodern and non-Western t…
How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age
July 01 2006 How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age Whitney Davis Whitney Davis Whitney Davis is Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Whitney Davis Whitney Davis is Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author o…
Decadence and the Organic Metaphor
While Charles Darwin's evolutionary account of organic decay, decline, and extinction provided a model for accounts of supposedly similar processes in the domain of human culture and society, Darwin's own theory of natural selection depended on models of cultural and social transformation, degeneration, and destruction. In the full circuit of the organic metaphor of decadence, then, a theory of culture was applied to nature and then re-applied to…
Visuality and Pictoriality
What Is Art For
Object and Intellect Interpretations of Meaning in African Art
Pleasure and Its Contents
The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit , New York: Schocken Books, 1986, 136 pp., 5 b. and w. ills., £17.95
The Forms of Violence
Replication and Depiction in Paleolithic Art
Research Article| July 01 1987 Replication and Depiction in Paleolithic Art Whitney Davis Whitney Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1987) 19: 111–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928533 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Whitney…
More on the Origins and Originality of Image Making
Present and Future Directions in the Study of Rock Art
Social Norms, the Self, and Sociobiology
A. I. Hallowell tried to turn anthropology towards a sociobiology while the former field was still strongly opposed to any consideration of the evolution of human behavior. His work is of more than historical interest, however, because he stressed the evolution of the human ability to internalize social norms and evaluate self and others in terms of them. This ability is the basis of our species's trait of cultural rather than biological adaptati…
Two Compositional Tendencies in Amarna Relief
So-Called Jaguar-Human Copulation Scenes in Olmec Art
Three Olmec sculptures are frequently thought to represent copulation between human beings and jaguars, an important element in what we are able to reconstruct of Olmec belief, but evidence and parallels discussed here suggest that this interpretation of the sculptures is incorrect. Alternate explanations which are consistent with a new view would assign an aggressive, ritual, or allegorical meaning to these sculptures and to certain other relate…
The Economic and Social Context of Southern San Rock Art [and Comments and Reply]
This paper suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding southern San rock art. The traditional explanations have been either innatist or functionalist. To escape the tautology of the former and the restrictions of the latter it is suggested that the articulation between the art and the social relations of production be sought. This articulation was expressed in the activities of medicine men, whose symbolic work acted upon the reproduct…
Canonical Representation in Egyptian Art
Reliefs des Alten Reiches und Verwandte Denkmäler
Studien zur Altägyptischen Keramik
Ancient Hierakonpolis
Representation and knowledge in the prehistoric rock art of Africa
Present and Future Directions in the Study of Rock Art
More on the Origins and Originality of Image Making
The Origins of Image Making
Although often mythologized as sudden, primal, and spontaneous, image making is a predictable adaptation which should be coherently situated in the overall trajectory of hominid evolution. It was a distinctive and specific cultural achievement but one that can be derived logically from simple and archaic perceptual and cognitive processes. In the view presented here, image making originated in the discovery of the representational capacity of lin…
Art for Art's Sake in the Paleolithic [and Comments and Reply]
Replication and Depiction in Paleolithic Art
Research Article| July 01 1987 Replication and Depiction in Paleolithic Art Whitney Davis Whitney Davis Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1987) 19: 111–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928533 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Whitney…
Pleasure and Its Contents
The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit , New York: Schocken Books, 1986, 136 pp., 5 b. and w. ills., £17.95
The Forms of Violence
The Signs of All Times
Rock Art and Archaeopsychology
Object and Intellect Interpretations of Meaning in African Art
The Archaeology of Perception
Ancient Egypt
Through Ancient Eyes
Nefertiti and Cleopatra
What Is Art For
The Ancient Art of Northern Asia
Art (40 works) · History (36 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Art history (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Archaeology (18 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Visual arts (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · History (14 works)