Anthropology and Evocative Significance: Art, Sport, and Aesthetics

Abstract

“Evocations” are frequently mentioned in anthropological accounts of art and artistic production, but the particular efficacy of the term for anthropological inquiry has not been considered in significant depth. This article argues that a theory of “evocations” has the potential to enrich not just anthropological considerations of art, but examinations of aesthetics and sensory perception as well. It offers a conception of evocations as contextually specific resonances between the sensuous texture of things and the socially produced sense-memories that are felt by those things’ perceivers. Such a conception allows for encultured understandings of aesthetic perception that extend beyond those most prevalent in “Western” thought while still offering a framework for the generalized analysis, through close ethnographic investigation, of such resonances and their political significances. This article highlights the efficacy of both evocations and their close examination by documenting some of the many ways that rugby performances in South Africa have evoked the country's political history. By focusing on rugby in this way, this article demonstrates how “evocation” invites a recognition of the aesthetic politics entailed in domains of social life—like sports—that are richly evocative but are not conventionally analyzed in conjunction with conceptions of art.