Defining Art in Anthropology: Beyond Western Categories

Ask ten people to define art and you will likely get ten different answers. Anthropologists have wrestled with the same problem for over a century, and their answers rarely match the neat, Western idea of art hanging in a gallery frame. From Robert Redfield’s poetic idea of art as an enlargement of experience to Gregory Bateson’s reading of Balinese paintings as coded messages from the unconscious, anthropology treats art not as a fixed category but as a lens for understanding how different societies see, feel, and make meaning.

Robert Redfield’s window onto a garden 🔗

Robert Redfield, the American anthropologist best known for his work on Mexican folk and urban communities, borrowed a famous image from the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset to explain what art does to us. Ortega compared looking at a painting to looking at a garden through a windowpane: your eye can either focus on the garden beyond the glass, or pull back and notice the glass itself, with its smudges and reflections. You cannot fully do both at once.

Redfield used this analogy to argue that traditional representational art works like clear glass. The viewer looks straight through the technique to the “garden” the artist intended, whether that is a landscape, a deity, or a historical scene. But with the arrival of modern and abstract art, there is no longer a fixed garden waiting on the other side. The canvas itself, its colour, texture, and form, becomes the object of attention, and the viewer must construct their own meaning from what they see. Redfield saw this shift as central to understanding why modern art can feel so disorienting to people trained to look for a recognisable subject.

Reading meaning into non-Western art 🔗

For Redfield, art is fundamentally an enlargement of experience. It stretches what we are able to feel and understand beyond our own daily routine. This is precisely why he insisted that anthropologists cannot judge non-Western art by the standards of European aesthetics. A mask, a totem, or a temple carving that looks strange or even grotesque to a Western eye may carry deep intellectual and emotional weight for the community that made it. The anthropologist’s task, in Redfield’s view, is not to decide whether such objects are “beautiful” but to patiently interpret the meaning their makers attach to them, on the makers’ own terms rather than an outsider’s.

Gregory Bateson and art as a coded message 🔗

Where Redfield thought about art as expanded experience, Gregory Bateson approached it as communication. Bateson borrowed his working definition of art from the writer Aldous Huxley, who described it as part of humanity’s search for grace, a state of integration between our conscious, rational mind and our unconscious, intuitive one. Bateson picked up this idea and pushed it further, arguing that art achieves its emotional force precisely because it operates outside conscious, purposeful logic, weaving together levels of the mind that ordinary language struggles to connect.

To test this idea, Bateson turned to Balinese painting, a body of work he studied closely during his fieldwork in Bali with Margaret Mead. Analysing a painting of a cremation scene, he treated the artwork as a kind of communication code, asking how the painter had encoded ideas of “head” (rational, conscious thought) and “heart” (unconscious feeling) into the composition. Crucially, Bateson made clear that he was not trying to decode the specific message of any single painting. He was interested in the code itself, in the underlying grammar that allows an image to carry emotional and psychological information at all. In this sense, he treated art as an interface, a kind of translator sitting between our conscious and unconscious ways of processing the world. His broader analysis of Balinese visual culture, later documented in collections built from his Bali fieldwork, remains one of the most influential attempts to bring communication theory into the study of visual art.

Where art blurs into science, craft, and religion 🔗

One of the more surprising things anthropologists point out is how difficult it actually is to separate art from other domains of human activity, particularly science, craft, and religion. The boundaries we assume are natural often turn out to be social conventions rather than fixed facts.

Art and science: closer than they seem 🔗

Consider architecture. Modern architects frequently describe their work as “the art of building,” insisting on its creative and expressive dimensions. Scientists, meanwhile, sometimes reach for aesthetic language to describe their own discoveries; elegant mathematical proofs and well-designed physical models are often praised in terms of beauty and grace, much as a painting might be. This overlap suggests that the line between rigorous, rule-bound science and expressive, rule-bound art is far blurrier than the popular imagination allows.

The uneasy hierarchy of art and craft 🔗

Craft has historically claimed a kind of moral high ground over art, framing itself as useful and technically demanding, while dismissing “fine art” as impractical or even self-indulgent. Yet the anthropological record complicates this neatly. The word “art” itself descends from the Latin ars, which originally just meant craft or skill. It was only in later centuries that Western societies began separating “fine arts” like painting and sculpture from the “applied arts” of woodworking, weaving, or pottery, largely along lines of social status rather than technical or aesthetic merit. Objects that anthropology museums once catalogued as mere “artefacts,” useful items tied to ritual or daily life, are today reassessed by scholars and collectors as significant works of art in their own right. Whether an object counts as art or craft, in other words, often has more to do with who is looking at it and where it is displayed than with any quality inherent to the object itself.

Art as religion’s mirror 🔗

Religion and art have always been deeply entangled. Religious traditions draw on art functionally, using painting, sculpture, music, and dance to give visible and audible form to ideas that would otherwise remain abstract: the divine, the afterlife, moral order. At the same time, some anthropologists go further and suggest that religion itself can be understood as a kind of collective art form, a symbolic system built to represent shared hopes, fears, and desires that exist beyond ordinary experience.

Religious art, in this framing, does not simply decorate belief; it reinforces it. A temple frieze, an icon, or a ritual mask carries and transmits a “conceptual pattern of a mystical order,” communicating through visual or acoustic means what words alone often cannot. Scholars of ritual have shown how such symbolic media help structure communal events and foster a shared sense of belonging among participants, a dynamic clearly visible in how art functions across many ritual traditions worldwide, including the elaborate temple sculpture, devotional painting, and classical dance forms found across the Indian subcontinent. In each case, art is not separate from religious life; it is one of the primary ways religious life becomes visible and shareable.

Art, freedom, and the bohemian rebellion 🔗

Art has also long been tied to the idea of freedom, an escape from convention, and sometimes outright rebellion against social norms. Western art history is full of movements that deliberately broke with tradition to challenge audiences and provoke new ways of seeing. The bohemian artists of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe built their identity around rejecting mainstream values, choosing artistic freedom and unconventional living over financial security or social respectability.

The 1960s carried this spirit forward, producing art scenes that saw themselves as unconventional and rebellious almost by definition. Contemporary art today looks rather different. Much of it is closely tied to markets, galleries, and commercial value, leading some critics to argue that the rebellious edge of earlier decades has softened into commodification. Yet even within these commercial structures, artists continue to set their own internal rules and draw on personal sources of inspiration that can appear almost mystical to outsiders. As the anthropologist Raymond Firth observed in his 1994 work on art and aesthetics, the creative logic an artist follows is often self-imposed and deeply personal, which is exactly what makes it so hard for anyone outside that creative process to fully grasp from the outside.

Why anthropology resists a single definition 🔗

Taken together, these perspectives explain why anthropology never settled on one tidy definition of art. Redfield saw it as expanded experience, Bateson saw it as coded communication between conscious and unconscious minds, and other thinkers have shown how art constantly bleeds into science, craft, religion, and rebellion. Rather than treating this as a weakness, anthropologists treat it as the whole point. Art resists a single definition precisely because it is so deeply woven into every other part of human life, changing shape depending on who is creating it, who is viewing it, and what that particular society needs it to do.

What do you think? When you look at a piece of art from a culture very different from your own, do you find yourself searching for a fixed meaning the artist intended, or constructing your own, the way Redfield described modern viewers doing? And where would you personally draw the line between craft and fine art?

References

1. https://www.perlego.com/book/1106710/the-dehumanization-of-art-and-other-essays-on-art-culture-and-literature-pdf
2. https://philarchive.org/archive/WESOGT-2
3. https://press.uchicago.edu/sites/piper/particles-literature_and_communication.html
4. https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-southeast-asian-studies/article/visual-methods-and-the-study-of-balinese-art-collections/6A6E8481E74FF20F419EE7793E9DF02F
5. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/art
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323838417_Art_Anthropological_Aspects_of
7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/bohemianism