Cultural Action & Social Change: The Case of Jamaica; An Essay in Caribbean Cultural Identity by Rex M. Nettleford (review)

160 Books JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, U,S.A, 1978. 289 pp. $26.50. Reviewed by Gifford Phillips' The editors of the first book, an art historian and an archeologist (University of Leicester, England), were also the conveners of a symposium held at the University in January 1975. The papers presented are published in this book in slightly abridged form. The authors comprise 23 archeologists, art historians and artists, principally from Great Britain, the British Commonwealth and the U.S.A. The purpose of the symposium in the words of its organizers was 'to offer a forum for those who study art and those who produce it' and 'to see if it was possible to achieve ... a happy interdisciplinary marriage between art and archeology'. Judging from these essays the happiness of the 'marriage' is in doubt: The partners appear unequal, with archeology overwhelming art and almost completely subordinating it. Regardless of what its organizers may have intended, nearly all the participants seem to have assumed that an archeological context was proper for the symposium. Hence even those outside the discipline generally conform to this approach. What readers will find here then is mostly a view of art in society that accords with the working goals of anthropology. For field anthropologists art is valued most as a fertile source of information, containing both hard facts and clues, about the culture of a particular society-usually a primitive society. The book is filled with scholarly examples of this approach. George Swinton, studying the contemporary art of the Inuit (Canadian Eskimo), concludes that the wide variety of forms found in this art reflects the individualism of the tribe. David Frankel, examining prehistoric Cyprian pottery, finds clues to the social relationships within Cypriot groups in the way pots have been decorated. James C. Faris, looking at the Contemporary art of the tribesmen of Southwest Nuba (Africa) as reflected in their personal dress, finds a correlation between their bodily makeup, jewelry, color of clothing, etc. and their relative leadership role in the tribe. Anthropologists today are divided into two camps representing different approaches, functionalism and structuralism, and this division is reflected in their views on art. Functionalists , following Malinowski, see the character of objects, including art, as developing out of the purposes for which they are used within a society. Hence, functionalists see art as originating in the artifacts that a tribal society uses for grain storage, cooking and warfare. In time, even a primitive society may come to value art for its own sake. But functionalists point out that art-making seldom becomes a separate activity but continues to be incorporated into the making of pots, tools, spears, jewelry, etc. Structuralists (Claude Levi-Strauss is the most quoted anthropologist) believe that cultural systems have an underlying structure that governs social relations within a tribe and among different tribes. Thus an understanding of tribal customs requires a knowledge of pertinent structure and cannot be gained simply through a knowledge of the economic and social functions of tribal components. It is thought that cultural structures closely follow the pattern of linguistic structures (e.g., divided into signifying and signified elements ). Such structures are revealed in tribal totems that contain symbols (e.g., names of animals and plants) that signify tribal identification and/or kinship relationships. Structuralists view art as essentially totemic in character, its purpose being to mediate between the natural and the cultural. Art then takes its place as an agent of communication within a culture. This is a semiotic view of art that has a substantial following in western Europe and has recently gained adherents in the U.S.A. Both functionalist and structuralist points of view are represented in this book, with the functionalist view predominating. The emphasis, however, in most of the essays is more on data from the field than on theoretical analyses. What I missed here is a projection of anthropological theorizing onto the level of advanced technological societies. '11777 San Vincente Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A. Only one essay, The Modern Artist In Modern Society by Josef Herman, even attempts to do so. Herman, perhaps unintentionally, points up the shortcoming of most of this book. He...