Alfred Gell (June 12, 1945-January 28, 1997) was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, language, symbolism and ritual

Ritual

A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....

. He was trained by Edmund Leach

Edmund Leach

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist of whom it has been said:"It is no exaggeration to say that in sheer versatility, originality, and range of writing he was and still is difficult to match among the anthropologists of the English speaking world".-Personal and academic...

 (MPhil, Cambridge University) and Raymond Firth

Raymond Firth

Sir Raymond William Firth, CNZM, FBA, was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies is separated from the idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society...

 (PhD, London School of Economics

London School of Economics

The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

) and did his fieldwork in Melanesia

Melanesia

Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania extending from the western end of the Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Fiji. The region comprises most of the islands immediately north and northeast of Australia...

 and tribal India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Gell taught at the London School of Economics, among other places. He died of cancer at the age of 51. In his 1998 book Art and Agency, Gell formulated an influential theory of art based on abductive reasoning

Abductive reasoning

Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as "guessing". The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true...

.

Selected bibliography of works by Alfred Gell

• 1975 Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda Society, Language and Ritual. London: Athlone.
• 1992a Under the Sign of the Cassowary. In Shooting the Sun: Ritual and Meaning in the West Sepik. B. Juillerat, ed. pp. 125–143. Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution Press.
• 1992b The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. J. Coote and A. Shelton, eds. pp. 40–66. Oxford: Clarendon.
• 1992c The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg.
• 1993 Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon.
• 1995 The Language of the Forest: Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. E. Hirsch and M. O'Hanlon, eds. pp. 232–254. Oxford: Clarendon.
• 1996 Vogel's Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps. Journal of Material Culture 1:15-38.
• 1998 Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
• 1999 The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone.