Abstract
Abstract To construct such a theory it is first of all necessary to define certain theoretical entities (terms) and relations. Just now, I suggested that such a theory would ‘look like’ familiar anthropological theories, such as the theory of exchange, or the theory of kinship, but that it would replace some of the terms of such theories with ‘art objects’.However, this raises immediate difficulties, in that ‘art objects’, ‘works of art’, or ‘artworks’ may form a readily identifiable class of objects in some art systems, but this is hardly true of all of them, especially not in anthropological contexts. In effect, if we make ‘the ,work of art’ the corner-stone of the anthropological theory of art, the theory itself becomes instantly otiose, for reasons which have already been alluded to.
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