Examining the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists, Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Challenging Art as Cultural Systems  12
2. Synthetic Realism: Postcinema in the Anthropocene  31
3. Feminage, Warang, and the Nervous System (Hauntology and Curation)  71
4. Nomadic Video in Turbulent Sea States: How Art Becomes Critique  100
5. Water Notes on Rattan Strings  132
6. Raw Moves and Layered Communication across the Archipelago Seas  165
Epilogue. Probing Art and Emerging Forms of Life  197
Appendix. The Year 2020 and the Camouflage Painting Series: Conversations with Entang Wiharso  215
Notes  221
References  253
Index  281

Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous books, including At the Pivot of East and West: Ethnographic, Literary, and Filmic Arts and Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century, both also published by Duke University Press.