Anthropologies of Art: Three Approaches By Wilfred van Damme

Van Damme separates the anthropology of art into three disciplines. The first one, he calls Anthropology A, focuses on the fact that anthropology is the study of humanity and human nature. Not only does it focus on the fundamental issues in the arts such as origins and development, style and reference, production and evaluation, and patterns of use and function, it also creates a bridge between Darwinism and Biology and the arts. This approach stresses the motor, perceptual, and cognitive capacities that hade to develop first in order to appreciate or create art.
The second approach to anthropology of art (Anthropology B) focuses on the study of non-Western art. Studies based in other countries “are usually carried out within a broadly conceived particularist or cultural relativist paradigm and, as such, tend to offer a rich contextual perspective.” Non-western based studies are extremely valuable because they provide data from different local contexts.
The last approach (Approach C) revolves around sociocultural phenomena. Contextual studies of art around the world lead anthropologists to question the actual uses of art forms, the art patronage, who the producers were, and what the process of creating the piece was. Using this approach, outsiders become immersed in a foreign culture, and examine the phenomena in that culture to their own larger sociocultural matrix.
In my opinion, approach C is what affects most people. The almost natural process that comes from finding phenomena in another country and relating it to one’s own culture seems to have an impact on people that might not have known anything about that particular culture before.