Aesthetic Anthropology: Theory and Analysis of Pop and Conceptual Art in America

In Aesthetic Anthropology, Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz makes the case that anthropology — long focused on “primitive” art and non-Western ritual — possesses untapped theoretical resources for analyzing the art of contemporary Western societies. Drawing on structuralism, symbolic anthropology, and the sociology of knowledge, Ravicz constructs a cross-cultural framework for understanding art as a system of communication embedded in its social and cognitive context. The result is a pioneering study that bridges the anthropology of art and contemporary art criticism. It demonstrates that the same analytical tools used to interpret Navajo sand paintings or Yoruba sculpture can illuminate a Brillo box or a set of typed propositions.

Ravicz’s analysis reveals Pop Art as a complex mediating system that oscillates between the domains of fine art and mass culture, simultaneously aestheticizing the commercial commodity and commodifying the aesthetic object. Notably, this study was one of the first sustained academic engagements with Fluxus, situating its intermedia experiments and anti-art provocations as a critical bridge between the appropriation of consumer culture by Pop Art and dematerialization of the object by Conceptual Art.

This book was originally a PhD dissertation completed at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1974. This book anticipated by several decades the now-flourishing interdisciplinary conversation between anthropology, visual culture studies, and contemporary art theory. It remains a vital and still-generative contribution to the anthropology of aesthetics.