3 Te recursivity of the curatorial Jonas Tinius and Sharon Macdonald Introduction It has become increasingly evident and is widely attested in museum, contemporary art and other exhibition contexts that curating is a pervasive buzzword. Some might even say we no longer live in an age of the engineer, the bricoleur or the fâneur, but in an age of the curator, whose fgure, depending on your point of view, evokes awe, annoyance or anxiety. Tere is no shortage of art historical, museological and anthropological texts (this one and the volume of which it is part included) speaking of the prominence and pervasiveness of curatorial discourse and practice. Te number of workshops and graduate programmes for ‘up-and-coming’ curators, at which new, or those described as such, theories about art and curating are distributed, is itself both cause and result of this discursive formation that began, arguably, some three decades ago. Curatorial practices no longer refer primarily to the taking care of an exhibition or the selection and interpellation of (art, ethnographic, etc.) objects and artists, but have expanded beyond museum and exhibition contexts to the questioning of these infrastructures themselves and the arrangement of theories as well as participatory and discursive formats. On the one hand, post-Fordist labour modalities that ‘valorise hyper-production’ (Rogof 2013: 41) have led to a proliferation of theories and practices in an expanded curatorial feld, in which everyone appears to be a curator and everything appears in need of curation. Or so it seems. Not only does this interpretation appear to suggest that this kind of valorization is the primary driver of such a theoretical advancement; it also downplays the complex range of other processes at play, such as the mobilization of innovation in the creative industries, changing institutional structures in art academies that combine theory and practice, and transforming formats across the arts (e.g. curating in the performing arts), and so on. On the other hand, Rogof has suggested that the increasing transdisciplinarity of artistic and curatorial production has not just led to a blurring of lines across art or exhibition contexts, but has also, simultaneously, provoked a new set of formats, programmes and conversations that interrogate the meaning of curatorial practice itself (ibid.). Te long list of publications addressing the relation between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ attests to this evidently generative phenomenon (see the introduction to this volume). The Anthropologist as Curator.indb 35 20-09-2019 16:19:31