ABSTRACT
In Paris during the early decades of the twentieth century when Picasso, Derain, and other artists were visiting Trocadero to look at African sculpture, Durkheim and his associates in the Année Sociologique were developing the new discipline of sociology. They suggested we regard human behaviour, ideas, and institutions of all kinds as social facts: political organization is a social fact, death is a social fact, so too are marriage rules, rituals of all kinds, as well as concepts of space, time, and self. My purpose in this chapter is to view art in the same light-and more specificially the ‘art’ of other cultures.
