Download 1 A pragmatic impulse in the anthropology of art? Alfred Gell and the

Draft version, published in Journal des Africanistes, 2001, 71/2, pp. 191-208.
A pragmatic impulse in the anthropology of art?
Alfred Gell and the semiotics of social objects.
Karel Arnaut
Ghent University
When, in preparation of this article, I asked a friend and colleague whether he had come across
any reviews of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998), or of anthropologists who had applied
Gell’s ‘system’ to their field data, he responded in his usual stringent way that ‘Everyone seems
to have fallen for the “Gell is a genius” line and failed to engage’.
In some indirect way, the fact that I have only been able to locate two book reviews (Harrison
1998; Jamieson 1999) may indicate that on the whole anthropologists and certainly africanists
have failed to engage. This is all the more surprising because the two reviews share an equal
admiration for Art and Agency on three points: (i) Gell is a creative scholar who has produced an
original and powerful model which connects with contemporary theory-building on selfhood and
social relationships, (ii) this making it into a (the first?) proper anthropological theory of
art/material culture, which (iii) makes use of an inventive, valuable terminology. What then, one
may ask, prevents scholars from further ‘engaging’?
In this paper I seek to spell out possible reasons for both the admiration for Gell’s theoretical
endeavour and its possible lack of appeal as a new method or approach. However, this is not an
exercise in reception analysis. Praising and neglect expose a central problematic of Art and
Agency: it goes theoretically too far and methodologically not far enough. It goes too far, I argue,
in trying to devise a proper anthropological theory of material culture. Like other high theories
in anthropology (Preuss, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss) this is above all a theory of difference and
otherness.1 In this case, it proposes to exclude certain analytic practices (the iconographic and
the aesthetic approach) as non-anthropological, and demarcate a preferred, allegedly
‘anthropological’, empirical field consisting of objects with coherent biographies (because of
intra-group production-and-consumption or because they are produced by one artist). This
ultimately makes for a highly consistent and powerful theory which reviewers have not failed to
appreciate as the index of a powerful intellect. Nevertheless, the analytic and empirical
limitations weigh heavily on the potential appeal of this theory. The preference for closed artistic
contexts is far removed from contemporary interest in boundary-crossing trajectories of art
production and use. The methodological restrictions furthermore leave most anthropologists of
art wandering how Gell’s method may revive their concern with value and meaning in material
1. See Thomas (1991, p32-34) for the dangers of high theory in anthropology and the author’s
programme to work at ‘an intermediate level of theory and analysis’.
1
culture. In the end the many possibilities that are opened up by introducing a novel analytical
scheme are seen to be left unexplored, short-circuited by heavy theory and methodological
exclusions.
Nevertheless, what I hope to demonstrate in the end is that it could be a mistake to seize the
analytical lack to subvert the theoretical excess and to end up with nothing. Instead, I try to show
that the initial analytic renewal gets eventually caught up in some theoretical spin and that by
detecting the latter we can profitably save the former. Gell’s analysis of the artefactual index is
finally appreciated as the possible onset of a pragmatic approach of art.
For the sake of this argument I make a distinction between two parts of the book. The first part
consists of chapters 2 to 6, in which Gell outlines his new method and terminology and illustrates
their use with ethnographic examples. The second part consists of the introductory chapter 1 in
which Gell sets out the general lines of his theory, which is further developed in the chapters 7,
8, and 9.2
1. Index and abduction: Peirce put to ethnographic use
Art and agency is basically about analysing the contexts of social relations (i) that are objectified
in the art object and (ii) which ‘social objects’ constitute. In order to support such a description,
Gell devises a four-term model. The main players in any action-context in the vicinity of objects
are identified and related as follows: a material (artefactual) Index made by an Artist ‘represents’
a Prototype and appears before a Recipient.
The uncommon term is index and Gell points out that this is a loan from the semiotic theory of
Charles Saunders Peirce; the tricky term in the above equation is ‘representation’ because indices
do that in a specific way. Gell uses ‘index’ in the sense of ‘natural sign’, which in my view can
be understood better in the definition given of it by Sebeok ‘a sign that has a causal relation
between signifier and signified’ (Schillemans 1992, p270). Because of this special relation,
indices have the effect of drawing the attention of the interpreter/user/addressee (Recipient) to
the object of the index (Prototype) or its maker (Artist) (Lee 1997, p119-20).3 This ‘attention’ is
theorised by Gell and made to cover many kinds of cognitive processes – ‘abductions’ or
‘abductive inferences’ – that surround the artefactual index.4 Indices motivate abductive
2. I will not be dealing much with chapter 8 because it more or less stands on its own and rather
detached from the rest of the book itself, and certainly also from the problematic of the ‘index’
and the ‘anthropological theory’ with which this review article is concerned.
3. There is a vast literature on Peirce. Apart from a rather general introduction (Hookway 1985),
I have used a number of recent publications by the anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee (1997)
and the semiotic anthropologist Richard Parmentier (1997a and 1997b).
4. Although introduced into sign-theory by Peirce, the term ‘abduction’ was redefined and
popularised by Umberto Eco. In his hands abduction became a rather vague term, covering what
one commonly understands as speculation or hypothesising: not strictly controlled kinds of
scientific reasoning that are nonetheless creative and conductive to new knowledge (Caesar
1999, p117-119).
2
inferences about both the artist and the prototype, and exert agency on the recipient or the other
way around (Gell 1998, p27). To the extent that a variable in the above equation exerts agency
relative to another variable that undergoes the effects of it, the former is the agent and the latter
the patient. People (Artist, Recipient, but sometimes also the Prototype) can bring to bear
‘primary agency’ on objects, while an object’s agency is of a secondary kind, derived as it is
from the motivated actions of primary agents. It is important to note in this how the agency of
people when applied to many objects is being transferred and disseminated by artefactual
indices.
Indices are bi-directional, they point (i) towards their Prototype and Artist (abduction of
origination) and (ii) towards the Recipient (for instance by ‘captivating’, ‘trapping’, or
‘repelling’ their observers or addressees). This indexicality can further be seen accompanying the
distribution of objects in time and space: objects refer back to their origin (place and time of
production, prototype, artist), are inscribed with their past use (e.g. handling, blood sacrifices,
etc.), and may influence the production of other artefactual indices whereby the original index is
turned into a prototype.
Examples of artefacts-in-context throughout the book illustrate the above exemplary indexical
profile of the artefactual signs. The two most salient features of the objects that emerge from
these reconstructions are (i) objects ‘internalise’ the agency of one and mostly several
people/agents, and (ii) objects ‘exteriorise’ their internalised agency (power, meaning, intention)
in the social action that surrounds it. These two reconstructive gestures follow the parallel
movements of involution and distribution. At the empirical level one witnesses a nearidentification between these very social objects and the people that socialise (with) them.
Together with the four terms, Gell also devises a notational system with letters for each of the
four agentive variables and for each of the two statuses (agent, patient); connecting them through
long or short arrows. These arrows can stand for any possible action effected from one variable
upon another, while the long arrow usually represents the culminating moment in the nexus of
actions and relationships described. Here it is important to note that the diagrams by which these
contexts are formalised are not put forward as presentations of ‘what objectively happens’, but
are made to reveal a certain perspective on who exerts agency on whom or what (Gell 1998,
p57).
In all, such a method supported by a manageable array of terms and interrelations appears to
promisingly explore the domains of interaction that decenter (contextualise) the art object and
turn it simultaneously into a tool and an agent of semiotic action and intersubjective exchange.
Much of this success can be seen residing in the choice and partial redefinition of the Peircean
‘index’.
Although Gell is careful to point out that he merely lends the term from Peirce and does not
necessarily take much ‘content’ or definition with it, looking at how the index is generally
positioned among other terms in Peirce’s system, is illuminating. The index features in one of
Peirce’s three sign-type trichotomies, the one that distinguishes icon, index, and symbol. Icons
3
are signs that establish relationships between different visual or other experiential registers, they
basically translate certain ‘qualities’ into other ‘qualities’. Symbols are signs which relate a
signified to a signifier which is recognised as such by convention; ‘a law’ causes the symbol to
be interpreted as referring to an object. The index, then, covers signification whereby there is
contiguity between sign and object to the extent that the object modifies the sign. Comparing
these three domains of signification one can attribute to them a specific terrain of human and
scholarly activity. The field of the icon is exemplarily ‘cultural’: at a relatively low level of
awareness people experience phenomena and order and connect these experiences. The scholarly
activity that deals with art as iconic signification is aesthetics (Gell 1998, p4-5). The field of the
symbol is that of communicative action relying on relatively stable codes for articulating
experiences/knowledge/intentions; the most linguistic-like of the art studies disciplines is
iconography, which seeks to decode the meanings in art (Gell 1998, p6-7). Indices then
constitute a third field somewhere in between the two others, that of the ‘social’, of human
agents using ‘cultural’ objects to ‘articulate’ their action, intentions, etc. Gell (1998, p6) sees
artefactual indices play ‘the practical mediatory role in the social process’. The discipline most
suited to deal with this domain is a new anthropology of art – to be built from scratch, according
to the author, because anthropologists so far have been lured into aesthetic and/or iconographic
analysis. Finally, within the domain of the social, Gell perceives one other discipline that can
deal with art but differently: the sociology of art (e.g. Bourdieu) or the social history of art focus
on the institutional side of art use and the participation of large, society-wide groupings (classes),
in the art phenomenon. In contrast, Gell (1998, p11) concludes in his introduction, anthropology
operates ideally in a biographical space, that of the lives and life-stages of subjects and objects
alike.
The above presentation is meant to bring out how I see ‘index’ functioning at at least two levels
within Art and agency. As an analytic key-term it helps to develop a new method of analysing
‘social objects’. As a term known and used by theories of signification in the human sciences,
the index is made to index, so to speak, a proper anthropological perspective on material culture.
As said the latter is accomplished in what I have called part 2 of the book, to the analysis of
which I turn now.
2. A proper anthropological theory 1: Marcel Mauss and participation
This is how Gell announces his determination to build a proper anthropological theory:
‘In fact, it might not be going too far to suggest that in so far as Mauss’ theory of
exchange is the exemplary, prototypical ‘anthropological theory’, then the way to
produce an ‘anthropological theory of art’ would be to construct a theory which
resembles Mauss’, but which was about art objects rather than prestations’ (idem, p9)
At that point it is unclear to what extent his will resemble Mauss’ theory apart from the fact that
‘anthropological theories are [...] typically about social relationships’ (11). The latter is certainly
the case, but it needs little arguing that ‘prestations’ in Mauss’ theory of the gift concern as much
the ‘objects’ as the social relationships that they institute. Throughout the book, this scheme is at
4
work, although enriched by more recent approaches by Marilyn Strathern and Nancy Munn.5 In
the end, however, it is difficult not to see that the Maussian archaic gift – whereby people
participate in the inalienable gifts (objects) they allocate (produce and distribute), sharing out
themselves in the process (Mauss 1990, p46) – is the leitmotiv of Gell’s entire project.
What connects the Maussian gift and Gell’s art object is that they are both instantiations of
participation. This participation paradigm has the double effect (i) of piloting a coherent theory
of ‘social objects’ not only in their material but also in their conceptualised form, and (ii) of
narrowing the empirical field that Gell is able, or disposed, to cover. The enthusiasm of the two
reviewers mentioned earlier is aroused by the first observation, this paper wants to highlight the
second and then tries to see how this undermines the theory-building as such.
In part II of Art and Agency the theory of social ‘objecthood’ and objectified personhood are
developed using, in this order, the examples of (i) exuviae sorcery first in a person-to-person
situation (volt sorcery) and then in a person-to-god situation (Tahitian To’o), and of (ii) idols
first in a simple form (as establishing reciprocity and intersubjectivity between god and
worshipper in Hindu effigies) and then in their more complex form combining internal and
external animacy: idols are put forward as social agents, and encapsulate willpower. This leads
to the conclusion that art objects as much as persons are at the same time part of social networks
and embody, internalise these networks. This model of the internal and external distributed
nature of objects and human beings, in chapter 7, prepares for the final argument in chapter 9
that not only do people and objects act in social networks, they also think in them. The Malangan
memorial carving (New Ireland) is brilliantly theorised as an index through which the total
‘agentive capacity’ of the deceased is reproduced in the ‘heads’ of the living (in return for ritual
payments). In another final example, the Kula circulation of objects (the example is from the
Kula ring of which Gawa is part) is identified as the workings of an extended mind, the mind of
the Kula operator thinking (strategically) through objects and transactions, their history and their
anticipated future; in other words Kula is extra-bodily cognition from a largely invisible but
nonetheless ever-present Kula operator.
The last chapter concludes with two cases which at first sight are somewhat of an anti-climax.
First we see ‘the extended mind’ at work in the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. This seems to beg
the question because the mental participation of the artist in all and every instance of his/her
opus is presupposed, and Gell ultimately capitalises on an oeuvre and a particular work (Large
Glass and its constituent parts) which the artist sought to frame as his extended self through
inscribing it with indices (traces) of himself. The second and penultimate example of the Maori
meeting house makes the rather obvious point that it is a space where past (ancestors), present
(memories and aspirations), and future (children, model for future building) merge; here Gell
puts to use the observation by Nicholas Thomas that these houses index the vitality of the group
5. More specifically Strathern’s concept of the ‘distributed person’ and Munn’s theorising of
Kula in Gawa as ‘a process of constructing an intersubjective spacetime’ in which develops a
‘generative or causal-sequential and iconic nexus of relations’ (Munn 1986, p268, 269).
5
(Gell 1998, p251-258).6 However, in both cases, it is the obvious that Gell wants us to face: the
fact that individuals and groups self-consciously objectify their (changing) consciousness in the
material environment they create for themselves and, surely, for others. Indices reveal their timetranscending, shifting, potential because they can, at other moments in time refer to other
ancestors, to another present and another past. What is happening in these last pages is that Gell
puts the index as analytic instrument back into the hands of the people he has been studying.
Anthropologist and artist now participate in the same semiotic trade.
This series of examples clearly illustrate the earlier contention that participation is being
explored consistently, but also, I hasten to add, systematically. There is so to speak a certain
direction to it, which in itself corroborates a deeper link with Mauss’ object/person theory and
the theory on which the latter was based.
In outlining the systematic study of aesthetic phenomena, Mauss (1967) in his Manuel
d’ethnographie follows a path which is based on Preuss (1904-5). The latter’s theory situates the
common origin of art and religion in the primitive belief ‘an die Zauberkraft von einzelnen
Körperteilen und bestimmten Handlungen’ (1904, p322). What follows is an evolutionary
process of externalisations of this ‘Zauberglauben’. The subsequent attempts to gain control over
the outside world start with the body orifices (‘Zauber der Körperöffnungen’), move over to the
use of different parts of the human body (‘Sympathiezauber’) – forms of excreta (e.g. faeces,
semen, saliva, ‘sounds’ from the throat), and bodily movements (dances) – and finally result in
using external objects which, through imitation of the outside world (‘Analogiezauber’) are
believed to capture its power (Preuss, 1904, p322, 389; 1905, p380). Analogously with this
externalisation of mediating power-objects, the very locus of power is gradually removed away
from the human body: from personal to anonymous spirits, and finally to gods (Preuss 1905,
381-2).
In the Manuel d’ethnographie the categorisation of art objects follows Preuss’ trajectory – the
order in which the ethnographer explores the aesthetic works of other peoples matches the way
humanity gradually discovers art. ‘On se servira, pour l’étude des arts plastiques’, Mauss (1967,
p94) sets off, ‘d’une division établie, comme pour les techniques, à partir du corps. Le premier
art plastique est celui de l’individu qui travaille sur son corps’. The subsequent entries for
studying the arts are: ‘cosmetics’, decoration of the body (first of the body itself, then by adding
objects to the body), decoration of other objects (such as tools and houses), and finally the ‘ideal
arts’ (drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture). Like in Preuss’ series of artistic and
religious phenomena, Mauss explicitly framed his series as exemplifying a movement away from
the body (externalisation) coupled with that away from materiality (spiritualisation). After
6. For this Thomas is fully acknowledged. This is not the case for a well-known art-historical
analysis of Large Glass by Rosalind Krauss (1977) in which she uses the concept of the index to
analyse contemporary art; Krauss is recognised (Bal & Bryson 1991, p190, n70) as the one who
introduced the ‘index’ (or ‘shifters’ as Peirce’s student Jacobson called them) into art studies.
This is pure ‘abduction of origination’ from my side, but it seems that the finale of the book
equally tells about the initial inspiration for Art and agency.
6
discussing the plastic arts, Mauss introduces the verbal and musical arts, saying that in
considering them, we will observe ‘des phénomènes’ qui se dégagent de plus en plus de la
matière.’(idem, p108). The entries here are ‘dance’, ‘music and song’, ‘drama’, ‘poetry’ and
‘prose’, and constitute a series in which form (‘des choses tenues dans la main’) becomes
secondary to spiritual content (‘des états de conscience’) (idem, p109).
By comparing Preuss’ magico-artistic stages and Mauss’ aesthetic course with the successive
examples in Art and Agency, I basically intend to reframe Gell’s theory as a gradual deployment
of mechanisms of object-mediated participation in and cognitive mastering of the outside (social)
world in a high theory of universal art production. It must however be noted that ‘gradual’ has a
very different meaning in each of the three theories: Preuss clearly sees a gradual progression in
an evolutionary scheme; Mauss embeds this in a ‘scholarly’ plan for the exploration and
systematic study of aesthetic phenomena, while in Gell’s case the progression must be solely
understood within the context of theoretical perfection.
Nonetheless, the problematic which I pointed out before – the simultaneous movements of
theoretical amplification and empirical reduction – can be rephrased in terms of such gradual
progression. At the point where the three theories reach their respective summits, the empirical
ground they cover becomes considerably smaller. At the height of Preuss’ evolution lies real art
and religion ‘as we know it’; at the end of Mauss’ course, scholars can have a go at ‘l’art ideal,
mais qui n’est qu’une toute petite partie de l’art’ (Mauss 1967, p95); in his final chapter Gell
chooses to theorise a number of specific cases of which he implicitly or explicitly admits that
they presuppose a kind of closure – a closeness and a closed-ness, however, which contemporary
anthropologists are prone to reject right away. In the case of the Gawan Kula, the rope-pulling,
semi-divinised Kula operator calculates his strategy based on an albeit impressive amount of
more or less predictable exchange events. In the case of Duchamp, Gell (1998, p242) specifies
that his model ‘best applies to artists whose oeuvre embodies a high degree of conscious selfreference and coherent development’. The advanced theory appears, in other words, exceedingly
successful in what contemporary anthropology would recognise as a terribly rare sort of cases:
that of a stable and closed group or individual.7 Here is a breaking point; here it becomes
obvious that Gell’s promising methodology is somehow trapped (‘ensnared’ as he might say) in
his own theory-building. My argument will be that the analytic tool of the index not at all
precludes addressing socio-economic contexts which do not demonstrate such a degree of
closure; it is Gell’s initial resolution to build a proper anthropological theory that is meant to deal
with other people, that forces him to methodologically back down. Presently, I will focus on the
second aspect of the proper anthropological theory: its attempt to address other art.
7. It may be of some interest that Strathern’s concept of ‘dividuality’ is precisely used to argue
against a stable selfhood across personal and social histories and cultural boundaries (Battaglia
1995).
7
3. A proper anthropological theory 2: Lévi-Strauss and other art
From the very start, Gell makes the choice of considering visual art and excluding verbal and
musical arts. Apart from this, he makes it clear that his is a theory which supplements regular art
theories and art history to the degree that they appear successful in making sense of non-Western
colonial and post-colonial arts – if they are indeed, Gell prefers to stay away from them. By
implication his is a theory of ‘anthropological art’ or what he elsewhere called ‘primitive art’
(1992, p62, fn1) making thereby the rather unappealing move of aligning anthropology with
precolonial (and surely, precolonial-like) non-Western society.8
Methodologically Gell excludes three ways in which anthropologists so far have approached art:
(i) as meaningful (language-like) communication, (ii) as sophisticated form appreciated
according to culture-specific aesthetic standards, and (iii) as special products circulating in
recognised art institutions. Apart from the references to the prototypical theories of Mauss and,
to a lesser degree Lévi-Strauss, Gell sees anthropology effectively covering the relational context
constituted by human lives and life-stages. This biographical outlook situates anthropology in
between sociology (supra-biographical) and psychology (infra-biographical).
All this indeed makes for a whole series of exclusions and what emerges from it is Gell’s
resolution to carve out an empirical field that is substantially different from Western/modern art
and that therefore cannot be successfully covered by existing art studies. Distancing himself
from most contemporary anthropological art studies and aligning his theory with those of Mauss
and Lévi-Strauss, demonstrates how determinedly Gell is looking for a (new) theory of other art
very much like Mauss was looking for an other economy and Lévi-Strauss, even in his ideas on
art, for other ways of constructing knowledge. To start with Mauss, it has been argued that The
essai on the gift rather frankly constructs an anti-image of commodity exchange to the extent of
blurring a large range of factual distinctions in the kinds of gifts described (Testart 1998,
Thomas 1991). In Lévi-Strauss’ ideas on art, Hénaff (1998, p190-213) detects a similar kind of
‘orientalist’ search for an anti-western art object. Here we see that Lévi-Strauss puts forward the
opposition between representation (in western art) and signification (in ‘primitive’ art).
Signification resembles index-like ‘participation’ in that there is a material relation between the
signifier and the signified; the signifier has not liberated itself from what it signifies. This
8. As can be see from his other work and from his own reflections on it (Gell 1999), it was not at
all Gell’s overall purpose to distinguish an empirical zone of primitive artistic action. Such
empirical reduction, I argue, emerged specifically from the theory-building in Art and Agency to
the extent that it prevented Gell from fully integrating the underlying ideas developed in essays
such as ‘Vogel’s Net’ and ‘On Coote’s “Marvels of everyday vision”’ in this, his ultimate book
on the anthropology of art. In the light of what he later said about these two essays (in Gell
1999), this is all the more surprising. Of the former essay, Gell declared that it was meant to
open up the reactionary, 19th century definition of art used in the anthropology of art, and to put
Duchamp and so-called primitive art on an equal footing (idem, p.18). The purpose of his
‘Coote’ essay is, according to the author, approaching ‘a work of art as something more
pragmatic and something which emerges out of a context of social interaction’ (idem, p.20).
8
primacy of material over model is to be found, according to Lévi-Strauss, in primitive art and in
early Western art. Contrarily, in representative art (Western art since the quattrocento), the
model prevails over the material, and through mimesis ‘the represented world is a world
possessed in effigy, mastered in its double’ (Hénaff 1998, p196).
The general point about these, admittedly rather crudely summarised, theories of art is that they
feature in a shared tradition of imagining other art. In building a distinctive theory
(‘anthropological’) pertaining to a distinctive empirical terrain (non-Western, precolonial,
primitive, etc.), Gell does not escape this othering of art and the tradition of ideas that comes
with it.
There is no space here to illustrate the many models which this imagining of other art has
produced over a period of more than one hundred years. For this we can rely on a recent
reconstruction by Richard Parmentier (1997b, p63-89) who found that in culture historical
discourse, one distinguishes four epochs or types of cultures, each characterised by one kind of
prototypical semiotic activity. Slightly adapting his reconstruction for our purposes we could
distinguish between:
1. Cultures of confusion (primitive or archaic culture) employ symbols without consciousness
of the fundamental bar between signifier and signified; the signifier is magically confused
with the signified; the natural, the human and extra-human (gods) realms participate in each
other.9 Prototypical art product: the ‘fetish’.
2. Cultures of motivation (classical and medieval culture) see the phenomenal world as a
realisation of the divine realm; signifiers are motivated by their signifieds; the natural and
human world are directed by supra-worldly forces. Prototypical art product: the idol.
3. Cultures of convention (modernity) use conventional signs, and are well aware of their
arbitrary nature; modern man assumes a positive transparency between the phenomenal
world and the realm of man-made signs. Prototypical art product: the ‘representative’
painting.
4. Cultures of aesthetics (postmodernity) detach signifying from any referential ground;
signifiers are emptied; there is multiplication of autonomous code structures severed from an
anchoring reality. Prototypical art product: contemporary art collages, installations, and
happenings.
The above model may seem dated and somehow too essentialising to be still in use in the
humanities. However, this is not the case. Up to the present there is a vivid debate in art history,
for instance, about how other peoples’ art functions and what it really is. For an example I turn
to a review by Arthur Danto of David Freedberg’s The power of images. Looking for a
fundamental explanation of ‘the power of images’, Danto (1990) introduces the difference
between ‘transeunt’ and ‘immanent’ representation. In the first case the subject is distinct from
the image representing it, while in the case of ‘immanent representations made in tribal Africa’
or in religious icons ‘it is believed that the thing represented is actually present in the
representation’ (Danto 1990, p342). The above example further brings out that the reconstructed
9. With reference to Lévi-Strauss, Parmentier (1997b, p79) names this ‘the Age of Bricolage’.
9
semiotic typology differentiates types of art which are often grouped otherwise, for instance in
two opposing categories. That we have seen in Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between signifying and
representative art – and this is a classic, popularised as it was by Gombrich’ (1963) opposition
between conceptual and perceptual art.
In seeking to capture Art and agency in the above semiotic typology, we could naively remark
that most of the objects that feature in the book fall within the categories of what culture
historians would call confused and motivated art (cultures 1 and 2 in Parmentier’s scheme).
Moreover, two of the final examples in Chapter 9 virtually exemplify the fetish and the idol,
respectively. The Malangan memorial carving is the confused object par excellence because it
pulls together in its image the prototype (the deceased), the artist (the few who have acquired the
knowledge of production) and the recipient (the wider community). The Gawan Kula, on the
other hand, perfectly illustrates the motivated object, controlled as it is from a distance by a
semi-divinised Kula operator.
However, presenting it like that, denies the theory-driven construction of ethnographic ‘objects’.
Therefore I do not argue that Gell has fallen victim to the highly questionable semiotic typology
presented above and that his ‘index’ is an elegant way of rationalising such a position. In fact
what he does is quite the opposite: because of their indexicality, art objects trigger confusion and
motivation either in the minds of their immediate audience or of the people who study them.
Precisely the concept of the index – sometimes deployed self-consciously by the users
themselves (cf. Duchamp and the Maori) – can help the anthropologist to de-confuse or demotivate the art objects; to reveal what the objects plainly are: the focus of social interaction and
therefore invested with social agency themselves. The object posing as either confused or
motivated is, for want of a better expression, a discursive effect, caused by the serious
ideological game of undergoing the agency of objects (or concepts) which one has created with
one’s own hands and invested with the intentionality one wanted them to possess.
All the same, if this reframing of Art and agency in a sort of Durkheimian problematic is correct,
it remains all the more surprising that Gell almost exclusively focuses on fetishes and idols,
knowing full well – and there are those scarce indications in examples like Duchamp and a
painting by Velazquez – that proper (‘post-quattrocento’, ‘perceptual’, ‘representative’) art is
liable to the same problematic, sometimes deproblematised in the cute psychological phrasing:
‘the suspension of disbelief’.
As already hinted at, the key to solving this contradiction in Art and agency is by looking at what
looks more and more like an arbitrary option: the resolution to build a new anthropological
theory and the perceived necessity to exclude from this the two main ways anthropologists have
been dealing with art objects in aesthetic and iconographical studies. With these methods Gell
associates the kind of objects, which he prefers not to deal with beautiful and meaningful art.
4. Exclusions and capacities
I started the previous section by summing up the initial limitations both in empirical range (e.g.
possible exclusion of art proper) and in study methods (exclusion of iconology and aesthetics)
which Gell imposed on his theory. If our observation that Art and agency is understood by its
10
author as dealing with the semiotic processes identified as ‘confusion’ and ‘motivation’ is
correct, then we can now see how these limitations function meaningfully within Gell’s
theoretical discourse.
From the three sign-types identified by Peirce – icon, index, symbol – Gell chooses the index
because it illustrates appropriately the kind of participation in the object, and motivation of the
object which artworks of the fetish and idol type exemplify. Approaching works of art as icons
or symbols would bring out the kind of qualities Gell chooses not to deal with. Icons in Peirce’s
trichotomy are signs that share certain qualities with their object. Considering this signifiersignified relationship one can highlight a degree of resemblance between signifier and signified,
either based (i) on convention (Bal & Bryson 1991, p189), or (ii) on personal, albeit negotiable,
experience (Vansina 1984, p136-7).10 Aesthetics in its broader sense can be taken to refer to
signification and valuation of qualities (colour, visual or auditive configuration, texture, smell,
etc.) that different orders of experience differentiate or share (see Morphy 1994, p673). Symbol
on the other hand almost always points to conventional meanings of images and objects;
analysing these falls within the range of iconography and iconology. Stereotypically, iconology,
unlike ‘aesthetics’, approaches the art object almost exclusively as an encoded message, and has
less attention for aspects of quality and materiality.
The above presentation brings out how approaching the art object as icon and symbol covers
most of regular art historical practice and indeed most of what ‘art anthropology’ has submitted
as its research programme (Morphy 1994). It is precisely in reaction to this double programme of
aesthetics and iconology as formulated by Morphy that Gell presents his ‘third way’ based on the
concepts of index and abduction.11 Put otherwise, foregrounding the ‘index’ can be seen within a
general strategy of dislocating icon and symbol, aesthetics and iconology from the centre of
anthropological theories of art.
Moves similar to the one of Gell can be witnessed in art history and anthropology from the part
of semiologists such as Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson (Bal & Bryson 1991), and Keith Moxey
(1994) for art history, and Richard Parmentier (1997b) for anthropology. Their ‘démarches’
resemble the one by Gell in that they (i) rely on Peirce for methodological guidance, (ii) use the
‘index’ to discover neglected aspects of the sign-functions of art objects, and (iii) envisage to
build a general theory of art/material culture which goes beyond the traditional framework of
separately regimented meaning, form and quality analysis.
On at least one important point Gell does not fit the ‘semiologic consensus’ portrayed above: he
privileges the index as much as he excludes the iconic and symbolic functioning of art objects.
Such exclusion is not at all what the other semiologists have in mind. On the contrary, the
reconstruction of the semiotic typology by Parmentier (1997) had the double goal of (i)
profoundly interrogating the ethnocentric essentialisation of the semiotic or metasemiotic
10. Vansina (ibidem) speaks of a ‘mental image’ in the mind of the artist and of the patron; both
their preconceptions of what the object should look like direct its realisation.
11. It must be pointed out that Morphy (1994) does not speak of a double programme but sees
the study of form and meaning come together in an enlarged programme of aesthetics.
11
activity of a culture or period, and more importantly, (ii) drawing up a checklist of semiotic
procedures all of which could be explored by anthropologists when studying material culture.
Gell might have been surprised to find himself in the company of semiologists but I consider this
imagined alliance useful because it rightly exposes how Art and agency is about meaningful
objects, in the sense that this meaning is always emerging in the different contexts of human
action that surround it.12 Gell’s is a radically albeit narrowly defined semiotic approach that shies
away from projecting – reading – (relatively static) meaning in the object itself – indeed, reading
poses as if the meaning is there to consume. Gell’s resolutely ethnographer’s stance, puts
meaning not in what people are able to say about objects but, ‘abducts’ meaning from the human
action in its vicinity. Throughout the many diagrams (in the first part) and the rephrasings of
others’ fieldwork findings (second part), Gell manages with efficiency to basically deessentialise (de-confuse and de-motivate) the object by laying out, as it were, its relatively
objectified ‘meaning’ or ‘power’ in the intentions and operations of the relevant community
around it.
The magical power of ‘nail fetishes’, for instance, is ‘liquidified’ by looking at the gradual
process of what Gell calls ‘involution’ in the course of which ‘a whole series of relations’ are
objectified in one index (1998, p62). Another example makes this even more clear. Here Gell
reconsiders Küchler’s conclusion that a Malangan sculpture serves as a temporary repository of
the ‘life-force’ of the deceased, and he points out that:
‘the life-force which accumulates in the Malangan carving is the net result or product of a
lifetime’s activity in the social world, not a species of mystical energy distinguishable
categorically from ordinary life and activity’. (idem, p226)
The same reconstruction is made in connection with mauri fertility stones of the Maori. Here
again these stones are not understood as bluntly embodying the fertility principle (hau) but of
indexing fertility: the stones, like the hair and nails of humans, are seen as the exuviae of the
forest, that grow and can be ‘harvested’. To conclude, laying out meaningful action in and
around objects, reintegrates them radically into the context that they are indexing and let them be
understood as objectification’s of this relation-context.
Venturing a step far beyond these observations and into the realm of critical semiology,
‘meaning’ and ‘power’ in Gell’s hands are redistributed in their contexts and not locked up in the
objects themselves, whether the latter positioning of meaning or power is believed in by its users,
constructed by its anthropologists, or marketed by its tribal art merchants. However, the latter
kind of ‘protentions’ outside the realm of ‘traditional’ art practice and the traditional
anthropological subject, and into the uses of objects in the context of commodity economy or in
ethnographic practice (whether professional or amateur) are few and far between. And now that
we have assessed the potential of the index in spelling out social objectification, this may seem
all the more disappointing.
12. Although Gell at some stage admits that ‘there seems something irreducibly semiotic about
art’ (p14), he states clearly enough that he suspects semiologists of obstinate linguistic
imperialism.
12
By confronting Gell with the other semiologists, we are bound to conclude that his can be
conceived as a profoundly semiologic way of dealing with art. On the other hand, we learn from
this confrontation that excluding other processes of signification (iconic and symbolic) is most
probably narrowing one’s view of the overall meaningful functioning of objects. I have tried to
argue that the exclusion of iconic and symbolic signification may be motivated by Gell’s
resolution to build a proper anthropological theory. This prompted him to push aside aesthetics
and iconography and led indirectly to the excommunication of the allegedly non-indexical forms
of signification. From what we can see from the other semiologists, by having set these
limitations, Gell may eventually have drained his method from very useful resources.
One of the other consequences of opting for ‘traditional’ anthropological subjects was that, as his
theory developed, Gell chose to focus on what we identified as closed contexts in which the
preferred mechanisms of participation and motivation appeared unproblematic if not downright
exemplary. My final argument is that staying within these closed contexts, focussing on these
confused and motivated signs, and presupposing total understanding between the different
participants (artist, recipient), has prevented Gell from sorting out the essential aspect of the
index, namely its indexicality. In the final section of this paper, I will demonstrate that Gell’s
concern with building an anthropological theory has regimented his semiologic ideas in such
away that he was unable to perceiving the structural problem of indexicality of the Gellian index.
Once one starts dealing with this issue, emerges a series of research questions which can be
characterised as ‘pragmatic’.
Thinking through indexicality: the pragmatic impulse
When presenting the concept of the index in Art and agency, I pointed out that although the term
was of Peircean provenance, the core characteristic of this ‘natural sign’ resembled the definition
given by Thomas Sebeok, namely that there is a causal relation between signifier and signified.
Taking the example of deer stripping bark of trees whereby the stripped bark is the index
(Hookway 1985, p123), brings out the main characteristics of this kind of indexicality: there is a
general focus on spatial contiguity (the deer must have touched the tree), there is an aspect of
ongoing participation (as traces) and motivation (tasteful bark, hungry deer), and, finally, the
stripped bark draws attention to its maker and triggers speculations about his/her identity,
intentions, etc. (abduction of origination).
This is the meaning in which index is used in most of Art and agency and in two other
publications mentioned above, namely Thomas’ description of the Maori meeting house and
Krauss’ analysis of traces of the absent/present artist in contemporary art. However, this ‘index’
in some of its aspects is different from the way other semiologists like Parmentier (1997b) and
Bal & Bryson (1991) use it. They stay closer to the linguistic definition of indices as ‘shifters’:
‘empty’ signifiers within the object which point to elements inside but also outside the whole
object; the basic point about these shifters – think of a person in a painting pointing to
something or someone outside the painting – is that any changes in this ‘outside’ provokes shifts
of meaning. Therefore, because they consider changes of context to be essential in grasping the
full historicity of the art object, the other semiologists find it also advisable to make use of
13
another Peircean term, that of interpretant. ‘Interpretant’ basically stands for the meaning that is
created by the recipient assuming a certain ground – the ‘recognition’ of what the object is or
means on the basis of acquired knowledge or past experience. Again in changing contexts and in
confrontations between recipients and ‘alien’ objects, the reconstruction of the interpretant is
problematic and therefore a critical subject of enquiry. After all, when the recipient does not
share common ground with the artist or the prototype, shifts in meaning are bound to occur.
I have argued that Gell remains operating ethnographically within closed contexts which we can
now redefine as: (i) contexts in which there is no fundamental change in the contextual referents
to which the shifters are pointing, and (ii) contexts in which artists and recipients share the
necessary common ground to grasp what the objects are about (no radical change in
‘interpretant’). The general point is that because Gell remains operating within these relatively
closed rings of perpetual participation and mutual understanding, the problem that indexicality is
different and more complex than the referential properties of the Gellian index, is not felt.
Once the theoretical (‘anthropological’) excess is being exposed as such and the theory of social
semiosis and objectification freed from its weight, I believe the way is open for contemporary
anthropologists to engage with what is reconstructed as a middle-ground theory of the
meaningful functioning of social objects within and through historical localities. This falls
nothing short of what Parmentier (1997b) and Bryson (1991, p73) suggest to call a ‘pragmatics’
of art.
Bibliography
BAL, Mieke & Norman BRYSON 1991. Semiotics and art history. The Art Bulletin, 73, 2, pp.
174-208.
BATTAGLIA, Debbora (ed.) 1995. The rhetorics of self-making. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
BRYSON, Norman 1991. Semiology and visual interpretation. In: N. Bryson et al. (eds.) Visual
theory, pp. 61-73.
CAESAR, Michael 1999. Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the work of fiction.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
DANTO, Arthur 1990. Review of D. Freedberg ‘The power of images’. The Art Bulletin, 72, 2,
pp. 341-2)
GELL, Alfred 1992. The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. In J.
Coote & A. Shelton (eds.) Anthropology, art and aesthetics, pp. 40-63.
GELL, Alfred 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
GELL, Alfred 1999. The art of anthropology: essays and diagrams [London School of
Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, 67]. Eric Hirsch (ed.). London: The Athlone
Press.
GOMBRICH, Ernest 1963. Meditations on a hobby horse. Oxford: Phaidon.
HARRISON, Simon 1998 The extended agency of Alfred Gell. Anthropology today, 14, 4, 1-2.
14
HÉNAFF, Marcel 1998. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the making of structural anthropology.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
HOOKWAY, Christopher 1985 Peirce. London: Routledge.
JAMIESON, Mark 1999. Review of A. Gell ‘Art and Agency’. JRAI, 5, 4, pp. 672-674.
KRAUSS, Rosalind 1977. Seventies art in America. October, 3, pp. 68-81.
LEE, Benjamin 1997. Talking heads: language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity.
Durham: Duke University Press.
MAUSS, Marcel 1967. Manuel d’ethnographie. Paris: Payot.
MAUSS, Marcel 1990. The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Transl.
by W.D. Halls. London: Routledge.
MORPHY, Howard 1994. The anthropology of art. In: T. Ingold (ed.) Companion encyclopaedia
of anthropology, pp. 648-85.
MOXEY, Keith 1994. The practice of theory: poststructuralism, cultural politics, and art
history. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
MUNN, Nancy 1986. The fame of Gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim
(Papua New Guinea) society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PARMENTIER, Richard 1997a. Charles Saunders Peirce. In: J. Verschueren et al. (eds.)
Handbook of Pragmatics, pp1-18.
PARMENTIER, Richard 1997b. The pragmatic semiotics of culture. Semiotica, 116, 1, pp1-114.
PREUSS, K. T. 1904-1905. Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst. Globus, 86-87.
SCHILLEMANS, Sandra 1992. Umberto Eco and William of Baskerville: partners in abduction.
Semiotica, 92, 3-4, pp259-285.
TESTART, Alain 1998. Uncertainties of the ‘obligation to reciprocate’: a critique of Mauss. In:
W. James & N. Allen (eds.) Marcel Mauss: a centenary tribute, pp. 97-110.
THOMAS, Nicholas 1991. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the
Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
VANSINA, Jan 1984. Art history in Africa: an introduction to method. London: Longman.
15