What's in a Price? An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction

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