Scholar Explores The Marketing Of "Primitive" Artifacts In The Modern World

Chestertown, MD, February 15, 2002 — The Washington College Department of Art and Department of Sociology and Anthropology present "THE POST-PRIMITIVE ARTIFACT: A GLOBAL TALE," a lecture by Shelly Errington, professor of anthropology at University of California-Santa Cruz, on Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at 8 p.m. in the College's Hynson Lounge. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Prize, Prof. Errington has focused her recent work on the political and semiotic analysis of the status and fates of non-Western artifacts in the late twentieth century. Her lecture will trace how "Authentic Primitive Art" was invented as a category, institutionalized, and had its triumph during the twentieth century. Its hallmark was that it was made anonymously and for ritual purposes, not for the market, but by the turn of the twenty-first century, a category shift had occurred, legitimizing made-for-the-market artifacts. This presentation briefly traces the rise and fall of Authentic Primitive Art and then sketches some new and emerging categories, exemplars, selling venues, and marketing of neo-primitive and post-primitive artifacts in the context of global events.

Prof. Errington's lecture is cosponsored by the Campus Events and Visitors Committee, the Goldstein Program in Public Affairs, the Art History Club, the Anthropology Club, and Lambda Alpha, the National Collegiate Honor Society for Anthropology. For more information on this or other events at Washington College, call the Campus Events Office at 410-778-7888.