Shelly E. Errington is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the studies of plastic art and narrative art

Narrative art

Narrative art is art that tells a story, either as a moment in an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Some of the earliest evidence of human art suggests that people told stories with pictures...

s, focusing on documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

, arts

ARts

aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....

, and multi-media. She is a professor of Anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

 at the University of California, Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...

.

Life

Errington received an M.A.

Master of Arts (postgraduate)

A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 from Newcomb College, Tulane University

Tulane University

Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...

 and an M.A and Ph.D at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. In 1981, she was the recipient of one of the first MacArthur Foundation "genius grants"

MacArthur Fellows Program

The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...

.

Errington has done field work in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...

, Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

 and Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

. Her current courses include a study of Multi-Media Ethnography. She is currently working on a documentary film on the art of the Pátzcuaro

Pátzcuaro

Pátzcuaro is a large town and municipality located in the state of Michoacán. The town was founded sometime in the 1320s, at first becoming the capital of the Tarascan state and later its ceremonial center...

region of Mexico, and an accompanying book on the subject.

On September 24, 2009, she spoke at a rally protesting cuts to California University education.

Selected bibliography

• The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
• Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (edited with J. Atkinson). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
• "The Cosmic Theme Park of the Javanese" Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Arts, published in Sydney, Australia, July 1997.
• "Myth and Structure in Disney World." In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views From the Outside. Edited by Irving Lavin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• "What Became Primitive art?" Cultural Anthropology 9 (2) : 201-226, 1994.
• "Making Progress on Borobudur: A New Perspective." Visual Anthropology Review 9 (2): 32-59, Fall 1993.
• "Progressivist Stories and the Pre-Columbian Past: Notes on Mexico and the United States." In Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, pp. 209–49. Edited by Elizabeth Boone. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993.
• "Some Comments on Style in the Meaning of the Past," Journal of Asian Studies, 38:2, 231-244, 1979.
• "The Cosmic House of the Buginese," Asia, 1:5, 8-14, 1979.

External links

• Sherry Errington's personal page at the University of California, Santa Cruz