Art, Anthropology of

PEDRO DE NIEMEYER CESARINO

University of São Paulo, Brazil

Museums, evolutionism, and culturalism

Objects, collections, and museums played an important role in the foundation of

anthropological tradition, although the anthropology of art, strictly speaking, has
never been a central preoccupation of the discipline. In the nineteenth century, the
beginning of anthropological research was closely related to the formation of the
ethnographic collections of the most important museums in Europe and the United
States. At a time when anthropology was still defining its academic outlines, the study
of objects produced by nonmodern peoples was a way of understanding the general
conditions of evolution through the specific study of technology. This was, for instance,
the criterion adopted by General Pitt-Rivers for the constitution of a collection that
is still exhibited today in Oxford—a collection largely based on morphological and
evolutionary presuppositions, which are implied in the display of objects derived
from colonial contexts (see Chapman 1985). Other important institutions, such as
the British Museum, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, and the Königliches
Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, also concentrated on the display of ethnographic
collections as part of the scientific activity that was at the beginnings of academic
anthropological research.
The Musée du Trocadéro in Paris was, in its turn, less organized by the scientific
endeavor that Pitt-Rivers represented but nevertheless very important for the early
generations of French sociologists and ethnologists such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel
Mauss, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule. The chaotic collection of the Trocadéro played
a very important role in the redefinition of artistic parameters by cubism, surrealism,
and other avant-garde movements that considered the museum’s objects, as well as
the textual production of French ethnologists, as one of their most important sources.
The redefinition of aesthetic canons through access to African sculptures, as well as
the general feeling of decontextualization produced by the ethnographic collections,
were responsible for the formation of an “ethnographic surrealism” that James Clifford
(1988) considers to be one of the key components of French anthropology from the
first decades of the twentieth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the US-based anthropologist Franz Boas played
an important part in the redefinition of museums through his application of the notion
of culture to the problem of display (see Jacknis 1985). In the National Museum of
American History, Boas invented new, didactic showcases that were an example of “con-
densed culture,” thus providing the public with a more contextualized access to objects
that, in other institutions, were displayed according to the arbitrary and ethnocentric
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2254
2 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

criteria of evolutionism and taxonomy. This innovation was actually a museological

extension of Boas’s conceptual transformations in general anthropological theory even
as he was criticizing evolutionism and building the grounds for cultural anthropology.
The break with evolutionism was also evident in Boas’s study Primitive Art, which
regarded “primitive” people’s artistic productions as based on the same “desire for beau-
ty” ([1927] 1955, 353) and the same “will to produce an aesthetic result” ([1927] 1955,
11) as is found in “civilized” works of art. This last expression—“will of art”—is actually
a tentative translation of the notion of Kuntswollen, which was developed by the art the-
oretician Aloïs Riegl. In this way, Boas overcame the paradigm of the natural sciences
that were at the core of evolutionism, as well as the supremacy of Western artistic expres-
sions. He considered that differences in “mental make-up” ([1927] 1955, 356) were not
the correct way to understand “primitive art,” because such an aesthetic impulse was
universal and could be found in every work of art that was conceived as a result of the
control of a technical skill and the imposition of style. This was a necessary condition for
producing beauty as well as for conveying a meaning that could be understood through
the interpretation of plastic symbolism influenced by culture.

Structure and symbolism

Following the criticisms of evolutionism first formulated by Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss

(1962) also considered the artistic production of non-Western peoples as an expression
not of inferior mental states but rather of universal logical structures. The emphasis on
sensible qualities by “primitive peoples” (by virtue of what Lévi- Strauss called their
pensée sauvage, or “savage mind”) was not a result of their lack of abstract thought but
rather of the presence of structure in the disposition of a sensibility for artistic produc-
tion as well as for verbal expression. Colors, for instance, could be organized as signs
in a system of aesthetic expression that could be considered as an important source
of information for anthropology. Internal correlations in artistic expressions were seen
in relation to other correlations produced by mythic narratives and social structures
in order to reveal a system of thought. This conception was successfully applied by
Lévi-Strauss in La voie des masques (The Way of Masks) (1979), dedicated to the study
of masks produced by Amerindian peoples of the Northwest Pacific coast. Lévi-Strauss
showed that masks should be studied not as isolated objects but as parts of a series,
from which their structural characteristics could be abstracted and placed in relation
to other objects and forms of thought. Lévi-Strauss extended this insight to any work
of art, since the problem of style could be understood only as a part of diverse pro-
cesses associated with social interaction. In this way, the French anthropologist could
also dismiss another anthropological mistake perpetrated by functionalist anthropol-
ogy (which was not specifically concerned with art)—the presupposition of the isolation
of cultures and societies, whereas structural anthropology emphasized connections and
transformations produced beyond social, temporal, and territorial limits.
The role of semiotics in the anthropological study of art was then a central concern
for research that appeared from 1960 onward, some of it influenced by the structural
anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. Anthropologist Nancy Munn, for instance, produced a
 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF 3

classic ethnography about the graphic system of a Central Australian society, the Wal-
biri. The sand paintings and other visual expressions of this people were considered
by the author as a visual text and understood as part of a wider graphic system that
was endowed with sociocultural symbolism. Walbiri graphic patterns—and henceforth
other similar productions of non-Western peoples—were not arbitrary schematic rep-
resentations but, rather, a kind of visual grammar that should be deciphered by the
ethnographer who was able to understand its representational value as an “iconic reg-
ulation of semanticity” (Munn [1973] 1986, 4).
Semiotics was, thus, one of the key components of a symbolic anthropology that con-
ceived culture as a kind of text that should be interpreted by the analyst. Emphasizing
the articulation of local systems of knowledge with their activation in everyday life,
Clifford Geertz considered that “a theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of
culture,” for art participates in a “general system of symbolic forms” (1983, 109) that
nevertheless should not be seen as an abstract grammar separated from life when inter-
preted by an anthropologist. In this vein, Witherspoon (1977) postulated the existence
of individualized Navajo artists and therefore of a system of Navajo art whose sym-
bolism could bring important information about its society and cosmology, as well as
examples of beautiful artistic creations that should be paired with Western paintings
such as those by the American artist Jackson Pollock. Several authors thus published
studies that concentrated on objects considered as works of art that were produced by
individual artists—for instance, Raymond Firth’s (1973) ethnography of Tikopia furni-
ture and Forge’s (1967) studies on Abelam ceremonial houses. The extension beyond
Western societies of the assumption of the author as singular artist and as an individual
human subject responsible for his or her creative productions was thus consolidated in
anthropology—even if the (modern) notion of the individual subject cannot be nec-
essarily conceived as universal or as compatible with local conceptions of personhood
and humanity.

Art and aesthetics

Taking for granted the inadequacy of labels such as “primitive art” and conceiving
the notion of art through a relativist perspective, studies published since 1980 are
characterized by detailed ethnographies about local aesthetic systems related or not
to the production of tangible artworks. Jeremy Coote, for example, contended that an
anthropology of aesthetics extends its analytical efforts beyond the notion of art to a
“comparative study of valued perceptual experience in different societies” that rests
in a universal human capacity for response and judgment (1992, 247). Cattle-color
terminology is conceived as an aesthetic matrix for Nilotic-speaking peoples such as
the Dinka (Coote 1992, 250), whereas for the Mexican Huichol (Shelton 1992, 236) the
notion of beauty is marked by cosmological implications instead of being involved in
the production and circulation of artworks.
The notion of the universality of aesthetics was the object of a debate edited by
Tim Ingold (1996, 249–94) that brought together anthropologists who opposed it
and those who favored it. Howard Morphy (1996, 255), for instance, argued that
4 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

aesthetics was a cross-cultural category and that anthropology needs such cate-
gories to produce its translations, thus going beyond Eurocentric preconceptions
and engaging with different organizations of perception and judgment in other
cultures. Following the theories developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Gow (1996, 271)
argued in the same debate that the aesthetical problem is defined in the Western
modern world as a discriminatory activity and therefore should not be naturalized
in ethnographic research, whose central objective is to understand other people’s
criteria of expressive forms. For other participants in the debate such as Alfred Gell,
Joanna Overing, and Christina Toren (Ingold 1996, 276), aesthetic universals must
be conceived as historical constructions, thus compromising their cross-cultural
applicability. The notion of aesthetics, although claimed to be generalizable by its
defenders, becomes in the end as historically and conceptually contingent as the notion
of art.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, museums and exhibitions continued to
collect, show, and categorize other peoples’ objects, but this time under the influence of
postcolonial thought, cultural relativism, and their conceptual paradoxes. Two exhibi-
tions, among many others, made an important and polemic contribution to this discus-
sion: “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1984–85) and Magiciens de la terre (Centre Georges Pompi-
dou, Paris, 1989). The first exhibition was strongly criticized by James Clifford (1988)
because the selection and categorization of other people’s objects as artworks—through
presumed formal affinities—revealed unilateral projections of a Western institutional
art system and its disengagement with local contexts and systems of knowledge. The
second exhibition was praised by influential postcolonial intellectuals such as Gayatri
Spivak and recently reconsidered by curators such as Pablo Lafuente (2013), who argued
that the notion of magiciens disguises and projects the modern presupposition of the
individual artist, supposedly detached from their community by the productions of his
or her privileged creative spirit.
The terms of this debate are replicated in the studies of Alfred Gell, probably the
most influential author on the contemporary anthropology of art. In discussions with
the philosopher Arthur Danto and in the context of the exhibition Art/Artifact (Cen-
tre for African Art, New York, 1988, curated by Susan Vogel), Gell also argued that
anthropology should not take for granted modern presuppositions such as those devel-
oped by Hegel in his Aesthetics. To introduce, as Danto does, a distinction between
an artwork and an artifact by the “progressive, cumulative tradition” (Gell 1999, 192),
which can be found, for instance, in a figurative sculpture but not in a hunting net,
implies an argument of authority and an arbitrary selection from the point of view of
a subject concerned with the centrality of aesthetics and its expressive manifestations.
Gell’s argument raises questions about who exactly is in a superior position to say that
this specific object and not another is imbued with the creative spirit originally derived
from a privileged and detached individual. Moreover, is it possible to establish a neu-
tral criterion that allows distinctions between an instrumental artifact and an object
imbued with the value of creativity? For Gell, it is also necessary to take into account
the fact that non-Western material productions constantly blur this distinction—a dis-
tinction actually imposed by the modern world since the foundation of ethnographic
 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF 5

museums and their separation from art museums—and that the restoration of local
concepts and detailed ethnographic descriptions are necessary to avoid the problems of
aestheticism.
Moving beyond idealistic projections such as Danto’s, Gell considers that a trap could
very well be conceived as art because it “embody ideas, convey meanings, because a trap,
by its very nature, is a transformed representation of its maker, the hunter, and the prey
animal, its victim, and of their mutual relationship, which, among hunting people, is
a complex, quintessentially social one” (1999, 203). The essential argument that allows
Gell to imagine juxtapositions of non-Western objects (conceived as art by himself)
with Western contemporary art or actually to define an artwork beyond the idealistic
conception of being the outcome of a creative essence or spirit is the “evocation of com-
plex intentionalities” (1999, 203). The “embodiment of intentionalities” (Gell 1999, 211)
becomes, then, the main argument for Gell’s notion of art (wide enough to include pre-
viously extraneous objects such as a trap or a net), which was developed in more detail
in his central work Art and Agency (1998). It is not by chance that he defends a kind of
“methodological philistinism” for the anthropological approach of art, thus granting a
“complete break with aesthetics” and an attention to art as a “component of technology”
(Gell 1999, 161–62). Technology is exactly what produces that embodiment of inten-
tionalities in artworks: a spectator is trapped by the technical expertise (be it manual
or cognitive or witty, as in conceptual contemporary art) of a maker, whose agency is
then transferred to an object that works as a bridge between social subjects. But this
magical effect of artworks (be it a Trobriand canoe prow or a Duchamp ready-made)
is, above all, social and not mysterious: “it is miraculous because it is achieved both by
human agency but at the same time by an agency which transcends the normal sense
of self-possession of the spectator” (Gell 1999, 171).

Art and agency

In Art and Agency, which was published posthumously, Gell establishes the outlines of
what he considers to be a true anthropological theory of art, independent of conceptual
frameworks derived from other disciplines (such as the natural sciences, semiotics, and
art history). For Gell (1998), an anthropological theory of art is, above all, social: the
study of artworks, whether Western or not, is considered within the Maussian tradition
of gift relationships. Criticizing aestheticism as well as symbolism, Gell maintains that
the objective of an artwork is not to produce beauty or even to bear meaning. The very
notion of an artwork is also destabilized, for it may include any material index capable of
pointing toward a “texture of social relationships” through the abduction of the agency
of the artist—another category that refers not only to an individual creator but also to
anyone who intentionally or otherwise “causes events to happen in their vicinity” (Gell
1998, 17, 16). Abductions, says Gell, “covers the grey area where semiotic inference
(of meanings from signs) merges with hypothetical inferences of a non-semiotic (or
not conventionally semiotic) kind” (1998, 14), thus opening up a perspective for
understanding artworks that goes beyond the inferences generally associated with
language.
6 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

The understanding of art—and, mutatis mutandis, of culture—as a text previously

sustained by authors such as Geertz is then abandoned by Gell in a move that echoes
other revisions of the influence of semiology in art studies. This is at the core of the
so-called iconic turn (Mitchell 1994), a theoretical revision of the independence of
the image from language, with important consequences for anthropological theory.
Gell’s point, however, is not the same as that of another influent theoretician of the
image, David Freedberg (1989), who published a classical study about the power of
images in religious contexts. An art historian such as Freedberg, argues Gell, must
distinguish the power of images (mostly defined as artistic by the criteria of mimetic
visual representation) from “mere unformed things” (Gell 1998, 150), whereas an
anthropologist works with every kind of thing, including human beings themselves,
and hence should not take for granted the centrality of the artwork. Elaborate things
(or persons) do matter for Gell’s theory but only if they reveal through abductive
inferences “the network of agent/patient relations ‘in the vicinity’ of the work of art”
(1998, 153).
It is not the cognitive impact of an elaborate pattern upon the observer that matters
as a way to explain aesthetic potency but the asymmetrical social relationship mediated
by the index (a painted body, a house, a sculpture, or a trap), which presupposes
someone (be it a spirit or a human being) responsible for its becoming. The map-
ping of a network of social relations mediated by material indexes also produces a
decentralization of the person, which can be distributed (Gell 1998, 98) in a wide
field of influence, as in the classical example of the exchange of gifts in Melanesia.
For Gell, the anthropological notion of person should, however, cover different
conceptions not necessarily understandable within modern philosophical parameters
and by divisions of internal/external realms. Gell suggests a kind of fusion between
concurrent internalist and externalist epistemological perspectives (where the mind is
something external to the subject or is dependent on an internal cognitive apparatus).
The point can be better understood in the processes of fractalization, which are
mobilized to understand the animation of idols, previously interpreted in symbolical
terms: “just as the idol, externally, is at the centre of a concentric array of relations
between ‘inner’ persons, so the idol, internally, can be seen as a concentric array of
relations between the ‘inner’ persons—the pandemonium of homunculi—of which
it is composed” (Gell 1998, 136–37). In this way, Gell can interpret the problem of
idolatry, which is essential for the understanding of religious images, through social
processes of interaction and different conceptions of personhood and processes of
animation.

Image and memory

In spite of Gell’s acceptance and reframing of the notion of art for an anthropological
theory, the label “anthropology of art” has become more and more devoid of conceptual
relevance. Among other reasons related to the destabilization of art, this weakening of
the label is related to the fact that anthropological concerns have ceased to be restricted
to the discipline and have invaded the theoretical program of other authors dedicated
 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF 7

to the study of image, for example Hans Belting. In An Anthropology of Images ([2001]
2011), Belting also goes beyond a unifying aesthetic notion of art in order to investigate
relationships between image, body, medium, and picture. For him, pictures are under-
stood as physical images that belong to a specific visual culture, whereas images have
no medium until they become embodied, for example in human bodies. Belting, how-
ever, avoids a universal definition of the notion of image and sustains an alliance with
ethnography that is necessary to produce an “opening to other thought patterns and
mental dispositions” ([2001] 2011, 32).
The rejection of aestheticism and its conceptual consequences is actually older
than the formulations of Gell and other contemporary theoreticians. By the end
of the nineteenth century, the cultural theorist Aby Warburg was also interested in
the “survival” (a tentative translation of Nachleben) of visual formulae throughout
different historical periods, as in the image of the serpent and the draped dress
of the maenads, found in instances ranging from Greek sculpture to Botticelli’s
Venus. The Warburgian notion of Pathosformel reveals this psychological power of
persistence of visual formulae regardless of cultural or theological differences. In his
visit to the Pueblo Indians in 1896–97, Warburg did not exactly intend to produce
an anthropological study but, rather, to investigate the persistence and potency of
images such as that of the serpent—from the Amerindian ritual to the Laocoön group,
revealing a temporality that should be different from that of the linear narrative of
art history. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, Warburg then considered images
as what survives from “an anthropological dynamic and sedimentation that becomes
virtual and partial, since it is destructed by time.” It is exactly this anthropological
dissemination that demands a “multiplication of points of view, of competences and
approaches” (Didi-Huberman 2002, 41, author’s translation). Echoing Gell, as well as
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, this process leads to an important consequence: the
displacement of the notion and object of art, which becomes “a complex—or better a
bundle, a conglomerate or a rhyzom—of relations” (Didi-Huberman 2002, 45, author’s
translation).
The influence of Warburg’s theories is also present in Carlo Severi’s anthropology of
memory, which extends beyond the historically laden category of “art” to the under-
standing of the intensity of images, which in turn is responsible for their transmis-
sion and persistence. Concerned with the “psychological grounds of culture,” Severi
seeks the “cognitive operations” involved in the notion of tradition (2007, 69, author’s
translation) and its expressive manifestations. The concept of chimera was framed by
the author to explain the psychological impact and resistance of images constituted by
the assemblage of contradictory traits in a single figure (a human head covered with
serpents—an example of a classical and persistent visual formulae from ancient Greek
art to Caravaggio). In this vein, Severi can explain the psychological persistence of con-
tradictory figures in specific iconographic traditions.
The anthropologist Philippe Descola has also recently criticized the earlier influence
of art history upon the anthropology of art, which was dominated by the presupposi-
tion of the primacy of the object and the interpretation of its symbolism as well as of
its stylistic and formal transformations (2010, 25). For Descola, the conceptual and cul-
tural specificities associated with the category “art” (such as the centrality of the object,
8 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

of the individual creator, and of aesthetic judgment) should not be taken for granted by
anthropology. As an alternative, the author proposes an “anthropology of figuration,”
since figuration is a universal cognitive operation that surpasses historical and cultural
determinations. Through figuration, argues Descola, a material object invested with a
specific social agency could reveal different forms of identification related to different
ways of inferring qualities in what exists (2010, 27). Descola understands this varia-
tion of forms of identification in terms of the division between animism, naturalism,
totemism, and analogism—an ontological multiplicity that is necessary for the under-
standing of other people’s conceptions of images and objects.

Alternative visual theories

Although general theories are present in the work of authors such as Gell, Descola, and
Severi, attempts at generalization are not the aim of all contemporary anthropologi-
cal studies of art. Other authors (such as Marilyn Strathern) do not seek to construct
comparative theoretical explanations but focus more on the ontological variations of
non-Western societies and their relations to images and other expressive forms. The
production of ethnology, even if not exactly engaged in a dialogue with the several
branches of art studies, is essential for the understanding of what can be generally called
the anthropology of art.
In Learning to See in Melanesia (2013), Strathern points to the paradoxes created by
Malcom Kirk’s photographic production, which captured the people of the highlands
of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. Kirk produced a series of portraits of painted and
ornamented individuals, seated or standing against a neutral background. The portraits
aimed to show isolated individuals, subjects whose inner personality were hidden by
thick layers of ornaments and facial painting. Strathern argues that the photographer
actually produced a kind of visual equivocation while registering something that does
not exist for the natives of New Guinea—isolated persons as individuals. The orna-
mented body is actually produced as a kind of extended or collective body for the
rituals of donation and of reception of gifts; people are then composed of other people
in lines of guests and hosts, from whence gifts such as shells, pigs, and yams circulate
throughout the local groups. The garmented and separated individual was therefore an
ontological projection of the photographer, which was unable to articulate local con-
ceptions of the visual.
But is it possible to speak about a local visual theory or is this an artificial projection
of Western intellectual presuppositions on other people’s social realities? “I use ‘theory’
as a provocation for taking seriously what we might otherwise take for granted” answers
Strathern (2013, 24), thus demarcating what is an anthropological thought experiment
with other people’s ideas from what might be their own practical or conceptual con-
cerns. This methodological warning implies a critical revaluation of Western analytical
discourse, from which derives the possibility of understanding other peoples’ ideas and
ways of expression:
 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF 9

An indigenous visual theory? It turns out to be a theory of practice, programs or recipes

for action. We shall find ourselves needing to confront notions of personhood, affect,
power. We may even find ourselves looking at what we could call social technology, tech-
nologies of the self that are technologies of relationships. For Papua New Guinea I shall
thus focus on what people do make to be seen, and ask: When people display objects, arti-
facts, and so forth precisely as “things” to be displayed, what invitation are they making,
what is behind the invitation to the audience to see? (Strathern 2013, 24–25)

The full comprehension of this alternative visual theory depends on a deeper study of
Melanesian ethnographies, but it is possible to see how it is precisely related to local
notions of personhood and other specific dimensions of social agency that are discon-
nected from what modernist aesthetic theory conceives of as “art.” To come back to
Gell’s point, it is impossible to understand the visual register of objects and things in
Melanesia without regard for their attachment to and circulation via social persons.
Images and their expression in objects do not transform themselves into the kind of
isolated items (such as is the case for artworks displayed in a museum) that belong
to the modern sphere of aesthetics—a sphere to be treated discretely, according to the
classical definition of Max Weber, as one among others, such as the economic, political,
and erotic spheres. It is necessary to understand that what could be called art in Melane-
sia, for instance, is not always compatible with Western art institutions, concepts, and
aesthetic categories and that it is dependent on another relational configuration, involv-
ing different ways of connecting people and visual/material productions through social
dynamics.
Images are indeed connected to persons in unexpected ways in several non-Western
societies such as the Yanomami, an Amerindian population of north Amazonia. Writ-
ing about an important concept of Yanomami shamanism, utupë, Viveiros de Castro has
proposed that it is necessary to understand it as an image “that is at once non-iconic and
non-visible” (2007, 19)—or, in other words, an image that is not defined by resemblance
and representation. How should we understand this interpretation, which sounds con-
tradictory to the basic mimetic definition of an image being conceived by its iconic
value? Categories such as utupë are also present in other Amerindian languages and are
generally translated as “vital principle” or “soul” by ethnologists. Indigenous peoples
conceive of shadow, photography, and pictures by this notion, which actually points
to a kind of independent humanoid agent and not to optical or physical phenomena
received by or projected from the subject. This independency is the key to understand-
ing Viveiros de Castro’s point, for an utupë is attached to an animal body without being
necessarily figuratively similar to it. Indeed, the utupë are humanoid images of the
ancestors of the animals that we may see today in the forest, and the shamans can make
them dance as spirits during their rituals. They are therefore simultaneously invisible
to the eyes of common people and different from the animal bodies with which they
nevertheless maintain a relational nexus. Utupë images behave much more like indexes
than like icons, since they are referentially attached to the animals of the forest while
being figuratively different from them.
To the extent that it makes sense at all to speak of an anthropology of art today,
it is necessary to take into account the possibility of alternative, expressive, or visual
theories, as well as the reflections of non-Western thinkers or agents not necessarily
10 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

conceived of as indigenous artists. An important example can be found in the work of

Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomami shaman and international activist, author of The Falling
Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Kopenawa and Albert 2013), from which Viveiros
de Castro elaborated the aforementioned considerations. While visiting the Musée du
Quai Branly in Paris, which inherited the ethnographic collections once hosted at the
Musée de l’Homme (and before that at the Musée du Trocadéro), Kopenawa was trou-
bled by the strange Western habit of collecting things from other people, including the
Yanomami:
Finally, having seen all these things in the museum, I began to wonder if the white people
have also started acquiring Yanomami baskets, bows and arrows, as well as feather orna-
ments because we are already in the process of disappearing ourselves. Why do they so
often ask us for these objects, when the gold prospectors and cattle ranchers are invading
our land? Do they want to get them in anticipation of our death? Will they also want to
take our bones to their cities? Once dead, will we also be exhibited in the class cases of a
museum? This is what all this made me think. I told myself that if we give our curassow
armbands, scarlet macaw tail feathers and annatto dye, our quivers and arrows and let
them be locked in the white people’s houses and museums, we will end up losing our
beauty and become poor hunters. Our toucan tail bunches, our parrot- and guan-wing
feathers, our cock-of-the-rock and sei si bird feathered hides are precious goods that
belong to the yawarioma water beings. By taking them away, the white people also cap-
ture their images and keep them shut up very far from our forest. That is why, as I said,
this will make us both ugly and clumsy at hunting. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 348)

Once again, we can see how nonmodern people’s things are not necessarily con-
ceived as artistic or ethnographic items isolated from persons or as aesthetic products
derived from the inner creative capacities of the modern subject. The Yanomami orna-
ments referred to by Kopenawa actually belong to the water beings; the destiny of the
ornaments can affect the hunters once the ornaments have been removed and trans-
formed as ethnographic specimens by Westerners. Kopenawa’s criticism is at the same
time ontological and political. Departing from other thought categories and modes of
existence, it reflects the challenges for a contemporary anthropology of art, whose con-
ceptual parameters need to allow for a more symmetrical and horizontal engagement
with other people’s ideas and ways of expression.

SEE ALSO: Animism; Archaeological Approaches in Anthropology; Art and Agency;

Art and Participation; Artifacts; Artisan; Authenticity, Cultural; Cognition and
Visual Art; Collecting; Colonialism and the Museum; Conceptualism, Ethnographic;
Contemporary Art; Copies and Fakes; Cross-Cultural Aesthetics; Ethnomusicology;
Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938); Geertz, Clifford (1926–2006); Gell, Alfred (1945–97);
Gender and Material Culture; Gender and Visual Arts; Gift; Iconography and Style;
Jazz; Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009); Lines; Malanggan; Material Culture; Mimesis;
Multimodality; Oral Cultures; Popular Culture, Anthropological Perspectives on; Reli-
gion, Materiality, and Fetishism; Ritual; Rock Art, Paleolithic and Hunter-Gatherer;
Shimmer; Social and Cultural Anthropology; Texture; Theater, Anthropology and;
Tourism, Travel, and Pilgrimage; Visual Anthropology
 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF 11

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Belting, Hans. (2001) 2011. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boas, Franz. (1927) 1955. Primitive Art. New York: Dover.
Chapman, William. 1985. “Arranging Ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers and the Typological Tra-
dition.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by George W.
Stocking Jr., 15–49. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coote, Jeremy. 1992. “‘Marvels of Everyday Vision”: The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the
Cattle-Keeping Nilotes.” In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and
Anthony Shelton, 245–75. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Descola, Philippe. 2010. “L’envers du visible: Ontologie et iconologie [The Reverse of the Vis-
ible: Ontology and Iconology].” In Cannibalismes disciplinaires: Quand l’histoire de l’art et
l’anthropologie se rencontrent [Disciplinary Cannibalisms: When Anthropology and History
of Art Meet], edited by Thierry Dufrêne and Anne-Christine Taylor, 25–37. Paris: Institut
National d’Histoire de l’Art / Musée du Quai Branly.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002. L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon
Aby Warburg. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Published in 2016 in English as The Surviving Image:
Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Translated by Harvey
Mendelsohn. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Firth, Raymond. 1973. Primitive Art and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forge, Anthony. 1967. “The Abelam Artist.” In Social Organization: Essays Presented to Raymond
Firth, edited by Michael R. Freedman, 65–84, 291–94. London: Frank Cass.
Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gell, Alfred. 1999. The Art of Anthropology. London: Athlone Press.
Gow, Peter. 1996. “Against the Motion (1993 Debate: Aesthetics Is a Cross-Cultural Category).”
In Key Debates in Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold, 271–76. London: Routledge.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, eds. 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising
Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim, ed. 1996. Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Jacknis, Ira. 1985. “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of
Anthropology.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by
George W. Stocking Jr., 75–112. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Lafuente, Pablo. 2013. “Introduction: From the Outside In: ‘Magiciens de la terre’ and Two His-
tories of Exhibitions.” In Lucy Steeds et al., Making Art Global (Part 2): “Magiciens de la terre”
(1989), 8–24. London: Afterall.
Layton, Robert. 1981. The Anthropology of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind]. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979. La voie des masques [The Way of Masks]. Paris: Plon.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morphy, Howard. 1996. “For the Motion (1993 Debate: Aesthetics Is a Cross-Cultural Cate-
gory).” In Key Debates in Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold, 255–60. London: Routledge.
Morphy, Howard, and Morgan Perkins, eds. 2006. The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Munn, Nancy. (1973) 1986. Walbiri Iconography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
12 A R T, A N T H R O P O L O G Y OF

Price, Sally. 1991. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Severi, Carlo. 2007. Le principe de la chimère: Une anthropologie de la mémoire. Paris: Éditions
Rue d’Ulm / Musée du Quai Branly. Published in 2015 in English as The Chimera Principle.
Chicago: HAU Books.
Shelton, Anthony. 1992. “Predicates of Aesthetic Judgment: Ontology and Value in Huichol
Material Representations.” In Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and
Anthony Shelton, 209–44. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2013. Learning to See in Melanesia. Manchester: HAU. Accessed March 10,
2017, http://haubooks.org/learning-to-see-in-melanesia.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2007. “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian
Spirits.” Inner Asia 9: 13–33.
Witherspoon, Gary. 1977. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.