Overview

The concept of art as being purely for aesthetic contemplation, that is typical of industrial civilization, is not a very useful one for cross-cultural studies. The majority of the art forms that we see in museums and art books that have come from Native America or Africa or Oceania, are objects that were once part of a larger artistic whole from which they have been extracted. We need to try to piece together and imagine the artistic context as well as the cultural one if we are to attain a deeper sense of the import than the piece available to use provides. Even then, it is almost impossible to define the artistic whole. Perhaps we would do better to regard these pieces as fragments from the lifestyle of a people.

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Reviews

Art as Culture, with its new chapters that comment on the late twentieth century, will be a godsend to both beginners and experts. For newcomers, it will provide a way to approach a dizzying amount of information-an overview before moving into the intricacies of ideas about art and its relationship to other things that people do. For the expert, it provides a refreshing change, a way to step back from the small pieces and see that they must fit into a larger puzzle or they are not very useful to anyone....Evelyn Hathcher's lifetime of thinking about art as an anthropologist is a refreshing and challenging point of view for any art historian or student-or ordinary person-who is interested in art and how it fits into our world. -Lyndel King Director, Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota

Anthropologists and art historians will welcome the second edition of Evelyn Hatcher's Art as Culture...[In this second book] she now presents the impact [on art] of the vast changes in the world since the Age of Discovery--from Columbus to computers--in all societies and especially the rise of folk, tourist, and export art. -John C. Messenger Jr. Professor Emeritus Dept. of Anthropology Ohio State University As a much needed bridge between anthropology and art history, Dr. Hatcher's work presents fresh and convincing theories to explain such fluorescence in widely separated areas and goes even further in examining the relationship between art and culture. The text, which is written with grace and wit, is enhanced by skillful line drawings that illustrate the author's well taken points. This is a book that belongs on the shelves of any serious student of art history, anthropology, or, indeed, of human culture. -Rena N. Coen Professor Emerita of Art History St. Cloud State University Hatcher's background and research in both anthropology and art give her a command of a broad view nowhere else offered in the literature. Hers is the only book in the anthropology of art that covers all the major well-known tribal art styles, juxtaposes them with the arts of civilizations usually left to art historians, and introduces the reader to a full range of theoretical approaches to interpretation. While Hatcher's scholarly, thorough presentation of familiar styles provides many fresh insights, her theoretical stance is reassuringly familiar and solidly anthropological: the arts are understood comparatively, in context, and in all their complexity; in short, as culture. -Dorothy K. Billings Department of Anthropology Wichita State University Art as Culture, with its new chapters that comment on the late twentieth century, will be a godsend to both beginners and experts. For newcomers, it will provide a way to approach a dizzying amount of information-an overview before moving into the intricacies of ideas about art and its relationship to other things that people do. For the expert, it provides a refreshing change, a way to step back from the small pieces and see that they must fit into a larger puzzle or they are not very useful to anyone....Evelyn Hathcher's lifetime of thinking about art as an anthropologist is a refreshing and challenging point of view for any art historian or student-or ordinary person-who is interested in art and how it fits into our world. -Lyndel King Director, Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota

Author Information

EVELYN PAYNE HATCHER is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at St. Cloud State University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her previous works published include Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art (1985).

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