Seeing Through Pictures: The Anthropology of Photography By Jay Ruby

Ruby discusses the possible relationships between photography and social sciences. Ruby states that because studies of mass media and popular culture are either characterized by being critical evaluations by an elite scholar, or a quantitative survey that lumps masses together without taking into consideration nuances or cultural differences, one needs to understand how the media is used by ordinary people. He quotes Stanley Milgram as saying, photography will be examined as “A technology that extends two psychological functions: perception and memory. It can thus teach us a good deal about how we see, and how we remember.”
Ruby breaks down his study domain into six categories: professional photography, those that take pictures as a hobby (hobbyists), public exhibition events, historical photographs, photography in education, and family photographs.
Some of his questions that interested me a great deal were, “what constitutes an even worth photographing?” and “how are changes in conventions related to changes in technology and availability of equipment?” The popularization of digital cameras has decreased the significance of snapping photographs. The photographer rarely gives a second thought to what he or she snaps a shot of. This could be seen as another way in which thought processes are getting shallower and shallower.
Ethnographic Semiotics, a paper by Worth, suggested that more analysis should be put on ethnographic study of how people make meaning in their everyday lives, and less on anthropological texts. I agree with this fact. Merely reading texts will never give us the useful insight we need to understand how mass media benefits or harms us.

Circuits of African Art/ Paths of Wood: Exploring an Anthropological Trail By Paul Stoller

This chapter starts with a depiction of The New York International Tribal Antiques Show at the Seventh Regent Armory on Park Avenue. Stoller continues on to prove how the economic and social forces of globalization have changed art worlds. African art has been shaped and brought into the Western world by The Museum of Primitive Art, which later became a wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)’s 1984 exhibition called “Primitivism” made tribal art even more acceptable by demonstrating how primitive art has inspired great artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
African statues and masks, referred to as “wood”, are also sold and traded at The Warehouse near the Hudson River in Chelsea. Stoller analyzes the factors that influence and drive these traders to come to America. He sites Islam as being closely linked with merchant capital. “Muhammad, whose wife Fatima was herself a prosperous merchant, deemed trade an honorable profession (pg.95).” In the West African kinship system, age, gender, and generation are all very important. The head of the household, or great trader, sends out his “children” to distant markets to sell and trade. “Looking to move ‘wood’ and ‘mud,’ African mobile merchants travel from city to city, festival to festival…until they have depleted their inventories (pg.99).”
Stoller sites El Hadj Ousmane of Niger saying that the two main reasons for the increase of African art in North America is 1). The hype surrounding MOMA’s primitivism exhibit which increased the value of tribal art and attracted new collectors, and 2). the increasing appeal of Afrocentrism, which has increased much interest in Africa.
Transnational crossroads are created where West African art is sold to Westerners. It becomes a place of complex dynamics where two completely different social worlds collide. Sometimes, as Stoller says, these crossroads can lead to a greater understanding of different cultures by both sides. However, sometimes they can lead to misunderstandings and anger.
From reading this article, I became more aware of the hurdles and issues between buyers and traders. Also, I learned of the journey of African art. From kinship villages to fast-paced contemporary worlds, traders have to adjust to the different flows.

The Unsettled Business of Tradition, Indigenous Being, and Acrylic Painting By Fred Myers

Myers focuses on the Pintupi-speaking people of the Yayayi community in Australia in this article. He approaches questions of aboriginality amongst them. What makes something or someone “Aboriginal”? What are the boundaries of Aboriginality? In fourth world communities such as the one Myers focuses on, tradition has been used to divide the Aboriginal people, by empowering some over others. In particular, Myers focuses on the acrylic paintings of the Aboriginals and the role they play in their traditional societies. Although acrylic paintings have been called nontraditional by some, “…Aboriginal producers do regard acrylic paintings as authentic”.
Linda Syddick, a Pintupi woman, creates Aboriginal Christian paintings through the use of dots. Her paintings do not fall neatly into any aesthetic categories, but rather signify that her tradition is always unsettled. They both show their relationship to local Aboriginal identities and also engage with wider themes of loss and disturbance. Syddick was adopted by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi when her biological father passed away. Her paintings depict both her feelings of her biological father and of Shorty’s care for her. As Myers states, these images were seen as “artistic communication” and as evidence of the way in which place and its representations might convey significance for Pintupi (pg.187).” Her paintings were therefore creating universal images of loss and passing, as well as specific cultural relevances.

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.

Gauguin, Negrîn, and the Art of Anthropology: Reflections on the Construction of Art Worlds in a Costa Rican Port City By Russell Sharman

Sharman analyzes the works of Paul Gauguin and Negrîn (Ricardo Rodriguez-Cordoba) in this article. He writes that Gauguin’s paintings and projects were the result of internal disputes. He, like many at the time, disliked the white invasion of his home in French Polynesia and portrayed the effects of the invasion in his work. Although Negrîn shared Gauguin’s feelings of dislike for the white invasion, he painted scenes from what life was like before the invasion. Negrîn, painting scenes of early Puerto Limon, called this trying to “rescue the culture.”
The term “aesthetics” and its roots and implications are discussed at length. It originated from the Greek term aesthetica, which referred to the attachment of value to experience, and the objectification of that socially valued experience. Greek philosopher, Plato, thought, “aesthetics, relying as it does on the emotions, polluted the purity of intellectual reason.” As Plato’s attitude toward aesthetics spread, it was Kant that brought the term back into contemplation.
Sharman also addresses the issue of art versus craft. He sites many artists and craftsmen in Limon as saying that they are both the same. One sentence that stood out to me was, “[This] distinction between art and craft is more economic and political than aesthetic.”
From this article, I got an overall idea of how aesthetics and art are perceived in different societies. The ethnography of art can be studied from many angles. It had been studied from the wrong angle for too long; giving more importance to the actual object rather than the creator of the object. Art is being studied from the correct angle slowly but surely, informing the anthropology of race, gender, and political economy, and not merely a glorification of objects.

From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among the Yolngu by H. Morphy

Aesthetics is concerned with how something appeals to the senses. This article focuses on the aesthetics of the Yolngu in northern Australia. “Only minor artists manage to say all they wish to and major artists frequently express things they did not intend to or were even unaware of,” Whitford states in the article. The Yolngu critical focus seems different than that of Western art criticism. The aesthetic properties do not have to be interpreted in order to have an impact. As far as public comments are concerned in Yolngu society, individual creativity is assigned no positive role. Although Yolngu individuals have aesthetic and creative capabilities, they never attribute these qualities in front of people. The reason attributed to why some people create the paintings and others don’t, is because of functional or practical reasons.
The distinctions between natural and cultural designs are irrelevant because of the constant change in their ancestral stories between inanimate objects and animate objects, between humans and animals. A Yolngu artist is guided by three objectives: to produce a correct design, to produce an Ancestrally powerful design, and to produce a painting that enhances or beautifies the object painted on. Paintings are usually smeared before they are displayed in public, and the only people that can see the painting in its full glory are those that create it. All others merely sneak glances at the paintings. It is believed that long, contemplative viewing is not the only way to appreciate a painting in Yolngu society. The Yolngu think that if a spiritually vulnerable person (young children, people suffering bereavement, seriously ill people, or sometimes women) sees a sacred painting, more sickness or death may result.

Open Ears by Murray Schafer

This article seemed much more tangible than the other articles I have read about sound and music. Schafer begins his piece by documenting the ringing of church bells, and the significances that go with it. On one hand, the bells were meant for God to know when the monks recited prayers. The bells also served to keep the regimen of the monastery and everyone who lived within that Christian society. Schafer writes, “When the authority of Christianity weakened, church bells grew fewer (pg.260).” Similarly, a people’s political state has a great relationship with their music at the time.
Schafer documented the Ear of Dionysius as the prototype for all future developments in acoustic surveillance.
Schafer’s analysis the “inner voice” was of great interest to me. It is so true that “The steady development of consciousness and rational thought has transformed the inner voice into a symptom of psychic disorder (pg.263).” Rationalism and so-called “modernism” has muffled the rich treasury of imaginary voices. Television has played a huge role in causing people to think less.
Even the small exercise of imagining different sounds (a fish jumping out of water, a woman weeping) helped me focus better on the rest of my chores for the day.
Although we are all physically condemned to listen, we shut our ears to almost everything. The number of things we ignore or refuse to listen to outnumber the things that we do listen to.