If little agreement remains on what constitutes the discipline of anthropology, even less exists on what constitutes art, thus posing scholars of the anthropology of art two sets of problematic definitions. Such scholars have sometimes struggled to distinguish themselves from art historians, frequently described as being intent on form while anthropologists pursued function. Nor have anthropological studies of art often been at the centre of theoretical developments, although they frequently illustrated its changing intellectual fashions.
Thus, it is possible to find in *Franz Boas’s analysis ([1927] 1955) of non-Western art both a critique of *evolutionary approaches and an example of the †historical particularism which came to characterize much American work at the begining of the twentieth century. Equally, the early *functionalism of *British social anthropology appears in the relatively small number of works about art, such as that by †Raymond Firth (1936) on New Guinea. The increasing interest by the 1960s and 1970s in †symbols and †semiotics is well represented by Nancy Munn’s (1973) study of Walbiri graphic signs from Australia. French *structuralism provides the analytical framework for *Lévi-Strauss’s (1983) examination of masks and myths on the northwest coast of Canada. By the 1990s, partly inspired by a revival of interest in †material culture as exegesis and evidence, anthropological analyses of art, however defined, became more numerous and informed by theoretical concerns with issues such as *gender and *colonialism (Morphy 1991; Thomas 1991).
Not surprisingly, over the course of these several generations of anthropological studies of art, the questions that have been foremost at any one time have changed, and even when the questions have remained the same, answers are continually reformulated. What was once ‘primitive’ art has become ‘ethnoart’; speculations about origins have been overtaken by those about meaning; description of stylistic elements is joined by a wider concern with *aesthetics. Sometimes these questions have been similar to those asked about European art on the nature of human creativity, the personality of the artist or the role of patronage. Inherent here is an assumption that the anthropology of art is about non-Western forms, although scholars such as Jacques Maquet (1986) have tried to broaden the discussion.
Whether such material (most studies of the anthropology of art are of objects rather than performance or the verbal arts) should be displayed in museums or art galleries as ‘art’ or ‘artefact’ is an important discussion point in *museum studies.
