ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the notion of ‘virtuosity’, and takes this forward, considering the formation of a canon of images. It aims to unpack some of the importance of ‘style’, before exploring an extended case study of style and coherence across media and genres in the Abelam context. Franz Boas, working in a wide, pan-Pacific rim cross-comparative context, introduces the notion of ‘technical virtuosity’ as a way to speak to the quality of art-like objects and craft production. The technical, creative artist forms beautiful craft through the methodical and systematic deployment of specific technique. The technical virtuosity, and its basis in systematic method of the craftsperson, was being developed around the same time as Marcel Mauss’s ‘techniques of the body’. The metaphysical question of the nature of relation for the Abelam, and inhabitants of the region more widely, is thus shown to be encapsulated in the virtuosity of the avian model and thus in assembled canon of difference and similarity.
