Style and Meaning Anthropology’S Engagement with Art Has a Complex and Uneven History
NICHOLAS THOMAS THOMAS NICHOLAS & CLARK ALISON style and meaning Anthropology’s engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While style and material culture, ‘decorative art’, and art styles were of major significance for ( founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the EDS meaning discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major ) moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British Essays on the anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and 1960s, anthropology of art and wrote influentially, especially about issues of style and meaning in art. His powerful, question-raising arguments addressed basic issues, asking why so much art was produced in some regions, and why was it so socially important? style ANTHONY FORGE meaning Fifty years later, art has renewed global significance, and anthropologists are again considering both its local expressions among Indigenous peoples and its new global circulation. In this context, Forge’s arguments have renewed relevance: they help and edited by scholars and students understand the genealogies of current debates, and remind us of fundamental questions that remain unanswered. ALISON CLARK & NICHOLAS THOMAS This volume brings together Forge’s most important writings on the anthropology anthropology of art Essays on the of art, published over a thirty year period, together with six assessments of his legacy, including extended reappraisals of Sepik ethnography, by distinguished anthropologists from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom Anthony Forge was born in London in 1929.
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