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During his New Guinea fieldwork in 1969, Alfred Gell came down with malaria and felt he had come very close to death. From that time until his actual, tragic death from cancer some 28 years later at the age of 51, he had the sense of living on borrowed time. It is perhaps no coincidence that of all the musicians Alfred admired it was Schubert that he felt most passionate about. Schubert died at the age of 31, a modest man during his brief life, who did not desire fame and was largely unaware of his own musical greatness. Those colleagues and students who knew Alfred would recognize something similar, particularly as an anthropologist who never took himself too seriously. This is not to say that he was not always preoccupied with serious conundrums and theoretical issues of central importance to anthropology, but he did so with a style of writing and wit that forestalled any claims to self-importance.
This characteristic is evident in his first monograph, Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries (1975), based on fieldwork among the Umeda, Papua New Guinea. Maurice Bloch, one of his colleagues at the London School of Economics (LSE), has written that the book "combines one of the finest structuralist analyses of New Guinea ritual and art ever produced, with a robustly anti-structuralist argument about the non-arbitrary nature of symbols and words" (Bloch 1997:1). These conflicting approaches are only brought together convincingly at the very end of Gell's life in his posthumously published Art and Agency (1998). Their reconciliation highlights the profound anthropological problems that quietly preoccupied Alfred over several decades. Together with his personal passion for music, Alfred was also a gifted artist as evidenced in the wonderful drawings produced for Metamorphosis. As with the artists he most admired, such as Duchamp and Titian, he attempted through his own writings to captivate and draw the reader into the patterned and diagrammatical nature of social and cognitive processes. He saw that so much of what anthropologists study is derived from visual sources that are not adequately addressed by the prevailing emphasis on the "writing culture" paradigm: the inherent wordiness of anthropology. Although a consummate literary stylist himself, he observed, "If one wanted to know how X perceived and understood the...