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With Danto’s challenge in mind, here is another philosophic thought experiment, one of my own. It is an imaginary pastiche, although derived in part from my experience of New Guinea. It may be caricature, it describes in every one of its details facts and events observed and by ethnographers who have worked in the Pacific region. Imagine again two peoples (the word “tribe” is not technically correct in Oceania). The first, I shall call them the Jungle People, produce carvings that carvers, who use tools of stone and bone, are specially revered by their fellows, with a few individual carvers known for their remarkable works. These men (they are strictly men in this culture, as women are strictly weavers) produce a great variety of carving, mostly involving human and animal forms. The Jungle People parpaticularly value carvings made of the hardest old woods of the ancient tropical rain forest they inhabit; they believe too that the gods respond especially favorably to carvings that difficult to make. Now and again their carvings are produced in secret hidden in the jungle, where they are found by children, with the word put about that they were left there by the gods. The Jungle People pray to these carvings, and cover them with pig fat, or blood, or semen, order to energize them spiritually to bring about healing or luck in hunting expeditions. As they are still isolated from modern civilization, the Jungle People have no access to representational images other than those their own carvers produce: they have never seen either pictures or carvings of other cultures, except the vaguely similar carvings of nearby cultures. They themselves have no tradition of two-dimensional painting drawing. Their carvings, even when realistic to our eyes, are indelibly stylized in their peculiarly elongated Jungle People manner. Occasionally, Jungle People form raiding parties to steal especially powerful carvings from neighbors. Over generations, many people have died in these raids. The carvings are very important to them.

As it happens, there is another tribe, historically and culturally closely related to the Jungle People. We know they are related because their language and system of mythology share many elements with the Jungle People’s, as did their sacred and decorative carving prior to their first contact with an Australian patrol officer in the middle 1930s. They where they have always lived, near the mouth of a river on their large South Pacific island. In the 1960s, a Club Med was built next to their village, and although they still have their traditional name, they now whimsically call themselves the Tourist People. They no longer pray their carved idols and would be terribly embarrassed at the idea of smearing carvings with blood or semen, because they have all become devout, somewhat prudish, Methodists. They still, however, produce their “ carvings, all of which they sell to the Club Med visitors. Using polyurethane varnish. The Tourist People are able to live comfortably government welfare benefit (the government is supported by mining royalties, as parts of the country are rich with gold deposits), so much extra money earned through carving goes into the purchase and rental of movies for their video players. (No broadcast television reaches Tourist People’s settlement, but every household has a video playback device. Old Hong Kong kung-fu movies, dubbed into Melanesian pidgin, are a perpetual delight.)

Now let us stop and try to imagine, in the manner of Arthur Danto, that no one can tell the difference between the carvings of the Jungle People the carvings of the Tourist People. But wait: how is it possible to imagine that carvings produced in such completely different contexts, for such completely different aims, could turn out to be indistinguishable? We might well suppose that an occasional Tourist People carving produced an old carver in the traditional style, or by a clever young carver using traditional model, might, at least to a tourist, look like an ancient Jungle People carving, or might be to