The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting

by Janet Catherine Berlo

Book Overview

The field of Native American art history, and our idea of what comprises Indian art itself, were molded largely by policies of the museums and institutions that established their ethnological collections in the second half of the nineteenth century. Objects housed in the great natural history museums--collected and seen first as natural history specimens and later as "primitive art"--have long been considered to be normative Native American art, rather...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0774804335
• ISBN13: 9780774804332
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Essential Reading in the Discipline

This anthology illustrates the core problems in Native North American Art History by showing the paradoxes in its founding methodology. The essays deal directly with early scholars' and collectors' cultural barriers to understanding their subjects. The book provides examples of how to question the idealogical bases of what we often accept as the truth regarding the work.I've found it to be immensely useful in a course that surveys the field; students develop a better appreciation for the work by studying the wider implications of ethnography and collecting. In particular, Marvin Cohodas' essay on Louisa Keyser often opens the way to new levels of understanding the contradictions in the discipline.Anyone with a serious interest in native art should read this collection.