The smugness of privilege
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2261696 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Kulick (0000-0001-9101-5539, School of English Hong Kong University Hong Kong, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 90-95 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/amet.13234 |
| OpenAlex | W4390343213 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
This essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as "ugly," is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological project and a representational practice. Like Arbus's photographs, anthropology is good for subverting the privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who are prepared to contemplate "ugly" people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Ethnography · Exhibition · Indignation · Literature · Pity · Politics · Privilege (computing · Sociology · Visual anthropology · Wickedness · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Highly cited | No |
|---|