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Jonathan Zilberg
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Jonathan Zilberg
Jonathan Zilberg is a cultural anthropologist specializing in art and
religion. Since the early 1980s, he has been exploring religious symbolism
in diverse art forms past and present in Central America, Africa and
Southeast Asia. His enduring interests are in aesthetics, ritual and
authenticity. Living in Asia, his current work focuses on how ideas
and imagery, sound and sentiment are being increasingly contested by
fundamentalist pressures. He began working with the National Museum
of Costa Rica in 1983 on pre-Colombian petroglyph iconography and since
then has conducted ethnographic and archival research in museums and
arts institutions in the US, the UK, France and in Africa at the National
Gallery of Zimbabwe before becoming involved in civil society and gender
initiatives in the context of development. He is currently completing
a manuscript titled From Bloodstains to Brancusi: A History of Zimbabwean
Modernism which represents the culmination of two decades of research
on the inspirational and institutional arts connections linking Africa,
Europe and America. In 1996 he completed his doctorate work at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a thesis titled Zimbabwean Stone
Sculpture: The Invention of a Shona Tradition. He has published a number
of articles on the history and authenticity of Shona sculpture and on
popular culture and is perhaps best known in anthropological circles
for his analysis of the popularity of Dolly Parton in Africa and of
youth culture and Americana in Zimbabwe. Above all, he is committed
to creative inter-disciplinary interaction in the humanities though
he maintains a deep attachment to science and environmental activism.
Currently he is working on the history of Indic textiles represented
on the Hindu-Buddhist sculptures in the collection in the National Museum
of Indonesia while simultaneously studying contemporary textiles, popular
culture, and religious pluralism through his work as an activist-scholar
experimenting with combining art, literature and ethnography.
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