Howard Morphy

Morgan Perkins

This anthology provides a single-volume overview of the essential theoretical debates in the anthropology of art. Drawing together significant work in the field from the second half of the twentieth century, it enables readers to appreciate the art of different cultures at different times. Advances a cross-cultural concept of art that moves beyond traditional distinctions between Western and non-Western art. Provides the basis for the appreciation of art of different cultures and times. Enhances readers’ appreciation of the aesthetics of art and of the important role it plays in human society.

A Reader

The Anthropology of Art

A survey of the great variety of Aboriginal art.

Aboriginal Art A&i

Maria Nugent

Gaye Sculthorpe

Using extraordinary Indigenous Australian art and artifacts preserved in museums across Great Britain and Ireland, the authors present a global history that entwines ancestral pasts with epochs of empire and colony leading to the contemporary moment.

Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museums

Ancestors, Artefacts, Empire

W. S. F. Pickering

Mauss (Pickering)

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) never completed his Doctoral thesis on prayer. Yet his scarcely mentioned introduction (Books I and II) of 176 pages and privately printed in 1909, can be seen as some of his most important work. His argument that much of prayer is a social act will be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists and theologians. Here, the first English translation to be published, is preceded by a general introduction by W.S.F.Pickering and finally a specific commentary on Mauss's use of ethnographic material.

On Prayer

Jonathan Jones

Lissant Mary Bolton

Dr. John Carty

Ian Coates

Published to accompany major exhibitions at the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia in 2015, Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation uses objects from the extraordinary collection of the British Museum to celebrate the unique and ongoing relationship that Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders have to place and country. This groundbreaking new publication also explores the profound impact and legacy of colonialism, the nature of collecting and the changing meaning of objects now in the collection of the British Museum. This richly illustrated book challenges pre-existing ideas about Indigenous Australian culture and highlights its beauty, diversity and vitality.

Enduring Civilisation

Indigenous Australia

Thirty years ago Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today, it is considered to be an important contemporary art movement, often promoted as being connected to a deep cultural past. Becoming Art provides a new analysis of the shifting cultural and social contexts that surround the production of Aboriginal art. Transcending the boundaries between anthropology and art history, the book draws on arguments from both disciplines to provide a unique interdisciplinary perspective that places the artists themselves at the centre of the argument.Western art history has traditionally regarded Aboriginal art as distanced from time and place. Becoming Art uses the recent history of Aboriginal art to challenge some of the presuppositions of western art discourse and western art worlds. It argues for a more cross-cultural perspective on world art history.

Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories

Becoming Art

Marcus Banks

This text brings together a collection of essays by leading anthropologists, covering an entire range of visual representation and including discussions on the anthropology of art, the study of landscape, and the history of anthropology.

Rethinking Visual Anthropology

This anthology provides a single-volume overview of the essential theoretical debates in the anthropology of art. Drawing together significant work in the field from the second half of the twentieth century, it enables readers to appreciate the art of various cultures at different times. An essay from the editors, offering an intellectual critique of the history of the discipline and exploring the contribution that the analysis of art can make to human societies, prefaces the volume; each part also begins with a useful editorial introduction to the readings. The readings themselves cover all the major debates in the field, including: definitions of art and aesthetics; the nature of representational processes; the nature of authenticity; the Primitivism controversy; the history of trade and commodification; and the role of contemporary artists. This anthology is the ideal resource for readers new to the anthropology of art. At the same time, it allows those with some knowledge of the discipline to see how art and aesthetics can contribute to their research.

A Reader. Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology

Anthropology of Art

G. A. Harrison

This book examines the concept of adaptation in four major fields in the human sciences. Genetic aspects are first considered through an examination of the human genes which have so far been identified as conferring survival value in particular environmental circumstances. The drift versus selection argument is also fully reviewed. The second contribution concerns the physiological changes which occur when individuals move from one environment to another. In the past, most attention has been given to the mechanisms of these changes, but here the focus is on the effects. The third contribution is directed at the analysis of behaviour - especially social behaviour. The application of kin selection and reciprocal attraction theories to humans is explored and the value of these approaches explained, whether the behaviour has a genetic basis or not. The final essay deals with the relevance of the adaptation concept to the social sciences and especially to social anthropology. It demonstrates that an ecological approach to understanding the nature and structure of human societies demands attention to adaptation.Reprinted in paperback for the first time and with a new foreword, this book, which serves as an excellent teaching text, clearly shows how attempts at integration in each of these various fields can benefit the study of human evolution, social structure and organization from all perspectives.

Human Adaptation

This book is one of a series of volumes resulting from the World Archaeological Congress, September 1986 which addressed world archaeology in its widest sense, investigating how people lived in the past and how and why changes took place to result in the forms of society and culture which exist now. The series brought together archaeologists and anthropologists from many parts of the world, academics from contingent disciplines, and also non-academics from a wide range of cultural backgrounds who could lend their own expertise to the discussions. This book is an exploration of the way in which the animal world features in the works of art of a variety of cultures of different times and places. Contributors have adopted a variety of perspectives for looking at the complex ways in which past and present humans have interrelated with beings they classify as animals. Some of the approaches are predominantly economic and ecological, some are symbolic and others philosophical or theological. All these different views are included in the interpretation of the artworks of the past, revealing some of the foci and inspirations of cultural attitudes to animals. Originally published 1989.

Animals into Art

Yolngu art as a communication system encoding meaning as form; relation of art to the systems of clan organisation and restricted (secret) knowledge; contact history and social contexts of art production; iconography of clan paintings; response to the art market; social organisation rights to land and law; marriage and kinship; rights to paintings; knowledge system - structure, inclusiveness, power, secrecy; role of paintings in ceremonies - burial rituals; range of meanings associated with paintings - examples used in ceremonies associated with the Wawilak Sisters and ancestral shark images; graphic components of painting - figurative and geometric, clan designs; chronological change - the Donald Thomson Collection, past and contemporary categories of painting, commercial art; iconographic analysis of Manggalili clan paintings; relation of events in painting to Yolngu cosmology - creative powers , life and death, male and female dualities.

Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge

Ancestral Connections

Françoise Dussart

Over the last 25 years there has been an explosion of interest in the Aboriginal religions of Australia and this anthology provides a variety of recent writings, by a wide range of scholars. Australian Aboriginal Religions are probably the oldest extant religious systems. Over some 50,000 years they have coped with change and re-invented themselves in an astonishingly creative way. The Dreaming, the mythical time when the Ancestor Spirits shaped the territories of the Aborigines and laid down a moral and ritual law for their occupants, is the fundamental religious reality. It is the basis of the Aborigines's view of their land or country, kinship relationships, ritual and art. However, the Dreaming is not a static principle since it is interpreted in different ways, as in the extraordinary movement in contemporary indigenous painting, and in attempts at an accommodation with Christianity. The contributions of anthropologists, cultural historians, philosophers of religion and others are included in this anthology which not only guides readers through the literature but also ensures this still largely inaccessible material is available to a wider range of readers and non-specialist students and academics.

An Anthology of Recent Writings

Aboriginal Religions in Australia

Thirty years ago Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today, it is considered to be an important contemporary art movement, often promoted as being connected to a deep cultural past.

Exploring Cross-cultural Categories

Wally Caruana

Luke Taylor

National Museum of Australia

Alisa Duff

This rich collection of Aboriginal bark paintings is the largestin the world, with many pieces dating back to the 1930s. Among theheroes of this collection are two influential artists, Narritjin Maymurruand Billy Yirawala, whose works feature prominently in this book.

Howard Morphy

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