Art Effects: Image, Agency, and Ritual in Amazonia

In Art Effects Carlos Fausto explores the interplay between Indigenous material culture and ontology in ritual contexts, interpreting the agency of artifacts and Indigenous presences and addressing major themes in anthropological theory and art history to study ritual images in the widest sense. Fausto delves into analyses of the body, aerophones, ritual masks, and anthropomorphic effigies while making a broad comparison between Native visual regimes and the Christian imagistic tradition.

Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in Amazonia, Fausto offers a rich tapestry of inductive theorizing in understanding anthropology’s most complex subjects of analysis, such as praxis and materiality, ontology and belief, the power of images and mimesis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, and animism and posthumanism. Art Effects also brims with suggestive, hemispheric comparisons of South American and North American Indigenous masks. In this tantalizing interdisciplinary work with echoes of Franz Boas, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, Fausto asks: how do objects and ritual images acquire their efficacy and affect human beings?

Carlos Fausto is a professor of anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a Global Scholar at Princeton University. He is the author of Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia and coeditor, with Michael Heckenberger, of Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives. David Rodgers has been based in Brazil for twenty years, working as a translator of academic texts, including numerous books in anthropology.