Modernism and the Anthropology of Art
Changes in the Western art world also resulted in a more serious engagement with anthropology. The concept of art that developed at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries centered on the aestheticized object separated from the rest of life. As far as anthropology was concerned, this was an alien view. However, modernism also created the groundwork for a more positive and dynamic relationship between anthropology and art. The rise of anthropology and the development of modernism in...
About the Authors
Howard Morphy is Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University and Honorary Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. He has written and edited a number of books on the anthropology of art and Aboriginal Australian art, including Ancestral Connections Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge 1991 and Aboriginal Art 1998 . He has curated many exhibitions including with Pip Deveson Yinga-pungapu for the opening of the National Museum of Australia in...
Exhibiting Art Today
Changing anthropological ideas have had an impact on the role of museums and art galleries as repositories of cultural artifacts. Two almost unrelated processes have made museums exciting places again. First, they have been properly recognized as valued repositories of cultural and historical archives providing a resource that allows for the reanalysis of contact history, colonial processes, changes in material culture and so on. Second, indigenous peoples have rediscovered their pasts in the...
Shark Tlingit Design
The general principles discussed in the preceding chapters, may now be elucidated by a discussion of the style of the decorative art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast of North America. Two styles may be distinguished the man's style expressed in the art of wood carving and painting and their derivatives and the woman's style which finds expression in weaving, basketry, and embroidery. The two styles are fundamentally distinct. The former is symbolic, the latter formal. The symbolic art...
The Anthropology of Art and Interdisciplinary Discourse
Ironically the future anthropology of art must re-engage with those methods and problems that led a different generation of anthropologists to reject the study of art in the first place. It must engage with the study of form at the micro level, seeing in the production of art objects a form of agency that arises from bodies of knowledge. At the macro level it must engage in the study of form for the purpose of comparative and historical analysis. Attention to form and the relative autonomy of...
An Anthropological Definition of Art
So far, we have skirted around two issues that are central to an anthropology of art -the definition of art and what characterizes an anthropological approach to art. The two are related - an anthropological definition of art is going to be influenced by the nature of anthropology itself. As a cross-cultural discipline, its definition of categories is affected by the desire to reduce cultural bias the objective is to make categories as broadly applicable as possible without becoming...
Part II Primitivism Art and Artifacts
7 Modernist Primitivism An Introduction 129 William Rubin 8 Defective Affinities Primitivism in 20th Century Art 147 Arthur C. Danto 9 Histories of the Tribal and the Modern 150 10 A Case in Point and Afterwords to Primitive Art in Civilized Places 167 Sally Price 11 Oriental Antiquities Far Eastern Art 186 Craig Clunas 12 Introduction to Art Artifact African Art in Anthropology Collections 209 Susan Vogel 13 Vogel's Net Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps 219 Alfred Gell
Anthropological Approaches to Art or Anthropological Theories of Art
What is distinctive about an anthropological approach or rather anthropological approaches to art, apart from the cross-cultural definition of art itself The easy answer is that the anthropological approach to art is as diverse as the discipline itself. There is no anthropological theory of art that is not also part of more general theory see Layton 1991 for one approach to the discipline and Van Damme for a survey of ''anthropologies'' of art . However it is possible to make certain...
The Anthropology of Art A Reflection on its History and Contemporary Practice
The anthropology of art has entered an exciting stage in its history. It is in the process of moving from its place as a minority interest that most anthropologists could neglect towards a more central role in the discipline. In the past, disengagement from art as a subject of study reflected attitudes of anthropologists to material culture in general. It also sprang from a particular, overly narrow, Euro-American conception of art that made it, for some anthropologists, an uncomfortable field...
One Tribe One Style New Guinea Art
The texts we have included in this part are the relatively recent foundations of a recognizable contemporary anthropology of art. We make no attempt to cover the early history of writings about non-European art, to examine the place of art in evolutionist theories, to summarize the debates between the diffusionists and the evolutionists, or probe the relationship between the anthropology of art and the culture history school or the technique and form theories of Semper 1989 . A number of these...
Part V Marketing Culture
24 The Collecting and Display of Souvenir Arts Authenticity and the Strictly Commercial'' 431 25 The Art of the Trade On the Creation of Value and Authenticity in the African Art Market 454 Christopher B. Steiner Part VI Contemporary Artists 467 26 A Second Reflection Presence and Opposition in Contemporary 27 Representing Culture The Production of Discourse s for Aboriginal 28 Aesthetics and Iconography An Artist's Approach 513 Gordon Bennett 29 Kinds of Knowing 520 Charlotte Townsend-Gault 30...
Part III Aesthetics across Cultures
14 Yoruba Artistic Criticism 242 Robert Farris Thompson 15 Style in Technology Some Early Thoughts 270 Heather Lechtman 16 Marvels of Everyday Vision'' The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Cattle-keeping Nilotes 281 17 From Dull to Brilliant The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among Part IV Form, Style, and Meaning 321 18 Visual Categories An Approach to the Study of Representational 19 Structural Patterning in Kwakiutl Art and Ritual 339 Abraham Rosman and Paula G. Rubel 20 Sacred Art and...
Tony Berkeley Author Anthropology
First and foremost, much gratitude must go to our editor Jane Huber for her always affable and patient enthusiasm from the very beginning when the project was just a gleam in several pairs of eyes. The series editor Parker Shipton has provided much encouragement and commentary along the way. Emily Martin, Angela Cohen, Graeme Leonard, Lisa Eaton, and many Blackwell staff members have helped to guide the manuscript through its various stages and lent advice when most needed. Thanks to Loreen...
From Inclusion to Exclusion Anthropology and Art in the late th and early th
The idea of art in European culture has itself been subject to a continuous process of change. The conception of art in the mid-nineteenth century was very different to what it subsequently became under the influence of modernism. Art and material culture were an integral part of nineteenth-century anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology developed hand in hand with the cabinets of curiosity, with antiquar-ianism, and with the widening of European horizons following the Enlightenment. It was...
Conclusion
In this survey of the history of the anthropology of art we have been equally concerned with two questions what anthropology can contribute to the study of art and what the study of art can contribute to anthropology. The first is easy to answer, in particular in relation to the recent European tradition of art history. An anthropological approach places art in its social context. The relativism of anthropological theory broadens the definition and conception of art by elucidating its contexts...