Anthropological Theories of Art, Interpretive–Historical Criticism

Study of art has a long and old record in anthropology which can be traced back to the 19th century. Altthough it has deeper roots in the collections by unprofessional people in the previous centuries in the form of the “ancient” and colonial objects and handcrafts which led to the formation of the first anthropology museums in Europe. Therefore, Franz Boas’s Primitive Art can be considered as a turning point in this filed which made a revolution in previous approaches and rejected the discussion of the opposition of “high culture” in its Victorian significance against “primitive culture”. Then, Raymond Firth continued Boas’s studies which were focused on American natives in Australia. This was the time when anthropology of arts found its theoretical bases. British and French researchers studying Africa on the one hand and those who study Australia on the other progressed in this way. Accordingly, the binary oppositional approaches of primitive arts vs. western arts on the one hand and museum approaches on the other were gradually replaced with the analytical–aesthetic approaches in the anthropology of arts. In this article, after reviewing this historical background, anthropological theories of arts will be studied in various branches including evolutionism, functionalism and structuralism as well as more modern symbbolic and interpretive theories. Then, some perspectives of this field of study in Iran will be presented.