There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts’ formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . .), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . .). Let’s try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the category of “art” is in some non-trivial and useful sense universal, and (2) those who believe that universal “definitions” are either tautologous or too abstract to be useful. There may be other binary pairs of positions, but these three come to mind in reading through The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, an anthology of previously published work edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins. Morphy is a very well-known and respected anthropologist who was trained at the Courtauld Institute and writes on Australian aboriginal art (among other things); he is also director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. Perkins is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Art and director of the Weaver Museum of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Most art historians who teach courses on the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (the focus of this collection) will gravitate toward positions (a)-(i)-(1), and, happily for them, these positions lurk behind Morphy and Perkins’s jointly written introduction (“The Anthropology of Art: A Reflection on Its History and Contemporary Practice”) and informs their selection and groupings of articles. I write “lurk” because their positions are always qualified, and they acknowledge, when analyzing other positions, that the study of those matters can contribute to our knowledge. For instance, they believe in the universality of art, but as an analytic category, not necessarily an empirical one. And they favor a close attention to “form and the relative autonomy of form” of the object (18) rather than accepting what they call the “black box” theory of art, which, they write, is a common approach to the art object in anthropology. Thus they focus on art as objects (rather than, say, focusing on the meanings of artifacts as inseparable from the context of their “performance” in ritual, markets, or other practices). Nonetheless, they are eclectic, asserting that “value creation processes in which objects partake . . . inhere in all of the interactions in which they are involved” (19). Thus, although the book’s center of gravity is the formal analysis of objects conceptualized as relatively autonomous, the book includes generous selections of writings on discourses, markets, and exhibits.

After the introduction, the anthology begins with a selection from Franz Boas’s 1927 Primitive Art (in part 1, called “Foundations and Framing the Discipline”), and it ends with an article by Jolene Rickard, a Ska ru re (Tuscarora) artist and academic (in part 4, called “Contemporary Artists”). Thus the first and last sections loosely frame a temporal development spanning close to a century. Besides the Boas selection, others in part 1 include Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America,” Gregory Bateson’s “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” and one of Anthony Forge’s several insightful articles on Abelam art (Sepik River, New Guinea)—all very different in theoretical approach, but all arguably “foundational” and worth reading and teaching. Two others in this section are included, I surmise, to show issues anthropologists once struggled with but are now far beyond, and are included for didactic reasons: William Fagg on African tribes and art (ca. 1965) and Raymond Firth on head-rests in Tikopia (Polynesia). Part 6, the final section, has works dealing thoughtfully and knowledgeably with the complexities of producing and understanding art made by and about Native peoples, including articles by two artists (Gordon Bennett of Australia, Rickard of North America), two anthropologists (Nicholas Thomas on contemporary Maori art, Fred Myers on Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings), and an activist art historian (Charlotte Townsend-Gault, writing on the 1992 exhibit of First Nations contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada).

Lying between these historical bookends are the authors’ chosen topic-groupings. Part 2, “Primitivism, Art, and Artifacts,” focuses on “primitive art” as a contested category. (Is it art or artifact? How do different museum exhibition strategies “construct” the object? And so on.) Most of these were prompted by controversies during the mid-1980s, when various art events (notably the opening of the Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art’s “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art exhibit) resulted in a swirl of controversy. All except one of the pieces included here are well known and address directly related issues (by William Rubin, Arthur Danto, James Clifford, Sally Price, Susan Vogel, and Alfred Gell). The anomaly, an excellent piece but an outlier in this grouping, by the art historian of China Craig Clunas, concerns the history of how Chinese art was classified at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Part 3, “Aesthetics Across Cultures,” includes four essays. Two date from the mid-1970s, one by the art historian Robert Farris Thompson on Yoruba art criticism, and one by the archeologist Heather Lechtman on style and technology. Next comes Jeremy Coote’s fine article on the aesthetic sensibilities of the cattle-keeping Nilotes (Africa), which will please scholars of the (2)-(ii) persuasion as well as those of both (a)-(b). Morphy’s meticulous piece on the aesthetics of dullness and brilliance among the Yolngu (Australia) is, I think, a revelation about meaning-making that is non-iconic in the way the term is usually used. That is, the cross-hatching and other marks he discusses represent not a thing but rather a quality of (some) things. I use both of the latter whenever I teach on the anthropology of art.

Part 4, “Form, Style and Meaning,” includes Nancy Munn’s classic (1966) structuralism-inspired analysis of Walbiri design elements; an article by Abraham Rosman and Paula Rubel laying out the “structural patterning” of Kwakiutl (Northwest Coast of North America) art and ritual; Aldona Jonaitis analyzing Tlingit shamans’ masks (also Northwest Coast); illuminating excerpts from a David Guss book on the ways in which meanings are accrued in basketry made by the Yekuana (Amazon)—like Coote’s, also pleasing to scholars of the (2)-(ii) camps; and Michael O’Hanlon writing on Wahgi (New Guinea) shield designs (beginning in the 1930s) and their changes in both use and graphic design with the introduction of firearms (ending in the early 1990s, but not told as a continuous story).

Part 5, “Marketing Culture,” kicks off with an excerpt from Nelson Graburn’s introduction to his groundbreaking book Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (1976), which itself initiated a flurry of new scholarly narratives that appreciated arts made for the market, including for tourists, by “Fourth World” (née “tribal”) peoples. It was foundational for anthropologists in camp (b), who study discourses and art markets. Also in this section, the art historian Ruth Phillips and the anthropologist/art historian Christopher Steiner, who have both written appreciatively about Fourth World arts made for the market, contribute pieces on (respectively) the historical collection and display of souvenir arts of Native North America, and on the creation of value and authenticity through exchange in African art. Steiner’s work generally has contributed to the (b) camp’s literature, whereas the work of Phillips straddles (a) and (b) and is useful for both. Thus, part 5 points toward part 6, in which we read about contemporary arts made by contemporary people fully engaged in art markets and exhibition spaces.

Assessment? I think the editors are entirely correct about the prevalence of the “black box” theory of the art/artifact in the discipline—after all, anthropologists are seldom trained to look at art objects’ forms and designs (or for that matter, to imagine them as “relatively autonomous”). Consequently, my guess is that the vast majority of anthropological writing on art objects gravitates toward one of two opposite directions, neither of which takes the artifact seriously as a somewhat autonomous interpretable-by-itself object. The original black-boxers took the direction of functionalists a la Radcliffe-Brown, who were interested in the object’s purported function, whereas more recent black-box commentators look into power relations, commodification, and the construction of the object through dominant narratives and frames. The second and opposite direction is taken by anthropologists who, far from seeing the artifact as an opaque black box, see it as a transparent or translucent item that all but dissolves into its surroundings (witness the admirable pieces by Coote and Guss in this volume)—ungraspable and incomprehensible without deep knowledge of the contexts and performances and sensibilities that produced it; and the more one understands, the less it appears a hard and autonomous object. The result is a predominance of anthropological work on discourses of art, on the one hand, or aesthetics, on the other.

Actually focusing on the formal design and linking it with its social meanings is a high calling, for both anthropologists and art historians, who historically have come from opposite places. I would like to see a thicker anthology retaining the categories the authors have, but expanding sections with some more of the great work that spans or fuses positions (a)-(b) and (i)-(ii)—for instance, the work of Victor Turner, whose writings on color and on polyvalent symbols (e.g., in The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) was highly influential and “foundational,” far more so than the work of Fagg and Firth in part 1. Clifford Geertz’s essay on “Art as a Cultural System” (in Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, 1983) would also have been highly compatible with part 3 (“Aesthetics”). I would include more work by Morphy, different and less formalistic work by Munn, and some by the art historians Ruth Phillips and Suzanne Blier (who work on North America and Africa, respectively). But the point of a short review is less to probe approaches too deeply, and even less to rewrite the anthology, and more to ask whether this book, intended for undergraduate classes, brings together enough good material, grouped sensibly, to form the backbone of required reading. On the whole it will serve extremely well as a sequence of topics and a guide to the most important approaches, touching as it does on both.