The traffic in culture

The essays in this collection signal a relationship between anthropology and the study of art. They explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and their "traffic" in non-Western objects. Starting from the premise that the traditional anthropology of art has been developed within categories and practices of Westem art worlds themselves, this volume develops a new framework for understanding how western art - its avant-gardes, scholars, commentators, and collectors - have appropriated anthropological subjects like the "primitive" and the "exotic other."