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ANTHROPOLOGY, ART, AND AESTHETICS
Edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton
Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Cultural Forms. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992 (hardcover edition), 1994 (softcover edition). 281 pp., 69 b/w & 15 color photos, 3 maps. $69 hardcover, $19.95 softcover.
This stimulating work is the product of two seminars and lectures organized by the editors at Oxford University in 1985. Comprising ten chapters by various anthropologists and ethnologists and one by an art historian, with an introduction by the editors, the book indicates the growing interest of British and Commonwealth scholars in non-Western art. Two general papers on the anthropology of art are followed by eight specific studies; only the paper by Jeremy Coote has an African focus. Yet, many of the ideas and arguments in this collection concern matters now being discussed by Africanist art scholars: the nature of aesthetics, the suspicion of Western art and aesthetic concepts and whether these concepts have any utility at all, the place of meaning and symbolism in art study, and how best to study rapidly changing non-Western art forms. The papers are sophisticated and detailed in argument, drawing strongly on the changing and broadening British anthropological tradition of recent years.
Editors Coote and Anthony Shelton emphasize a concern with context rather than with stylistic analysis and classification, or "the identification of schools, or the oeuvre of individual artists" (p. 6)--a surprisingly narrow anthropological conception of art from an American perspective, where scholarship in art history and that in anthropology are converging. But the compactness of approach has advantages in developing theory and concept a characteristic of British social anthropology until recent years. The chapters do, with several exceptions, tend to stress the social aspects of art.
In their introduction the editors note that the anthropology of art has reflected rather than influenced mainstream anthropology, and that it has generally been seen as being of secondary importance to other subfields of the discipline. Their emphasis is on the importance of objects as objects rather than on functional or structuralist analyses (which seems to contradict what they have written previously). Function and the meaning art communicates should be secondary. Nevertheless some of the papers do deal with these, and it is not always clear what the editors...