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After the Second World War, however, the attention given to tribal by anthropologists was in many respects less satisfactory. Cultural relativism developed into the reigning orthodoxy in academic anthropology, and along with it came a reluctance to judge or even describe tribal peoples in ways suggesting that the writer was using Western values. cultures while minimizing similarities and pan-cultural universals. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has gone so far as to accuse his colleagues a form of “professional malpractice” in the extent to which they have tried in the last half century “to exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures.” This exoticizing tendency has in partic u lar infected anthropological approaches to art, where doubtful or misleadingly described cases drawn from the ambiguous margins areas of life—where art gradually fades into ritual, religion, or practical concerns—have been used to promote the idea that “they don’t have our concept of art.”

The direction of opinion in anthropology for the last half century has been toward the denial of a human psychological nature other what might have been constructed by local cultural conditions, along with a reluctance ever openly to discuss—or to commit to print— comparisons between the values of peoples in modern industrial societies and those of inhabitants of tribal societies. Not knowing better—how could they?—many art theorists and historians have bought anthropological bill of goods and have repudiated the search artistic universals, or at best remained silently agnostic on the subject. But the central features of art as a universal, cross-cultural phenomenon not to be denied by bad ethnography. The similarities and analogies the realm of the arts are in fact not difficult to see, and the anthropological literature leaves no doubt that all cultures have some form of perfectly intelligible Western senses of the term.

II

Consider a lively published debate held in 1993 at the University of Manchester over the motion, “Aesthetics is a cross-cultural category.” One of the two speakers arguing the negative, anthropologist Joanna Overing, spoke against the motion “because the category of aesthetics is specific to the modernist era.” It therefore “characterizes a specific consciousness of art.” She claimed that “the ‘aesthetic’ is a bourgeois and éli-tist concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the rationalist Enlightenment.” At length she refined this view, stating made artistic activity especially distinct from the technological, the everyday, the productive.”

Overing’s argument depends on conflating the idea of art, broadly conceived, with the specific inflections the idea is given in local cultures. Long before Kant, the question of artistic autonomy was being debated Greeks, some of whose music, painting, and drama was as detached from social or ideological content as most modern painting, drama, music. Is it possible to take seriously that the aesthetic interests of Eu ans were ever limited to a special, tiny class of glorified objects (painting sculpture, once seen only in palaces, today mostly surviving in fine-arts museums), which were given rapt, disinterested attention only by privileged elite? Most of us conceive of art and aesthetic experience broad category that encompasses the mass arts (pop ular forms such as tragedy, Victorian novels, or to night’s tele vision offerings), historical expressions of religious or politi cal belief, the history of music and dance, the im mense variety of design traditions for furniture, practical and architecture. Far from being a small, rarefied class of in the European imagination back to the Greeks, art includes staggeringly vast range of activities and creative products.

I can write of art in this manner and expect to be understood not my readers and I have checked the dictionary to determine meaning of “art” but because we share a much more vague and broad pretheoretical understanding of what art is. Although there may be number of difficult