Clare Harris reflects on how her research, publications, exhibitions and digital projects all bear the trace of SOAS debates on politics: in knowledge formation, in the exhibitionary complex, on the possession (and dispossession) of objects, and in contemporary transnational art worlds.
Paper long abstract:
Clare Harris, Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford, became an MA student at SOAS in 1988, having previously worked in a Tibetan refugee camp and taken a BA in Art History at Cambridge. In the early 1990s, as she continued at PhD level, SOAS was a hotbed of debate about how art from Africa and Asia should be studied in the post-colonial era. Those debates were fuelled by staff in Anthropology and Art and Archaeology, and by the writings of the doyennes of post-colonial studies. Clare went on to become lecturer in the Anthropology of Art at the University of East Anglia and then lecturer in anthropology and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Her research, publications, exhibitions and digital projects have focused on Tibetan art, photography, museums and wider issues of representation. They all bear the trace of SOAS debates about politics: in knowledge formation, in the exhibitionary complex, on the possession (and dispossession) of objects, and in contemporary transnational art worlds.