Anthropology, Art andPerception 1

What difference does the analysis of artmake to the study of anthropology?

University of St. Andrews

School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Department of Social Anthropology

Student ID: 140018431

Word Count: 3545

The main concern of analysis of art and at the same time the

main problem of the art world in our days, is the understanding of

what art is. Apart from this, the anthropology of art tries to

find ways of looking for art in the groups of people, that are

being studied, some of them not having the concept of art as part

of their language. Subsequently one may question: how can we as

anthropologists understand and categorize indigenous art with

inspiration from our western apprehension of art?

This essay will discuss the implications of the analysis of

art on the study of anthropology behind three important aspects of

the art world, mirroring them into the study of anthropology of

art. I focus on what can be called artwork, the relationship

between aesthetics and art, giving importance also to the role and

agency of the artist in the creation of an art piece. These

important features that are mostly considered in the western art

world are afterwards examined through the eyes of the anthropology

of art, with examples from different social groups such as: Dinka,

Fang, Anga, Gawa, Sogyle and so on. The theoretical debate starts

from Plato, Kant and carries on with Danto, Morphy and Gell, with

a proposition for an anthropology of art as free from western

conceptualization and sympathetic with the meaning and utility

given by the natives to the piece of art. This understanding is

based on a phenomenological approach and in disagreement with the

semiotic analysis (study that is based on the breakdown of

symbols).

I. How can aesthetics and art work together with the

anthropology of art?

If one were to discuss the implications of art in

anthropology, it is vital to look at where the concept of art

comes from. People started to be concerned with art, more

precisely aesthetics, when they gained free time to think about

the complexity of the world. Before the 16th century, art (artem)

denoted a skill or craft. After this, the concept evolved having

almost no meaning in our days. Art can be anything and anyone.

As a short history of the idea of art, Plato’s understanding

of art was as a representation or mimesis, an imitation of the

world. He referred to it as a shadow of the shadow of reality. In

this view, art cannot construct any type of knowledge nor can the

artists create a form of knowledge. (Plato 2012) Looking at

beauty, or aesthetics, Plato did not associate either with art –

this had for him (in Republica) a more erotic meaning, associated

to the body. Moving on to Kant, his main interest was a judgment

of aesthetics. He defines art as: “a kind of representation that

is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless

promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable

communication” (Kant 2007). This description of art is part of

Kant’s bigger and largely ambitious philosophical movement to find

a link between morality, scientific knowledge and faith. As a more

contemporary view, one can look at Ryan Garden who speaks about

“art as everything and everything as art”. This interpretation of

art as everything begins with the revolution that Marcel Duchamp

started with his “ready made” art objects – most well known being

The Fountain – and continues with Damien Hirst and other modern

artists. The denotation of art was detached from the craft, the

skill of making something, from the imitation of the world to

concepts. In modern times, in the West, the creation of a piece of

art is related with giving a non-conventional meaning to

something. It can be anything, from an object, an animal to a

human and so forth. If we look at the “evolution”, or maybe the

changes and movements that occurred during history, in what we

call art today, they are in strong relations with the views that

people had on the once world. Even so, these views define more the

western view on art. Is art only for the West or it can be found

in all cultures? How can we, as anthropologists, understand a

concept that is mostly used in our part of the world in order to

mirror it in someone else’s culture? Is the need for aesthetic

judgment present in any other parts of the world? If so, how can

we as anthropologists grasp its meaning?

It seems, at least for me, unnatural to discuss art in a

society that does not have the concept embedded in their culture

and language. If it is to take the phenomenological attitude to

research, I do not see a clear path of how anthropology of art can

come out of the western context and project (or look for) art in a

culture where the term does not exist and propose an understanding

of the concept from its informants. However, this can be argued

and the answer to the question “how can we understand other

people’s art” has to come (in my point of view) from the people -

whom we study as anthropologists.

Taking into account the current views on art, as allowing art

objects to be everything, surely can lead us as anthropologists to

see any object, ritual, dance, body decoration, way of walking and

so on, as art. If everything is art then the concept has no value

and it is a meaningless term. For the next part of the essay I

will focus on aesthetics and build up to the anthropology of art.

The proposition to look into aesthetics comes from Kant and his

idea that the sensibility for aesthetics is present in every

society. (Kant 2007) If it is to think about what is beauty in the

west, it is an intersubjective construct.(Toren 2012) I see

something as being beautiful with reference to the way other

people see it and by combining perspectives, I have found my own

view, but always in relations to the views of others.

Nonetheless, I do not want to put a sign of equality in between

beauty and aesthetics, the explanation from above shows how a

group of people form aesthetic judgment in intersubjective

relations. Even if there is a way of looking at a common ground

of aesthetics in different groups, there is no way of finding a

common ground for artifacts or artworks. If there is a mutual

concern with aesthetics, then the anthropologist has to look for

this in the group of people he/she is studying. By adopting a

phenomenological perspective one can try to understand how a group

of people refers to the objects around them and look for those who

do not have a utilitarian (or partial) function and then grasp the

meaning offered to them in terms of aesthetics. This can refer to

the colors that have been used, to materials, to techniques and so

on. These kinds of objects can be empowered with a greater

aesthetics value that it first seen as having. As an example,

Jeremy Coote discusses the way people perceive oxen in Dinka.

Coote argues for an anthropology of aesthetics that “consists in

the comparative study of valued perceptual experience in different

societies”(Coote 1992, p 253). Coming back to Dinka, the way they

decorate their cattle is informed by a specific “cultural set of

characteristics regarding color, pattern, shape and so on” which

extends to a more vast and complex attitude in their everyday

life. In specific rituals or with specific occasions, Dinka people

decorate their bodies similar with their ox, “hold ox postures in

their dance, select adornments which emphasize light/dark

contrast, and convert themselves with ash, which recalls the

whitish of the oxen”(ibid, 267). Not only those oxen, according to

Coote, have aesthetic value and are a symbol of their community,

they are also a source of imagination and creativity in their

traditional poems (Coote 1992). Having this example in mind, Coote

implies that Dinka do not have art but they have a specific

aesthetic taste. This view implies an opinion on aesthetics as

dissociated from art, an argument that is also sustained by

Zangwill(1986) and Diffey(1986). In the meantime, aesthetics for

Coote is prior to art. This sensibility for aesthetics should be

referred to all that is in the world and not just for made up

objects. His observations for art had a Kantian approach,

according to Gell(2006), which makes his description of aesthetics

as part of “the branch of philosophy concerned with judgments of

beauty or sublimity”(ibid, p 221). Kant in his judgment of taste

proposes a divorce of aesthetics from utilitarianism. Looking back

at Dinkaland, the oxen are not kept only for their aesthetic

value; they are used in society for different purposes. For

example: young guys impress young girls with their ox in order to

get married. As a utilitarian view, this can be comparable with

guys attracting girls with their expensive cars and luxury houses

in the western society. Another problem with Coote’s view is his

closed eye for Dinka art. Even if he is against the old school of

anthropology of art, he is not escaping its rules. He does not see

that Dinka people have art because he considers art as something

collectable to be put in a museum and there is nothing to collect

in their culture. (ibid 225) What he also misses is the fact that

Dinka is a nomadic population, which cannot be seen as collecting

artifacts to move them around the land. The art of Dinka is the

people and the cattle in themselves.(ibid 225) As Gell argues,

there cannot be an anthropology of aesthetics without and

anthropology of art, they complement each other and they are

indivisible. Also, regarding aesthetics, people always have

reasons for objects to look one way or another, they cannot be

“said to have an aesthetic value simply by virtue … that things

look one way or another”(Gell 2006), p 231). As a short resume,

aesthetics and art have to work together in order to grasp an

anthropological meaning from the artwork. The movements of western

arts affects at all times the way anthropologists view the artwork

in the group they are researching. If it was to do anthropology

approximately 500 years ago, painted walls and painted/sculptured

bodies would have been what the researchers would have looked for,

now it can probably be anything. Coming back at Kant and Coote,

looking at aesthetics in terms of beauty is not a sustainable

method for anthropology. Baudez argues for “anthropologists to

look for meaning” and leave “art history to be concerned with

form”, in the same paper he suggests a drift from beauty/no-beauty

to aesthetics as a form of generating emotions.(Beaudez 2002, p

140) Even so, having all these ways of viewing artwork, I am still

not at peace with what the concept refers to and how we can define

a piece of art in a non-western context.

II. What is and art work?

In order to define an artwork and to be able to see it as such

in a researched community (maybe as a pattern – or structure as

Levi-Strauss (1969) puts it) one must look at how art is

analyzed/described in the land where it was conceived. In the

contemporary western context, art is what the art world says it

is. The people involved in making and criticizing art are those

who have a word to define the concept. One can look at many

different aspects of the artwork – it can be color (Alfremov),

form (Raphael), style (Brâncuși), shadows (Rembrandt), given

meaning (Hirst), live performance (Abramovic) and many other

features. Another important characteristic for the western art

world is quantity. If it is to know how many paintings a painter

painted during his lifetime and all of them are located and

valuable, the prices for these paintings will be more financially

esteemed and they will gain more value. Meanwhile, the art world

values objects/performances that can be collectable and put in an

art gallery/museum/exhibition and maybe traded. In modern times,

the art world started to shift to abstract/conceptual art, ready

made objects (Duchamp) that are not valued for their aesthetics or

creativity, but for the meaning the artist gave to them in

relation to a historical context. As an example, one can look at

the work of Damien Hirst and his most well known piece of art –

the giant shark in a tank with formaldehyde entitled: “The

impossibility of death in the mind of someone living”. The art

world had troubles putting it in a box as being high art, medium

art, low art etc, in the end they decided that it is art of some

kind and all his work of art is presently valued at £215 mil. As

so far, here in the western society we know how to deal with art,

we have art schools, we teach people how to make art, how to

understand creativity, we inspire them with our long History in

art and even if we do not know exactly how to deal with the new

movements we do our best and always find a good deal. The question

now arises on how do we deal with “art” in a space where there is

no institution of art and no concept of art. Morphy (1994) and

Danto (1964) both reject the idea of art as being whatever the art

world says it is, on the grounds that there is no art world in

some societies where anthropologists do their researchs. In the

aid of anthropology of art, Danto(1964) comes with two theories:

interpretive and institutional. According to the first theory,

indigenous art can be called art only by our meanings of what is

art, because anthropologists see it as such. The institutional

theory of art claims “that there is no quality in the art object,

as material vehicle, that definitively qualifies it to be, or not

to be an artwork” (Gell 2006, p 188). The differences between the

two relate on historicity, the institutional theory is not looking

at a historical interpretation. Morphy comes and builds on Danto’s

theories and proposes a dualistic definition for the artwork: “art

objects are those having semantic and/or aesthetic properties that

are used for presentational or representational purposes” (Morphy

1994, p655). Following his thoughts, artwork is seen as being

formed of objects that are inscribed with meaning or that are made

to “provoke a culturally endorsed aesthetic response” (Gell 2006,

p 5) or both of them together. Gell rejects all of the theories

mentioned above and debates for a free anthropological theory of

art without any pre-given lines or script to follow. He rejects

the theories based on his view on the aesthetic properties that

cannot be abstracted “from the social processed surrounding the

deployment of candidate art objects in specific social

settings”(ibid, p5). As an example, Luba-Sogyle Masks are not made

with a particular aesthetic interest in design, they are supposed

to be frightful and impose social control and defuse disruptive

elements in their society. The masks are well known in the

anthropology of art, they do not have to be related as beautiful

masks but powerful and frightening masks. In Gell’s view, the

anthropologist has to get rid of the aesthetic judgment and relate

to artwork from the point of view of the meaning that his

informants attribute to the mask and what role does it play in

their society (ibid, p 6). Gell also rejects Morphy’s idea of art

as “visual code for the communication of meaning”(ibis). Gell does

not take into consideration symbolism and puts emphasis on

“agency, intention, causation, result and transformation”(ibis),

as an alternative to the semiotic analysis. Gell suggests that his

view is more anthropological because he sees to look into the

“practical mediatory role of art objects in the social

process”(ibis) opposed to the artwork as compared with texts to be

semiotically analyzed. His proposition for a new view on a free

anthropological art theory suggests that the art object does not

have to be defined before being in the field. It does not have to

satisfy any “aesthetician, philosopher, art historian or anybody

else”(ibid 7). There should be no advanced decision about the

nature of the artwork because it is embedded in the social matrix

and this has to be understood prior to categorization. For such an

instance, anything can be related as anthropological art (from

bodies to masks, traps, and so on) but it has to be understood and

viewed through the eyes of the artists, while adopting a

phenomenological perspective. To give an example, one can look at

the way Fang people create their traps and how these can be

regarded as artwork(Gell 2006, p 200). One can argue that traps

are art objects in themselves, even taken out of their context.

However, Gell claims that they personify ideas and express

meanings, “because a trap by it’s very nature, is a transformed

representation of its maker, the hunter, and they prey animals,

its victims, and their mutual relationship which among hunting

people is a … quintessential social role”(ibid, p 203). In the

same token, these traps can be for Fang people images of the

ancestors, because they express inherited ancestral power. Traps,

among Anga people, are believed to be similar to some of the

western fantasies of moving statues or moving pictures. According

to Lemmonnier (1993) they believe traps move or attract animals by

the use of ancestral power.

III. How can we relate to artists in the anthropological

study?

Assuming that this essay has so far established what could be

considered an artwork, in the process of art analysis, the artist

takes a very important part in the understanding of the art

object. The artist is the person valued for what he/she creates. A

piece of art brings value to the artist and creates a name for

him/her. However, the converse is also true, as soon as an artist

has a name, everything that he creates afterwards has value and

prestige, even if it is considered by art historians as of little

value. One can look at Van Gogh, his first paintings are

spectacular, the latter ones not so much. As instance: his clown

painting is not as good as his first paintings, but it is valuable

because the artist put his brush and name on it. From the western

point of view, the artist is the one who creates, who brings to

life his/her piece of art, making it or just conceptualizing it.

One would argue that this agency of the artist has to be taken

into consideration in the anthropology of art. Even if the first

impression for the anthropologist would be to find the craftsman

or manufacturer of the piece of art, this cannot be done at all

times. In some cultures, objects that we call art have no creator

or they magically created themselves. They are objects “brought to

life by divine origins” (Gell 2006, p 23) and sometimes the

origins of the artwork can be forgotten, taking in this way the

agency from the artist and redeeming power in itself, the art

object remains self-sufficient in some societies. As examples, one

can look at the way Gawa people paint their boats, how Kurdish

create their carpets or again the example of the Fang traps.

Nonetheless, when these art objects are brought in the west and

valued, no one knows who made them, it is mostly known what part

of the world they come from but they do not need the agency of the

artist. These art objects (mask, ships, tools, shells) by the art

world as primitive and they will probably never have the same

value as the western art has on the art market. We, as

anthropologists, should never rely on the agency of the artist or

the actual origin of what we consider art. The focus must be on

the importance of the object in itself and the history, meaning

and attributes that are inscribed/given on/to the object by the

social group that we study.

As discussed so far, understanding what art is outside the

western context (and not only) brings up problems of

identification of the artwork and also with grasping its meaning.

The anthropology of art can project the idea of art in the group

of people the researcher studies, by understanding through a

phenomenological approach how natives see and relate to whatever

the researcher identifies as art. The western analysis of art

offers ways of identifying art objects, such as looking into

aesthetics, at the artist, the way the art object was created and

what informed the artists’ creativity. If this would be accepted

in a western context, for indigenous art the situation is changing

and the anthropologist has to perceive the art object through the

eyes of his/her informants. However, for a more anthropological

inside, one can follow Gell’s “free theory” which makes more

sense, freeing the researcher from putting art into boxes. The

analysis of art should only conceptualize the discipline and give

a foundation to the researcher, without imposing a frame of

action. It can be compared with psychology. In the same way, the

discipline offers insights of how humans form meaning, how to

understand the consciousness and so on, but the actual situations

and methods of research belongs to the anthropologist who only

borrows ideas and concepts from psychology.

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aesthetics and the cattle-keeping Nilotes’, in J. Coote and A.

Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon

Press) ;

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Press;

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Hirsch (eds) , Oxford: Berg;

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Dickie, G. (1974), Art and The Aesthetics: An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca:

Cornell University Press;

Kant, I. (2007)[1790], The Critique of Judgment, Oxford: Oxford

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People and Food: Bicultural Interaction and Applications to

development, Paris: UNESCO MAB;

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Plato (2012), Republic, London: Penguin Classics;

Morphy, H. (1991), Ancestral Connections: Art and Aboriginal System of Knowledge,

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