Anthropologies of Art

by Edited by Mariët Westermann; With essays by Hans Belting, Janet Berlo, Suzanne Preston Blier, Steve Bourget, Sarah Brett-Smith, Shelly Errington, David Freedberg, Anna Grimshaw, Jonathan Hay, Howard Morphy, Iken Okoye, Fancesco Pellizzi, and Ruth Phillips

• ISBN13: 9780300103533
• ISBN10: 0300103530
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2005-07-08
• Publisher: Clark Art Institute

Summary

Based on the 2003 Clark Conference, this new volume in the highly successful series Clark Studies in the Visual Arts examines the intersections and divergences between art history and anthropology. How do these disciplines understand the term "art"? What sorts of questions do they ask of the work of art? Is it possible to find a cross-cultural definition of art, or are such definitions inevitably Western in their origins and concerns? What implications do the answers to these questions have for the collecting and display of Western and non-Western objects in art museums? Fourteen leading art historians and anthropologists discuss these and other questions.

Table of Contents

Introduction : the objects of art history and anthropology
Warburg's mask : a study in idolatry	p. 3
On the margins of recorded history : anthropology and primitivism	p. 26
Toward an anthropology of the image	p. 41
Linger or flee? : Pieter Aertsen, "Iguegha Uhe," Michel Leiris	p. 59
Transcending places : a hybrid, multiplex approach to visual culture	p. 89
The functions of Chinese painting : toward a unified field theory	p. 111
Seeing Indigenous Australian art	p. 124
The knowledge of women	p. 143
But is it art? : the complex roles of images in Moche culture, an ancient Andean society of the Peruvian north coast	p. 164
Anthropologies and histories of art : a view from the terrain of Native North American art history	p. 178
Reconfiguring the ground : art and the visualization of anthropology	p. 195
History now : post-tribal art	p. 221
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