1 Identity and Style in Ghanaian Artistic Discourse By

• Main Author: Maruska Svašek
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cree indians; eskimo*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.200.2106; http://ssl.brookes.ac.uk/anthro-art/papers/svasek.pdf

Whether people perceive and classify specific objects as art depends not only on their knowledge and understanding of art history, but also on their expectations of the artistic output of their producers. In 1978 Nelson Graburn asked a group of American anthropology students to give their opinions about a series of objects made by Eskimos and Cree Indians. The students used Western cultural categories, such as the opposition between art and craft, and projected their romantic views of `primitive people', to classify the objects (Graburn 1978). 1 Graburn's study clearly shows that objects, as dynamic signifiers, can be incorporated into discourses which demarcate, define and reinforce specific social identities. In their interpretation of the objects displayed as museum pieces, the students used images of primitives-being-close-tonature, primitives-having-lost-their-authenticity, and students-being-objective-observers. Daniel Miller argues that `objects may not merely be used to refer to a given social group, but may themselves be constitutive of a certain social relation', calling this phenomenon `the cultural nature of the subject-object relationship ' (Miller 1987: 121--2). Graburn's findings and Miller's argument suggest that art objects cannot simply be regarded as reflections of fixed identities. In Karin Barber's words, `[art forms] are in themselves important means through