ABSTRACT
The relationship between art and anthropology did not start at the turn of the twenty-first century; this is a long story. And it is not simply based in a common interest in the cultural “other,” exotic peoples and faraway places, but in something more profound in the constitution of their own forms of practice, as both art and anthropology were in a process of reinventing themselves. This chapter focuses on art as anthropology; that is to say, how some forms of art throughout the twentieth century have engaged with ideas and questions that anthropology has also been interested in. In fact, anthropology was directly and explicitly influential on the new forms of theater that proliferated in the sixties and seventies, and central to the emergence of performance studies. Particularly important were the writings of anthropologists working on ritual, especially Victor Turner.
