Abstract
This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life.
Highlights
Is it ever permissible to infer from style to context? Namely, is it ever justifiable to treat the character of a collective visual style as revelatory of the collective’s norms, institutions, or attitudes? The question is both alluring
This helps explain why theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis has been in steady decline post-World War II in social and historical sciences, the trend intensifying at least since the 1980s
There has been no recent discussion of style comparable in its prominence to, for example, debates on ‘isochrestic’ variation in archaeology (Sackett 1985, 1986, 1990; Wiessner 1985, 1990) or on the expressive power of Oceanic styles in anthropology (Forge 1979; O’Hanlon 1992; Roscoe 1995; O’Hanlon and Roscoe 1995)
Summary
Is it ever permissible to infer from style to context? Namely, is it ever justifiable to treat the character of a collective visual style as revelatory of the collective’s norms, institutions, or attitudes? The question is both alluring. It is alluring because to answer it in the positive is to suggest that analyzing visual styles of material cultures may provide independent insight into these cultures’ circumstances, even when little is known about them otherwise It is controversial because the story of efforts at such a stylistic analysis is rather unwholesome; what it reveals is a reliance on holistic, essentializing, and often racialized notions of collective style as expressive of culture. Instead of defending the prospects of somehow rescuing the largely discredited line of reasoning, I offer a different framing of the problem that will dispense with the unwanted ideological baggage This re-framing proposes that inference from style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. I show how these parameters are applied in instrumental structure analysis that infers from morphology to function (Part 4) to argue that the universal non-conventional link between style and context should be framed in terms of instrumentality (Part 5)
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