Anthropology of art

The anthropology of art is a social science which historically clung to study the production of plastic and pictorial human societies 'traditional', "without writing" or "primitive." Like other disciplines or within the anthropology (as the ethnology and sociology), there has in recent decades to expand its field of study, and today it is rather an analysis cultural symbolic and artistic production in all its forms.

The anthropology of art is distinguished from the sociology of art in that it emphasizes not the economics, politics and media arts productions, but rather it examines the meaning that they can take in their culture of origin and they are not studied for their intrinsic value, as would be the case in an art critic.

The question of the object

Velvet's Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo

The anthropology of art is at its foundation faced with a question epistemological simple: What is the art?

After numerous attempts to resolve this question, Erwin Panofsky has finally proposed an acceptable definition of anthropology. He suggested reverting to the original meaning of this concept, using the Latin word ars, artis, which has long kept two distinct meanings:
the set of rules and techniques, that thought should be implemented to achieve the knowledge and represent reality.
the ability of conscious and deliberate man "to produce objects in the same way that nature produces phenomena"

This double articulation evidence that "the study report that each culture maintains between these two aspects of the concept art - between certain forms of knowledge and some technical design and production of images - is the subject anthropology of art


History

It is possible to trace historically this particular curiosity of Europeans for goods produced by companies across the world. Additional observations fairly quickly, as and measurement periods, the status of objects in their eyes moving from the status of mere curiosity to the work of art, then the work of art to that of 'tool, ornament, or decoration of everyday life.


Origins: the colonial period

Rock painting, Australian Aborigines

Ceramic Nazca polychrome shaped fish

This was the fourteenth and fifteenth century that navigators and traders brought back evidence of the existence of unknown worlds: Marco Polo returned from Asia, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan completes the first round of globe. These early witnesses unusual, were shown throughout Europe in the private collections of royal rulers, such as those of the kings of France, or the family of Medici in Florence. The intellectuals of the Renaissance had time to wonder about this "genius of the inhabitants of those distant countries" they were in fact already seen as "works beautifully finished for unknown artists, but as imperfect evidence of early stages of development that leads to Western civilization

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the period of colonialism led to a widespread accumulation. Indeed, in order to study these works of art he was able to collect, especially since it was admitted that these people had no idea of the value of their productions. Thus, scientific expeditions were financed by the colonial states, and often led to practices of looting and "requisition". Explorers, traders, missionaries and colonial administrators also took part, giving a character widespread ownership of the cultural heritage of non-Western Europeans by The Dakar-Djibouti mission, conducted in 1935 by Marcel Griaule, illustrates this scientific statement yet remaining in the twentieth century to collect objects to study the cultures, the beliefs, social organization and richness of African art. Such practices were also criticized by Michel Leiris, a member of the expedition itself

Ultimately, some of these objects were exhibited at the Universal Exhibition of London in 1851, but were eventually forgotten for the great majority of them.


Evolutionism and primitiveness

The pioneering work of Gottfried Semper on the origin of art gave rise to this sub discipline of anthropology, although his perspective is evolutionary. The first art is addressed through a comparative history of styles, without necessarily being confined to a search of the origins of artistic representation. According to him, each style has not witnessed an evolution cultural ( "not found in childhood styles), but rather summarizes the technical subject to changes and the mental capacity of the organization 'space implies that any representation.

Franz Boas advance for his part that there is art when it is mastery of technique. Hence the idea that an art object is not only a utilitarian function, but may also become the model of style. It would depend on both the culture surrounding and type of representation of space, the latter being crucial in the eyes of the author. It says in effect that there are two types of representation of an object: one that seeks to imitate faithfully what the eye sees, and that which is as would mind. Thus, F. Boas notes that within the same production, traditional societies are able to combine different perspectives and multiple points of view. "Primitive art is neither naive nor primitive, in choosing a specific variant of the organization of space, he constructs the complex where our gaze is used to simplify"

The character of evolution of this analysis is mainly embodied by the idea that to produce the art, a company must have acquired in their culture specific skills. This evokes the concept of design space present in these two authors. We can, however, that when Franz Boas gives this concept a function of analysis, rather than the role of selection criterion, it tries to break away from this paradigm. Indeed in this way, he manages to show us how a knowledge of styles and techniques in the study of primitive arts can teach us about distant societies.


Contemporary Research

The anthropology of art today explores several areas of research include:
study of the meaning of art objects in the context that is theirs. See example in this regard the work of A. Forge and D. Biebuyck.
the study of artistic style as a system of communication and independent service. See example in this regard the work of G. Bateson, A. Forge, E. Carpenter. We note also that in this type of anthropological research on art, it appears new objects of study: the oral tradition, the dance, music ...


Aesthetics and museum


Following the huge backlog of items that have been raised policies colonial, huge collections have stayed many years in the storerooms of museums of Europe. Discipline ethnological has also built in a fairly close parallel with the development museum: in fact, these institutions were the only possible locations for training candidates for the profession ethnologist at this time when it did not of academic life. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, faithful to the idea of evolution, were those where the artistic productions of ethnographic collections were attached to the museums of antiquities and natural history.

Currently, he is regularly issue highlights many of these collections forgotten to expose to the public for him to discover the exotic aestheticism or duty to remember these crops forgotten. However, these initiatives face several major ideological problems, which include for example:
How relevant criterion should be retained in the selection of a few parts out of the shadows, among the thousands of others?
What sense does it, considering that Carpenter as "a sculpture before an object is an act, and then therefore" it is strictly speaking nonsense to believe that we visit put in the presence of primitive art
what position to adopt vis-à-vis these objects one does not always legitimate?

We can note for example that it is these same issues that have marked the debates around the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly, commonly called primitive arts museum.