Art and the Anthropologists

Abstract

The relation of art and the anthropologists has been a rather curious one. Up to about 1930, the atmosphere of self-confident and self-taught eclecticism, characteristic of Victorian intellectual life, continued to hang over social anthropology, and favoured the keeping up of a fairly wide range of interests, including some awareness of primitive art, meaning the art of those peoples outside the great literate civilisations, and there are books from this period by anthropologists, such as Boas and Haddon, which are still of value. From 1930 to 1960, the emergence of social anthropology as a profession coincided with a virtual disappearance of interest in the visual arts. Perhaps, just as puritanism tends to go with respectability, so an academic puritanism, remorselessly pruning side-interests, tends to appear as the road to academic respectability; again, the division, particularly marked in Britain, between university departments and museums, and the classification of social anthropology as one of the social sciences, thus approaching it to economics and sociology, and distancing it from fine arts and linguistics, must have been significant.From about 1960 onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in the anthropology of art. We have had a number of valuable symposia in which both anthropologists and art historians have taken part, notably The Artist and Tribal Society (edited Marian W. Smith), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (edited June Helm), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (edited Daniel Biebuyck), African Art and Leadership (edited H. M. Cole and D. Fraser), The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited W. L. d’Azevedo), and the book I am particularly considering here, Primitive Art and Society (edited by Anthony Forge).