Undivided object: language, ethnography and sources

Abstract

Aware of the symbolic forms and foundations of social life, anthropology cannot avoid analyzing the world of art and the specialized fields of cultural production, as shown by recent studies by anthropologists dealing with the subject and, indirectly, sociologists and historians attentive to the interconnections between culture, power and symbolism. These include Auerbach, Becker, Baxandall, Bourdieu, Geertz, Gell, Goody, Elias, Miceli, Schorske, Williams and Beatriz Sarlo, to mention an expressive set of authors who have explored intensively the questions of the autonomy and dependence of symbolic systems. 1 While the pathbreaking work of these authors leaves no doubt as to the importance of including intellectual life, specialized cultural production and the world of art and its practitioners in the range of objects studied by anthropology, other doubts exist, relating to the question of language and the use we make of these written and oral sources in our research, which