Before becoming an artist, Susan Hiller completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology. One day, during a lecture on African art in a ‘moment of brief clarity’ she promised herself “to happily abandon the writing of a doctoral thesis whose objectification of the contrariness of lived events was destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of ‘evidence’ that would help anthropology become a ‘science’.” What is it about the way anthropologists work and the way they see art that upset the artist so much that after years of dedication to the subject she decided to abandon anthropology?

Anthropologists have traditionally been interested in the ‘art’ of the people they studied. The study of art in these cultures was closely, or even exclusively, linked to the so-called ‘material culture’. In their fieldwork, ethnographers looked at a range of objects, the technology applied in their making and at the underlying meaning in the broader cultural context.
However, anthropology has evolved since then. As Peoples and Bailey describe in their textbook ‘An introduction to Cultural Anthropology’ anthropology today is interested in the study of art as part of a culture’s expression of aesthetic values and ideals. Anthropology recognizes the many forms of artistic expression: clothing, basketry, architecture, music, dance and theatre. Through art, the artist communicates encoded ‘meanings and messages in symbolic forms’. Art for an anthropologist is part of the culture they study and can only be understood within the cultural framework. Or as Peoples and Bailey put it: “Anthropologists are not interested in art simply for art’s sake. […] art is embedded in a cultural context.”

At this point, I began to wonder.

In creating art, is the artist merely reproducing their ‘culture’?
As an artist, Hiller has her own stance on the subject. Distancing herself from anthropology, Hiller suggests that artists not only perpetuate but also modify and change their culture by stressing hidden, suppressed or unrecognized aspects. Therefore, artists act as experts of their culture.

So should anthropologist turn to these experts in order to collect their field data?
For Hiller, the problem of anthropology’s view on art lies deeper than that. She claims that ‘art exists primarily in its relationship to the viewer who must participate in it, intimately experience it’. There is simply no room for objectivity. If art must be felt and experienced on a very intimate and personal level, then there are only limited possibilities for an anthropologist to objectively observe art. Consequently, anthropological participant/observer split activities become a vain endeavor.
One question remains.

Can anthropologists pick up on Hillers thoughts without giving up anthropology in its entirety?