There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts’ formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . .), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . .). Let’s try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the category of “art” is in some non-trivial and useful sense universal, and (2) those who believe that universal “definitions” are either tautologous or too abstract to be useful. There may be other binary pairs of positions, but these three come to mind in reading through The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, an anthology of previously published work edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins. Morphy is a very well-known and respected anthropologist who was trained at the Courtauld Institute and writes on Australian aboriginal art (among other things); he is also director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the...