Culture in the anthropological sense means much more than the arts; it is conceived as the sum of all the learned, shared behavior of human beings: how they make a living, produce things, organize their societies, and use language and other symbolic forms. Culture is the distinctively human means of survival. Each and every society has a more or less consistent way of life, a culture.

Anthropologists and art historians are presently going into the field, to places not yet industrialized, to find out how arts are made and used in the different cultures. They are coming back with accounts of the arts in such context, enriching our understanding through published works and new forms of exhibits. We can begin to see how art is made and used in social situations, many of them lively and exciting. When we study art in context, we find that many relationships seem to exist between art forms and all, or nearly all, of the other aspects of human life, and the visual form or style of the arts in a specific society.

We seek to compare the relationships and meanings from a variety of ethnographic contexts, to see if there are any regularities or generalizations that apply to all cultures, or whether certain kinds of art and certain relationships are characteristic of certain kinds of cultures. The comparative method is the anthropological equivalent of experiment, and so by making cross-cultural comparisons it may be possible to test the innumerable statements about the nature, functions and correlates of art that have been made in the context of the traditions of Western Civilization. It should also increase our understanding of the nature of art.

Furthermore, and this follows from the above, the study of art as culture calls for the consideration of a great variety of view points and theories from our own and other cultures. The anthropological study of art is not confined to the works of peoples with primitive technologies, but involves all cultures from any time and place. The traditional emphasis on "primitive art" has existed primarily because no one else was paying such attention to endangered species of art forms, other than those who have been interested in collecting it without the slightest regard for its cultural context. Unfortunately a purely esthetic appreciation is often linked to acquisitive greed. We need to compare not only the products, but the theories of artists -- comparative esthetics or "ethnoesthetics." . . .

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