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Art and the Anthropologists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Adrian Edwards CSSp
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The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.

From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 57 , Issue 673 , June 1976 , pp. 263 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Proceedings of a Symposium held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1961.

2 American Ethnological Society, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1967.

3 University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969.

4 University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

5 Indiana University Press, 1973.

6 Oxford University Press, London, New York, 1973. 286 pp. £6.50.

7 Department of Antiquities, Lagos, 1965. Kalabari art seems to stand at one extreme of the African spectrum, being highly stylised and traditional, intended to please spirits rather than to impress human beings.

8 Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1970. Yoruba art is shown by Father Carroll to be a primarily secular art, which shows the worshippers of the gods rather than the gods themselves, but tells us a good deal about Yoruba daily life. Yoruba art, which gives much scope to the individual artist and is associated with a keen sense of what is, or is not, beautiful among the general public, is at the opposite, ‘humanist’ end of the spectrum to Kalabari. See also the essays on Yoruba art by William Bascom and Robert F. Thompson in The Traditional Artist in African Societies.

9 Gerald Duckworth, London, 1971.

10 The conclusions to this book are very valuable, suggesting various ways in which African art can express and support differences in rank.

11 Perhaps the most interesting feature of this book is the evidence for there being three main possible attitudes towards artists in traditional African societies; the artist as a recognised, socially honoured figure, the artist as a rather disreputable, marginal figure, and the artist not distinguished from craftsmen.

12 Forge's other papers on the Abelam need to be read to get a full picture, notably his paper ‘Learning to See in New Guinea’, in Socialisation: the Approach from Social Anthropology (edited Mayer, P.), Tavistock, London, 1970Google Scholar.

13 Particularly associated with the names of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

14 The civil war example is not quite so silly as it sounds, since experience of conflict may lead to the emergence of ‘rules of the game’ to control competition in future. But, even so, the capacity to adjust to conflict, or to control it, is not quite the same thing as conflict iself, and terms like ‘social integration’ or ‘social solidarity’ suggest a static, rather than a moving, equilibrium.