Anthropologies and Histories of Art: A View from the Terrain of Native North American Art History (original) (raw)

2005, … of Art, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and …

It is customary protocol among my indigenous colleagues to begin a presentation with a greeting in their native language. "Hau, Kola," a Lakota might say. A Navajo speaker would go on to reveal both her mother's and her father's clan, so that a Navajo audience or readership could place her in the terrain of Navajo politics and metaphysics. In the academy, it's not so different: one's classificatory system includes what discipline one practices, where and when one was initiated into its mysteries, and with whom one claims kinship. So I begin this essay with an autobiographical prologue so the reader may assess my fictive kinship patterns and who my affinal ancestors are, as social anthropologists might say. And indeed, as the Navajo assert, these do explain my location in the academic terrain and how I approach the question of the relationship of anthropology and art history, which to me is not as vexed a relationship as it might be for another interlocutor. I was trained in a so-called traditional art history department at Yale in the late s. My chief mentor was the great scholar of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art, George Kubler. I was one of his last students. The courses he offered during the years I was there covered historiography and pre-Columbian iconography, among other things. My other mentor was Robert Farris Thompson, the vibrant historian of African art. In his classroom, the discourse ranged from Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, to Yoruba aesthetics, to the improvisational patterns of African textiles. Kubler, my dissertation advisor, may have been unique among his generation of art historians for his intellectual interests. Though he studied with Henri Focillon and Erwin Panofsky, Kubler wrote a dissertation in the s on the colonial religious architecture of New Mexico. 1 During the time I was studying with Thompson, he was moving between his ideas about African art in motion and his poetic, evocative works about the African diaspora, which encompassed everything from Caribbean altars to Afro-American quilts. 2 I also was encouraged by architectural historian Vincent Scully, the director of graduate studies, to take courses in anthropology. My mentors there, Michael Coe and Floyd Lounsbury, were immersed, respectively, in studies of Maya iconography and hieroglyphic decipherment. The intellectual climate that surrounded me in the History of Art program