The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology

Th~ complaint is commonly heard that art is a neglec~ed topic in present-day s~ .anthropology, especially in Britain. The marginalization of studies of prumnve art, by contras~ to the ~ense volume of studies of politics, ritual, exchange, and so f ?rth, IS too obvious a phenomenon to miss, especially if one draws a contrast with the situation prevailing before the advent of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. But why should this be so? I believe that it is more ~ a matter of clian~g fashions in the matter of selecting topics for study; 3:i if, by some collecnve whim, anthropologists had decided tci devote more tune to cross-cousin marriage and less to mats, pots, and carvings. On the ~on~, the ?~glect of art in modem social anthropology is necessary and ~ten~onal, am~g from. the fact that social anthropology is essentially, consntunonally, ann-art. This must seem a shocking assertion: how can anthropology,. by universal consent a Good Thing, be opposed to art, also universally co~dered an equally Good Thing, even a Better Thing? But I am afraid that this IS really so? because these two Good Things are Good according to fundamentally different and conflicting criteria. When I say that social anthropology is anti-art, I do not mean of course that .anthrop~lo~cal wisdom favours knocking down the National Gallery and turning the site into a car park. What I mean is only that the attitude of the an-lo~g public towards the contents of the National Gallery, the Museum of Mankind, and so on (aesthetic awe bordering on the religious) is an unredeemably ethnocentric attitude, however laudable in all other respects. Our value-system dictates that, unless we are philistines, we should attnlmte value to a culturally recognized category of art objects. Tirls attitude of aestheticism is culture-bound even though the objects in question derive from many different cultures, as when we pass effortlessly from the conte~pl~ti?n of a Tahitian sculpture to one by Brancusi, and back again. But this willingness to place ourselves under the spell of all manner of works of I