Stimulated by the development of some initial areas of art research, future art research will increasingly be conducted from an interdisciplinary perspective. Anthropology is concerned with what Westerners and non-Westerners now broadly refer to as the visual arts. The emergence of the concept of art and anthropology is only a matter of recent decades. This also means that the study of art and anthropology is rarely conceptualized, nor is it practiced systematically. Even today, art and anthropology, conceptually speaking, has difficulty being interpreted as merely the systematic study of the visual arts. The emphasis in art and anthropology is not on objects but on specific methods. To understand what art and anthropology are, we also need to know what anthropological methods are. Many art anthropologists will list some keywords of anthropological methods, such as thematic viewpoint, field work, ethnography and so on.

Many anthropologists believe that the most obvious difference between humans and animals is that humans have art and religion. And in ancient times, these two things were inseparable from each other. This point of view can’t help but make me a little puzzled. The natural world has its own rhythms and beautiful scenery, and people’s sense of beauty probably needs to match them, so how can we say that art does not exist in the world other beyond people? But anthropologists responded that only when the world beyond people becomes “the object of human cognition, description, and imagination” can it become the object of anthropological research. We can’t seem to find evidence that animals can play musical instruments, play chess, or paint, but we have definite evidence that all human activities have aesthetic value in some form.

Art and anthropology / Jing-Ting Huang / Contemporary Art + Anthropology (Level 11) (2022-2023)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0