Social Science Research Council

Kim Babon, University of Chicago, Sociology

"But Will it Play in Peoria?: Contextualizing Art Controversy"

Why and how does art become controversial? The easy answer is that it offends. But does that adequately explain the range of responses to controversial art? Can we explain controversial responses to abstract art in the same way as representational art? This project seeks to examine more precisely how individuals legitimate and express negative opinions about art and how these responses might be related to different artistic genres. Through comparative analysis of four established artists (Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, and Richard Serra) whose works range from Monumentalism, Pop Art, Pop Humanism, and Minimalism, I intend to compare reception of these different artists in order to better understand the social action of controversy. Initial research I have conducted suggests that ways in which individuals perceive the context (the physical location) of art is an important contributing element to controversy. As a result, the research design does not only compare artists to one another but reception between different physical locations of art in order to better understand how context may inform controversy. Not only may we gain insight into the social action of controversy itself, but we can gain access to processes of meaning-making and even perceptions of the artistic contexts themselves.

Daniel Fisher, New York University, Anthropology

"Art, Media, Industry: Aboriginal Expressive Practice and the Multicultural State"

The past two decades have seen the efflorescence of Australian Indigenous arts and media as important sites for the representation and revaluation of Indigenous heritage and belonging. Rather than the intrusion of modern institutions on a primordial and unmediated Aboriginality, however, these developments mark a new phase in a longer history of Indigenous engagements with hybrid institutions of Aboriginal governance. In the midst of both official endeavors towards 'reconciliation' with Indigenous Australian communities, as well as contentious struggles to define the meaning of land rights legislation, Aboriginal activists, anthropologists, and state agencies have drawn on categories of artistic and aesthetic value to revalue Aboriginal cultural practices. In this context, Aboriginal media organizations have been framed and funded as arts organizations, and increasingly function as institutional centers of Australian Indigenous "creative industries." This research ethnographically centers Aboriginal radio, music, and speech to address three related issues these emergent creative industries raise. First, and most broadly, why have Indigenous art, music, and media achieved such critical success while other sorts of state-supported social endeavors are broadly assessed as failures? Second, what is the significance for categories of both artistic value and 'Aboriginality' as Indigenous cultural producers and media organizations become assessed and funded as 'artists' and 'art organizations'? And, third, how are the emergent expressive forms and practices such cultural producers develop and transform related to the political economic contour of art and cultural policy, to a more general Australian multicultural politics, and to global changes in the value of Indigeneity for different 'first-world' populations?

Aaron Glass, New York University, Anthropology

"Conspicuous Consumption: A Cultural History of the Kwakwaka'wakw Hamat'sa Dance"

This archival and field-based research investigates the representational histories and contemporary understandings of the masked Hamat'sa (the famed "cannibal" dance). It asks how Kwakwaka'wakw (indigenous "Kwakiutl" of British Columbia) negotiate the legacy of anthropological depiction in the context of colonial history and current claims for self-determination. The Hamat'sa was widely depicted from 1850-2000 through written ethnography, film and photography, museum and art gallery display, and touristic or non-ceremonial performance. I will examine the process whereby such ethnographic representations circulate globally (becoming the primary means of educating international audiences on Kwakwaka'wakw culture) and return to indigenous communities, where they are used as historical resources available for Native self-fashioning.

The larger project addresses modes of cultural production for both anthropology and indigenous people, the politics of expressive culture and efforts to control the global circulation of art and ethnographic displays, and the dynamics of social memory in which Native people re-appropriate academic and popular representations in their ongoing re-evaluation of tradition. This entails an expansion of the term "expressive culture" to suggest a broader mode of cultural practice which links art, entertainment, commerce, education, politics, and ritual, and which demands a multidisciplinary approach.

Karene Grad, Yale University, American Studies

"When High Culture Was Popular Culture: Culture and Society in Postwar America, 1945-1965"

Recent studies of postwar American culture have focused on either "popular" culture (television, movies, and rock and roll) or "high" culture (abstract expressionism, the avant garde, and the performing arts). Implicit in these studies is a cultural divide, a strident separation of "high" culture from "low." This dissertation challenges that assumption. I argue, instead, that the distinctions between "high" and "low" were not at all clear, that postwar American culture was not as stratified as the historiography suggests. As evidence, I point to the production and reproduction of high culture on TV; the success of a (high) culture industry; the creation of a vast constituency of culture consumers; the tremendous popularity enjoyed by artists like Leonard Bernstein; the very public discourse on the state of American culture; the unprecedented interventions of the U.S. government in the arts; and the construction of cultural centers, like New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, as public monuments to culture. In postwar, cold war America, high culture was popular culture.

It was also newly legitimized. With the end of World War II, the U.S. became the vanguard of western culture, the center of classical music, opera, ballet, modern dance, and modern art. The rise to power of the arts in America, and of American artists in the world, is central to this study. So, too, is the role of high culture in the shaping of postwar national identity. But it is, after all, the experience of culture in all of its complexity - and the dialectic between culture and society - that this dissertation seeks to recover.

Helen Lennon, Yale University, Comparative Literature

"Creating A Witness: Non-Fiction Film as Evidence in International War Crimes Tribunals"

This dissertation analyzes the use of documentary film as legally-binding evidence in the prosecution of crimes against humanity. In every single one of the four international war crimes tribunals - the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-1949), the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-1948), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (established in 1993), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (established in 1994) - non-fiction film has been utilized as verifiable proof of atrocities committed by the state against civilians. Despite the fifty years between the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and the enormous advances in international humanitarian law and documentary film techniques throughout that time, neither legal rules nor relevant scholarship exists recognizing the unique probative value of film in adversarial proceedings.

Creating A Witness will examine the cases administered by each of the four tribunals in which film (and in current proceedings, video) has been introduced to prove genocide and crimes against humanity. Employing in-depth comparative case studies, Creating A Witness identifies and evaluates the social, cultural, political, and legal conditions effecting the perceived reliability of non-fiction film as historical record, forensic method, aesthetic construct, and as an accurate, verifiable representation of the real.

The dissertation's essential claims are these: Non-fiction film representations of human rights violations create access to powerful moments of witnessing. These images are a form of testimony that must be explicitly identified by the legal proceedings that utilize them to function in the process of proof in international criminal trials. I contend that this is paramount to maintain the legal legitimacy and ethical authority of non-fiction film footage of egregious crimes that are habitually denied by the governments that perpetrate them.

The dissertation will articulate justifications for, and objections to, the admission of film and video evidence at the contemporary adjudications of mass atrocity in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. As tribunals to deliberate systematic exterminations are underway for Sierra Leone and East Timor, and soon, the International Criminal Court, Creating A Witness will anticipate the convergence of artistic and legal concerns in these potential proceedings as well.

Cristin McVey, University of California, San Diego, Sociology

"Picturing San Diego: Race, Class, and Community Politics in African American Photography"

Using examples of black studio portraiture in San Diego from the turn of the century to the present, I explore photography as a site for the articulation of 'private' black identities and 'public' personae that challenge and subvert racial stereotypes. I argue that the camera offered black San Diegans a visually sophisticated tool for constructing images of individualism and freedom consistent with the morals, values, and desires of an emancipated black citizenry. Far from being objective markers of social reality, these visual narratives of self-fashioning embody paradoxical assumptions about truth and representation embedded in struggles over the creation of private and public selves. Am I who I appear to be? Or does my appearance hide who I really am? Each chapter of the dissertation situates the photograph collections within a 'frame' of visuality that sees photography as a signifying practice located within specific social and cultural settings and situated within larger political and national debates on civil rights, racial stratification, and artistic agendas. Previous scholarly attention to the relationship between race and photography has focused primarily on the oppressive and dominating character of the 'colonial' camera, which sought to collect, classify, and capture 'native' persons and sensibilities as part of the colonizing process. My dissertation on photographic works produced and consumed by African Americans, inspired by the role of the imagination and processes of idealization, recognizes the vitality of artistic forms and visual representation in the struggle for racial and social equality. The efficiency of the camera to remake, retouch, and reinterpret the notion of race as a signifying practice and a site for projection, idealization, and imagination, rather than a fixed social category, is the triumph of the medium of photography.

Amanda Minks, Columbia University, Music

"Expressive Practices and Identity Formation Among Miskitu Children"

My project is based on the premise that participation in aesthetically structured activities - what I call "expressive practices" - mediates the ongoing construction of social identity and difference. Expressive practices are shaped by broad historical, sociocultural, and economic structures, yet they also contribute to the reproduction and transformation of those structures at the local level. These processes, though widespread, are foregrounded in the activities of children in a multilingual, culturally diverse environment. One such environment is Corn Island (pop. 7,000), located sixty miles off the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Dominated by English-speaking Creoles since the mid-19th century, Corn Island is now home to at least 2.500 Miskitu Afro-Indians, among other recent migrants, who are part of a larger process of social, economic, and demographic change in the region. Miskitu children on Corn Island are exposed to an array of languages and expressive styles that aesthetically shape musical, verbal, and kinetic modalities of communication. Through their participation in expressive practices, they negotiate fluid boundaries of social "belonging" in terms of gendered, generational, ethnic, religious, and regional identities. I propose to conduct an ethnography of children's expressive interaction across a range of social contexts in order to answer the following question: What are the repertoires of Miskitu children's expressive practices on Corn Island, and how are they used to affiliate and differentiate across a range of contexts, thus mediating the ongoing construction of social identity and difference? This research will contribute to general understandings of aesthetic socialization, multilayered identity formation, and children's informal learning processes.

David Novak, Columbia University, Music

"The Global Circuits of Experimental Music Scenes"

How do we expand our notions of politics, place, and expressive culture when we travel with a recording in its transnational distribution? As contemporary global distribution networks further separate sounds from their spatial and historical sources, popular music circulations increasingly reflect the imagination of place, criteria of performative "liveness,² and practices of reception in collecting and exchanging recordings. This dissertation traces the US-Japan circulation of experimental music as within the larger frameworks of popular music industries, revealing the multiple layers of intercultural communication and miscommunication that develop flexible histories of translocal music scenes. It is concerned with the ways in which esoteric musical subcultures lucidly articulate the critical concerns surrounding globalization, as underground margins in different sites attempt to both partake in and evade pervasive contexts of nationalisms, marketplaces, essentialist cultural identities and social histories of locality. In the shifting circuits of experimental music that connect Japan with the US, discourses of genre in "independent," "underground," "outsider," and "avant-garde" scenes intersect with broader global cosmopolitan practices of subcultural naming and scene identity, the document-keeping network of record collecting, the spread of independent media, and new technologies for creating and exchanging musical objects.

Catherine Ragland, CUNY Graduate Center, Ethnomusicology

"Ne aqui alla (Neither Here Nor There): Mapping Musica Nortena as a Border-Crossing Soundtrack for the Mexican Diaspora"

The mass migration of Mexicans into the U.S. over the past 40 years has resulted in the formation of a complex Mexican diaspora. My dissertation and research proposal will explore how the Mexican migrant community has reconstituted itself in multiple sites, and in particular, the dynamic role that music, in this case musica nortena has played in this process. Some important studies have explored Mexican migration as living life in a transnational space, but none have considered this concept in relation to the parallel development of this distinct popular music genre.

Musica nortena (translated, "music of the north") has also traveled along those same migrant routes and has survived as a veritable "soundtrack" of the circulatory, back and forth migratory experiences of the Mexican laborer community. This dissertation will constitute the first indepth, scholarly study of musica nortena and will explore the historical, political, economic, and transnational existence of modern musica nortena hat has allowed it to become the music and expressive voice of the migrating Mexican worker. The research and documentation of a Mexican popular music phenomenon that is expressly tied to globalization, migration, displacement, and economic necessity, speaks to a plethora of multidisciplinary issues in the field of social science research. The growth and expansion of the Mexican diaspora population in the U.S., predominantly driven by marginalized laborers from depressed rural Mexico, has significantly affected and shaped American popular culture in the 20th Century. There is no doubt that this community will continue to have an even larger impact on the cultural and social landscape of this country in the new millennium.

I will trace the music's evolution and popularity from its early roots as "border music," alongside, and as part of, the development of musica tejana (also Tex-Mex or Tejano), a genre that has enjoyed the majority of academic consideration by scholars of border music and culture. I am interested in musica nortena's exclusive association with the Mexican national who travels to the U.S. for work, and then returns to other regions in Mexico where it has recently established itself as music of the Mexican working-class, a definition that includes a history of travel to the U.S. This research will touch on sociological, historical, technological, and economic issues in the arts and how they are tied to the individual creation and experience of music and expressive culture.

Kathryn Ramey, Temple University, Anthropology

"Is the Film Avant-Garde, Avante-Garde? A Study of Institutions and Expertise among Alternative Media Practitioners"

Avant-garde cinema is both historically and currently the production of films by predominantly Western European and North American filmmakers made with the intention of critiquing, subverting and providing an alternative to dominant media production. In the past thirty years there has been a proliferation of academic texts on the history and theory of the film avant-garde, how it functions as resistive cultural production, and how its practitioners participate in socially critical discourses around gender, identity, censorship and representation. However there has been no text, anthropological or otherwise, that considers a systematic study of avant-garde film as a field of social production. In the United States avant-garde film functions as an elite cultural practice that has both sought legitimacy and recognition through institutionalization in the curatorial practices of museums and the educational programs of universities and resisted commodification within dominant media production/consumption circuits. It is marginalized economically through limited funding, distribution and screening venues and politically through state sponsored censorship but has been accused of perpetuating its own marginalization by creating films that mainstream viewers cannot engage with. Through historical and current ethnographic research this dissertation will investigate how the film avant-garde maintains aesthetic, economic, social and political outsider status (critical to being avant-garde) while simultaneously pursuing aesthetic standards, re-organization of the field, and legitimation by larger cultural institutions (museums, universities) and the state (funding). It is my hypothesis that the film avant-garde is able to remain avant-garde in part because it is economically unviable but also because of the ongoing circulation of avant-garde films and filmmakers across state and national borders. In screenings, journals, and communications situated outside the context of the museum or university and below the radar of the state, audience/participants provide affirmation of each others' avant-garde status and allow space for work that is censored or otherwise unacceptable in the home environment of its creator.

Yasmin Ramirez, CUNY Graduate Center, Art History

"Nuyorican Vanguards, Political Action, Poetic Visions: A History of Puerto Rican Artists in New York, 1964 to 1984"

This dissertation is a twenty-year overview of the social activism, institution building, and artistic practices carried out by Puerto Rican artists living in New York (hereinafter designated as "Nuyoricans"). The study begins in 1964 with Mayor Robert F. Wagner's implementation of social welfare programs related to The Civil Rights Act and ends in 1984 with the curtailment of public funding for arts and education under Mayor Edward I. Koch. A primary aim of this dissertation is to analyze the dynamics of Nuyorican arts activism during a momentous era in New York City's history, one that was marked by sustained collective organizing among artists from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds to create an "alternative" art world where a plurality of disciplines and social agendas unsupported by mainstream institutions could be pursued. The following questions will guide my research: what groups, movements and organizations did Nuyorican artists join and/or form? How did race, class, and gender affect the abilities of Nuyoricans to form coalitions among themselves and with artists of different ethnic backgrounds? What possibilities and limitations did engagement in the visual arts founded on a nationalist/ethnic-specific platform pose for Nuyoricans during the 1960s and 1970s? How did recognition of the hybrid and transnational construction of Nuyorican identity, as well as the growing need to accede to a multicultural/global paradigm in the arts, shift the rules of engagement for Nuyorican artists in the 1980s?

Sigmund Rivkin-Fish, Princeton University, Sociology

"Putting Value on the Arts: Community Cultural Planning in the U.S."

Over the last two decades, community cultural planning has become a central means for local communities to develop and implement art policies. A systematic study of cultural planning at the local level can help explain the ways arts are assigned public value in American society. Moreover, the community cultural planning process shows how the process transforms what art is considered to "be good for," as participants struggle over its social values. I demonstrate how the notion of a "community cultural plan" encapsulates three contested pieces aspects of cultural politics: decisions regarding whom arts and culture are for (the "community"), what culture and the arts encompass (the scope of the "cultural"), and how and by whom the participatory decision-making process should be conducted (the process of "planning"). Decisions regarding these three issues are themselves constituted by a series of alternative conceptions concerning both rationality in planning (planning styles), and moral repertoires for valuing the arts, or "orders of worth." As participants from government, non-profit and business sectors struggle to define what the arts are, what should be done to them, for them, or with them, the meaning of "the arts" and its perceived value as a public good become transformed.

Roger Sansi Roca, University of Chicago, Anthropology

"Fetishes, Images, Commodities, Art Works: A Research on the International Circulation of Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture"

In the last decades, Afro-Brazilian art has become a prestigious form of cultural production, with an international public. Afro-Brazilian "fetishes" have become works of art. Many contemporary artists vindicate Afro-Brazilian religion and iconography as a source of inspiration. Foreign (specially US Afro-American) intellectuals and artists have been determinant in these transformations, bringing new ideas about art that have been appropriated by Afro-Brazilians.

In my research, I will analyze this process of cultural change following the international circulation of Afro-Brazilian art works, from production to reception, and the international careers of Afro-Brazilian artists, seeing how they help building cultural exchanges, values, and discourses in their way. I will follow these art works and artists from their origin in Brazil- mainly in Bahia, to the places where artwork are displayed and consumed- inside Brazil, in Europe and the US.

My general theoretical hypothesis is that international art worlds are becoming one of the means through which local and dominated cultures are finding ways to reconstitute themselves and negotiate their identity in the contemporary global situation. Furthermore, these art worlds are transformed in this process, reciprocally, blurring the strict hierarchical distinction of "high" and "low" art, center and periphery, although not eliminating it altogether.

Shauna Saunders, Duke University, Economics

"Public and Private Contributions to the Arts, Empirically and Historically Considered"

My dissertation research seeks to address the interdependent relationship between the various funding sources for the nonprofit arts sector, specifically the relationship between private and public contributions. Given that the nonprofit arts sector relies on private and public funding sources for 30-45% of its total revenue, the relationship between these funding sources addresses a dominant feature of production and consumption in this sector.

My first approach to understanding this relationship is an empirical one. Specifically, I ask: Do public funds displace ("crowd out") private contributions to the arts? Using restricted data from the nonpublic use versions of the 1992 Census of Services and the 1997 Economic Census and program rules concerning federal arts funding through the National Endowment for the Arts, I am able to improve on the empirical methods, specifically the identification strategy, of previous empirical research.

My second approach is a historical one. I ask to what extent the case for federal funding of the arts in the 1960s and 70s and the creation and expansion of the NEA can be given an economic interpretation. I evaluate the arguments in their political and historical context and addresses the question of whether they can be understood in an economic framework of public goods theory.

My dissertation research, which relies in part on an extensive and previously unused data source, aims to expand the scope of empirical research on the nonprofit sector and specifically the arts sector. Previous empirical studies of the relationship between public and private funds have not been able to draw persuasive conclusions about the causal relationship between different funding sources nor have they explicitly considered the art sector. My research, then, represents both a methodological and an evidentiary contribution to the economic study of the nonprofit art sector as well as to the economic study of nonprofits more generally and to social science research in the arts.

Very little scholarly work, both from within and without economics, has addressed the history of the creation and expansion of the NEA, despite its (symbolic) significance in American cultural policy. This paper attempts to fill this gap while adding also to the historical literature on the interplay of policy makers, government institutions and economic ideas.

Michael Wakeford, University of Chicago, History

"Everyone an Artist: American Art Education, the Creative Self, and the Transatlantic Politics of Culture, 1925-1960"

This dissertation studies visual art education, broadly conceived, as a dynamic arena of intellectual though, social science, and transatlantic cultural politics. It argues that the interwar and early Cold War era witnessed an intensified interest in art education; educators, joined by philanthropists, research and clinical psychologists, and other intellectuals, worked on an unprecedented scale to promote and measure artistic knowledge and the ideal of creativity-centered learning. Historians, however, have yet to adequately understand how art education's myriad proponents contributed to a broader and multivalent dialogue about the sociocultural underpinnings of democratic society, the conditions of human freedom, and the therapeutic, social, and economic dividends of artistic, creative experience. This project will argue that the field of visual art education posed deep questions that engaged acute dilemmas in mid-century American culture: What was the role of artistic experience in the formation of the democratic citizen and the healthy, productive self? Did the language of children's art, and an enhanced form of visual literacy, possess the universalizing capacity to foster transnational empathy and understanding in the fractured Cold War world? Might art education soothe anxieties over the decline of creativity in the everyday experience of routinized work and mass leisure? Would the educational promotion of artistic production, and social scientific research into the creative process itself, ultimately spur inventiveness in the American workplace? Moving beyond the realm of pedagogical history, the dissertation re-frames art educators as significant public intellectuals who engaged those cultural dilemmas, participated in a vibrant transnational discourse, and took the lead in advocating artistic knowledge in a culture dominated by scientific and commercial values. This interdisciplinary dissertation makes extensive use of archival sources, professional journals, popular periodical literature, and the published works of leading figures in the field. So doing, it will contribute to scholarship on the construction of artistic value, the transnational nature of culture and intellectual life, cultural philanthropy, and the psychology of modern childhood and creativity.