rationale and ContextThe editors began discussing this special issue in 2014 through a serendipitous encounter. Ruy and Maïté were interested in the possibility of promoting an anthropology of utopia, and simultaneously an anthropology as utopia. Alex and Jonas, working on anthropological approaches to contemporary artistic practices, were seeking to develop the theorising potential of relational art. The immanent space of connection was, precisely, the concept of "micro-utopia". In our discussions, several questions, problems, and challenges emerged about the relevance of micro-utopias for an anthropology of art in particular, but also for an anthropological agenda concerned with core themes of the disciplines, among them agency, creativity, and relationality.As editors based in three different continents, we have selected a range of texts that are situated in starkly different fields. We have therefore been faced with challenges of anthropological comparison: how to synthesise distributed anthropological and local expertise? This special issue proposes to render plastic key artistic theories and concepts that help to situate and compare different field sites, with the aim of rethinking core anthropological theory, while also striving to respect the specificities of the contexts and distinct vocabularies of the case studies discussed. In this introduction, we propose a preliminary cartography of the concept of microutopias in art practice and anthropological theory of art. We are, however, wary of sidelining art practice and theory as a sub-discipline or niche area of anthropological inquiry. Instead, we show how micro-utopias -as one example of an ethnographic concept -can feed back into anthropological theory itself and inform some key concepts that have been central to the discipline since its various inceptions.From an anthropological point of view, framing art as a social experience would be sufficient justification for a disciplinary heuristic construction. The anthropology (or rather, an-

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