Table Of ContentANTHROPOLOGIES
OF ART
Edited by Mariët Westermann
ANTHROPOLOGIES
OF ART
I /Al\ I
ANTHROPOLOGIES
Edited by Marîët Westermann
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference
“Anthropologies of Art,” held 25-26 April 2003 at the Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. For information on programs and
publications at the Clark, visit www.clarkart.edu.
© 2005 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the written permission of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
Curtis R. Scott, Director of Publications
David Edge, Graphic Design and Production Manager
Diane Gottardi, Layout r
Mary Christian, Copy Editor
Printed by the Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts
Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
ISBN (Clark) 0-931102-55-3
ISBN (Yale) 0-300-10353-0
Printed and bound in the United States of America
10 987654321
Title page and divider page illustration: Francis Frith, detail of The Rameseum of El-Kurneh, Thebes,
First View, from A Series of Twenty Photographic Views, c. i860. Albumen silver print from glass negative.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark Conference (2003 : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute)
Anthropologies of art / edited by Mariet Westermann.
p. cm. — (Clark studies in the visual arts)
“Based on the proceedings of the Clark conference “Anthropologies of art”, held 25-26 April 2003
at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts”----T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-931102-55-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Art and anthropology—Congresses. I. Westermann, Mariet. II. Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute. III. Title. IV. Series.
N72.A56C57 2003
7O4.O3---dc22
2OO4O4542I
Contents
Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology vii
Manet Westermann
Part One : Entwinement and Divergence
Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry 3
David Freedberg
4 On the Margins of Recorded History: Anthropology and Primitivism 26
Francesco Pellizzi
Toward an Anthropology of the Image 41
Hans Belting
Linger or Flee? Pieter Aertsen,“lguegha Uhe,” Michel Leiris 59
Ikem Stanley Okoye
Transcending Places: A Hybrid, Multiplex Approach to Visual Culture 89
Suzanne Preston Blier
Part Two : Local Practice,Transcultural Theory
The Functions of Chinese Painting:Toward a Unified Field Theory 111
Jonathan Hay
Seeing Indigenous Australian Art 124
Howard Morphy
The Knowledge of Women 143
Sarah Brett-Smith
But Is It Art? The Complex Roles of Images in Moche Culture, 164
an Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast
Steve Bourget
Anthropologies and Histories of Art: 178
A View from the Terrain of Native North American Art History
Janet Catherine Berio
Part Thr ee: Art as Anthropology
Reconfiguring the Ground: Art and the Visualization of Anthropology 195
Anna Grimshaw
History Now: Post-Tribal Art 221
Shelly Errington
The Value of Disciplinary Difference: Reflections on Art History and 242
Anthropology at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century
Ruth B. Phillips '
Contributors 260
Introduction: The Objects of Art History and Anthropology
Mariët Westermann
The Clark Conference “Anthropologies of Art,” held in April 2003, brought together
art historians and anthropologists who have investigated intersections and diver
gences of their disciplines, either through their particular historical or cultural studies
or through their methodological inquiries. A striking theme of the gathering, both
inside and outside the auditorium, was the occasions rarity. Although art history and
anthropology have looked over each others shoulders throughout their histories, and
never more so than in this inter- and cross-disciplinary moment, they have seldom
engaged in a sustained exchange about their disciplinary motivations, protocols, and
boundaries.1 As an edited record of the conference, this book hopes to open up new
channels of communication at a time when each discipline is looking to the other for
culturally specific ways of speaking about art and for the possibility of understanding
art as a cross-cultural and trans-historical human activity.
This essay introduces the questions that framed the conference for anthro
pologists and art historians of quite different stripes, and it outlines some of the en-
twinements, divergences, and complementarities of art history and anthropology.
The papers gathered here did some or all of the above in more specific terms. Taken
apart and together, they instantiate how anthropologists and art historians can
sharpen their focus and raise their ambitions in conversation with each other.
Art History—Anthropology—Visual Anthropology
It should be noted at the outset that art history and anthropology have been seeking
out the other for quite different methodological needs. The self-aware art history of the
past two decades has looked both backward and outward to discern its disciplinary
objectives. Many places it has looked—in art history’s nineteenth-century origins, in
the cultural history and new historicism so formative of social art history, in the
phenomenology embraced to avert the Scylla of arid formalism and Charybdis of
contextual determinism, in the postcolonial exposure of structural Eurocentrism in the
humanities—it has found anthropology and ethnography.2 Art history’s anthropolog
ical flirtations have been seen to mirror those of contemporary art and art criticism.3
Pervasive as art history’s anthropological turn seems to be, it has had a provisional,
intuitive quality, particularly for historians of Western, Islamic, and Asian art.
viii MariëtWestermann
The fieldwork and theoretical frameworks traditionally employed in the
study of African, pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art are often
aligned with anthropology’s ethnographic practices. Many art historians and an
thropologists working in those fields have thought hard about their disciplinary po
sitions, and they were thus well represented in the conference. Howard Morphy’s
phenomenological confrontation with Yolngu art, Sarah Brett-Smith’s analysis of
Bamana mudcloth patterns as registers of female modes of knowledge, and Steve
Bourget’s archaeological reconstruction of the role of images in ancient Moche cul
ture could qualify equally as art history or anthropology, depending on one’s disci
plinary perspective. If asked, Morphy would self-identify as anthropologist,
Brett-Smith as art historian, Bourget as anthropologist-archaeologist-art historian.
By training and by range of area interests—from Maya hieroglyphs and Plains In
dian drawings to the gendered history of textiles and the historiography of non
Western subdisciplines—the art historian Janet Berio has- found herself inevitably
committed to the practices of art history as well as anthropology, experiencing both
as “inventive, experimental, and open to interdisciplinarity.” Jonathan Hay’s ambi
tious attempt to bracket off a millennium and a half of pre-modern Chinese paint
ing from adjacent forms of cultural production, on the basis of function, owes as
much to the rigors of structural anthropology and sociological communication the
ory as it does to postmodern art history.4
For all historians of art engaged in some measure with anthropology, the
discipline’s sophisticated understanding of social processes, cultic rituals, exchange
mechanisms, and mythic self-narration has held out a promise of structural under
standing of how images (and not necessarily works of art) are encoded to mean
something to their makers or consumers. Not surprisingly, the cultural anthropol
ogy that understands art as semiotic system has been particularly attractive to art
historians trained in decoding complex iconographies and pictorial narratives.5
If art history has been provisional about the anthropology in its craft, an
thropology has long studied and debated art and its role in culture, almost always
understood as the culture of non-Western, pre-industrial, pre-bureaucratic states.6
Pleading in this book for art historians and anthropologists “lingering or hanging
out in the oddly populated corridors” between our disciplinary houses, Ikem
Stanley Okoye observes “that only a small number of those cultural anthropolo
gists interested in art or representation ever turned their attention to the art of
Western Europe and North America, perhaps in an eerie display of reverence.”
Anthropologists (and occasionally art historians) certainly have widened their
