Anthropology & Art

Review article: ANTHROPOLOGY AND ART JOAN M. VASTOKAS Dorothy Jean Ray, Eskimo Masks: Art and Ceremony, Toronto-Montreal, McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1967. In the past twenty years, in Canada as well as abroad, the arts of such non-western peoples as the Africans, South Pacific Islanders, and American Indians, have gained in popularity among the general public, among collectors, and among writers on art. This increasing universalism in the appreciation as well as in the scholarly study of the arts of mankind finds its origin in the age of exploration when such men as Captain James Cook circled the world, discovered new peoples, and returned to Europe with objects of native manufacture. These objects stimulated the interest of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century collectors of curiosities but maintained the status of exotica throughout most of the nineteenth century until the advent of such scholars as the Cambridge anthropologist A. C. Haddon. In 1895 he wrote that "When all the factors are taken into account, one finds that the aesthetic sense of a savage artist is not so very different after all from that of his civilized fellow -craftsmen - both are, in fact, artists" (Evolution in Art, London, pp. 201-202). This new attitude of appreciation toward the art of "primitive" peoples was continued in the twentieth century by other anthropologists, by the American Franz Boas, for example, in his classic work, Primitive Art (Oslo, 1927). Meanwhile, at the tum of the twentieth century , European painters and sculptors became fascinated with the arts of the newly encountered peoples and immediately fell under their impact. The result was that many late nineteenth and early twentieth century artists - the Post-Impressionist Gauguin, the Cubists, the Fauves, the Expressionists, and the Surrealists, for example - received both formal and iconographic stimulus from the art and culture of the Pacific Islanders and West Africans. Although modem sculp56 tars and painters introduced these arts to a wide audience, a disservice was done to the full appreciation and understanding of "primitive" art; they would praise a piece of African sculpture, for instance, primarily for its formal qualities. More than one critic of the period held the view that any knowledge of the function and meaning of an African carving would merely detract from one's aesthetic appreciation. Alongside this newly awakened interest in the arts of "primitive" peoples, however, may be detected an increasing awareness throughout the thirties and forties on the part of scholars, anthropologists at first and art historians later, of the need to dispense with ethnocentric value judgments and to deal analytically with "primitive" art as seen against its own cultural background. Presently, these arts are no longer considered primitive and have been fully accepted as art forms valid in themselves, as in no way qualitatively different from the arts of European societies . It has been recognized that the differences lie rather in the unique characteristics of style that exist in the art of any culture when compared with the art of another. The same tools of visual and historical analysis are now brought to bear upon the arts of all peoples. Thus, the stylistic features and iconographic content of an African bronze from Benin or a carved figure from New Guinea are no longer measured against European standards, but are related to their individual cultural and historical circumstances . Such studies, however, are still rare. Also, professional interest in these arts is still divided between anthropology and art history, each of which brings to bear essentially different methods of analysis and disciplinary presuppositions . Both recognize, on the other hand, that in order fully to understand the art of any culture outside that of our own, the art work must be seen within the context of the culture that gave it birth. The art work must be observed, not from the outside, but from within. The economic, social, and ideological characteristics of the society in question must be examined and correlated with the visual forms. That these visual Revue d'etudes canadiennes forms may embody and express cultural patterns is of primary concern to the anthropologist. For the art historian, on the other hand, it is the art object itself upon which attention is...