Representations

Representations seeks to transform and enrich the understanding of cultures. Our central interests lie in the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice. Cultures are built out of representations. Their making is, fundamentally, a communal activity. Even in the special realm we call art, representation is a communal activity, inseparable from collective motives, attitudes, and judgments.

The understanding of representation is the shared concern of a wide variety of disciplines. Significant research by historians, art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists focuses on the way societies, institutions, and structures of power represent themselves in language, art, and ceremonial–and are themselves shaped by these representations.

Representations provides a forum for work that is theoretically sophisticated but with a high degree of social, historical, and textual specificity. The journal brings together work that ignores traditional disciplinary boundaries, revealing the connections among widely diverse fields of research. In doing so, it has created a new community of scholarship among all who explore the way artifacts, institutions, and modes of thought both reflect and give a heightened account of the social, cultural, and historical circumstances in which they arise.