Richard L. Anderson is, in my view, the most respected and influential aesthetic anthropologist alive today (see Anderson 1979, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2015, 2021, 2023). I first met him in the 1980s when I was teaching a course called Creativity and Society at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, using one of his works (1979) as a required text. He was teaching in the Liberal Arts section of the Kansas City Art Institute, a mere hour’s drive away, so I invited him to come and speak to my class. The students were delighted to hear from their text’s author, and he and I hit it off right away. Before long, we were collaborating on a book of readings (Anderson and Field 1993), a project in which I learned a great deal from him. Because of those experiences, and because Richard is now in his 80s, I feel it is crucial to preserve his thoughts and experiences so that they may be shared with other anthropologists interested in the field of art and aesthetics. The following discussion is one that we conducted via email over the past several months and one in which I hope to capture his role in the history of that tradition.

KLF: Greetings, Richard! When you look back over the history of aesthetic anthropology, who are the figures and what are the works that really stand out as being especially important, both to you and to the field?

RLA: Well, the first thinkers that stand out to me are Tylor and Morgan—Tylor because he gave us that early, impactful definition of “culture” that still gets written on the board in every intro classroom and that contains the word “arts” as an integral part of culture (see Tylor 2010 [1871]) and Morgan (see Morgan 1877) because, first, he showed us the shaping of culture by technoeconomic patterns, an emphasis that was picked up by Marx and Engels (1976) and later by White (2005 [1949]) and that gives us a framework for analyzing how the arts fit into society; and second, because he was one of the first to take “tribal,” or pre-agricultural, arts really seriously… Look at the collection of Iroquois works he assembled in 1849-50, the stuff that ended up in the New York State Museum! He had quill work, deer hide items, elaborate beadwork by a lady named Caroline, and he took it seriously enough to enlist an indigenous family, the Parkers, to help him choose what to include.

KLF: So, what was the next big milestone?

RLA: That would have to be the publication of Franz Boas’s Primitive Art (1955). With it, readers not only saw again that the arts of pre-agricultural societies were worth careful attention, but also learned that with respect to quality, they might be equal to those of the industrialized West, thanks to Boas’s belief in the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that each culture should be judged on its own terms, not in comparison to others. The idea that a [Kwakwaka’wakw] mask might be equal in aesthetic quality to a Picasso portrait, or an Iroquois chant might be equal to a Chopin nocturne, blossomed in anthropology and quickly spread to other fields, like history and philosophy.

KLF: And what came next?

RLA: I think the next important development in the anthropological study of the arts, and one that had a lot of impact on my own work, was the publication of The Science of Culture by Leslie White (White 2005 [1949]). Picking up on Morgan, he provided a useful framework for analyzing any culture—one wherein the material base shapes the social and then the ideational subsystems. For example, he pointed out how agricultural economies, producing a surplus and private property, resulted in class stratification in their social subsystems, and therefore we could expect different arts for different classes, or possibly fraught situations where the artist is regarded as a lower-class worker serving an upper-class elite. Pre-agricultural economies—hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists and pastoralists— could be expected to lack such stratification.^[1]The differentiation intended here is between pre-intensive agriculture and what I believe most anthropologists would call “traditional communal economies,” namely, foraging, horticulture (“shifting cultivation”), and pastoralism. These are economies that do not have private property or a surplus, as are found with intensive agriculture and which result in class stratification, among other major differences like occupational specialization and first-time or increased gender stratification (see Harris 1968). It therefore made sense to me, when doing a cross-cultural survey of the arts, to discuss pre-agricultural societies together (e.g., Anderson 1979; Anderson and Field 1993), but post-agricultural ones separately (e.g. Anderson 1999). Or, when analyzing an aspect of the ideational subsystem, such as an aesthetic philosophy, it made sense to me to show how it was shaped by the material and social subsystems of the cultures where they emerged (e.g., Anderson 2004).

KLF: I know that another milestone for my work occurred with the publication of Jacques Maquet’s terrific work, The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts (1986). A Belgian anthropologist who had become an expert on the art of sub-Saharan Africa, his insight and success reassured me that I, an American, could also understand and help preserve the arts of other cultures. I got to T.A. for him when he was a visiting professor at Stanford, and I learned a great deal from him, including ideas that I incorporated into my dissertation (see Field 1979). How about you? Did you like his work? 

RLA: Very much! He provided anthropologists with an ingenious and highly useful vocabulary for talking about the arts cross-culturally. For example, it had often been hard for anthropologists to find a single definition of “art” they could all agree on, especially one that could be applied to pre-agricultural economies because they lack occupational specialization and therefore also a group of people called “artists.” Most of them made “things,” like bowls and clothes, some of which an observer might find beautiful and intriguing, but do we call them “art” and put them in the same category as the Venus de Milo? Maquet proposed that they may not be “art” in the Western sense of the word since they are not solely or even primarily intended to engage the viewer’s attention. But so long as they display “non-instrumental form” (Maquet 1986, 60-61), they can be classified as “aesthetic objects,” objects “stimulating and sustaining in the beholder an attentive, non-discursive and disinterested vision” (Maquet 1986, 33). A ceramic bowl’s roundness and depth are instrumental features; they help it hold food. But the carefully inscribed triangles all around the rim?  They are non-instrumental, providing a form meant to engage the viewer’s interest through the senses of sight and touch—form that makes the bowl an “aesthetic object.”

KLF: Yes, and to get back to Tylor and Morgan…, by coining that term, didn’t Maquet settle a debate that had puzzled evolutionists like them? They kept wondering whether “art” could be considered a cultural universal, since they knew of cultures that didn’t have art galleries, art museums, or even full-time artists. They might even lack “objects mainly or solely intended to engage the viewer’s attention” (Maquet 1986, 25)—that’s “art” in the West. But we know today that no human society lacks objects with non-instrumental form; no culture lacks aesthetic objects. That means we can truly study “aesthetic objects” cross-culturally.

RLA: And that makes his term “aesthetic segment” a useful one. Building on Leslie White, he agrees that each culture has a material, social, and ideational subsystem. So you’ll want to explore the material patterns that go into the making of aesthetic objects—the marble, clay, deerskin, that’s used, and the skills that are needed— then the social relationships between the teacher, the maker, and the users. Finally, you want to look at the ideas, the philosophies, the messages that are embedded in the objects. You can use that same framework in everything from foraging societies to advanced industrial ones. Somehow, his coming up with those universally-applicable terms made me feel as though aesthetic anthropology had finally come of age, finally been recognized as a distinct subfield of anthropology. 

KLF: And how about recent history in aesthetic anthropology? What do you see as the main and/or the most useful trends today? 

RLA: To be quite honest with you, I haven’t kept up with more current trends in our field. I’m retired now, no longer part of a university community, and rather than focusing on other people’s aesthetic productions, I’m producing some of my own—not visual stuff, but fiction (see Anderson 2015, 2021, and 2023). And rather than scientifically observing a different culture, I’m literally immersed in one… [M]y wife and I moved to Mexico over a decade ago. It’s been an invigorating change. But I know there’s a lot of diversity in what art anthropologists are doing nowadays… [T]ake the papers given at the meetings of the Southern Anthropological Society in 2011 (see Lundy 2013) that I happened to see. You see ethnographic reports from Botswana, Gozo, Peru, and Ireland, but then, also, reflexive works like The Art of Teaching Anthropology/The Anthropology of Art (Lundy 2013) and “Arts Integration in Critical Pedagogy” (Sheehan 2013).  That’s quite a range. And one guy just came out with a book that shows how “avant-garde” movements in the West, like Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism, have all worked, in one way or another, to destroy “art” altogether (Falconer 2025). So hey, maybe pretty soon there won’t be anything to study here in the West! But I have a feeling there’ll always be stuff with non-instrumental form wherever you go, so I’m not too worried!

KLF: Let’s back up just a bit now, so we can trace your own history with our discipline. How did you first get into anthropology? As I recall, that involved a major change in direction as early as your undergraduate days, did it not?

RLA: I was born, grew up, and went to college in West Virginia, a fact that to some extent accounts for my love of Mexico. Both are beautiful places effectively reduced to the status of colonies exploited by corporate interests, and both have rich and unique traditions of culture and popular art. After receiving a chemistry set as a Christmas gift when I was nine years old, I remained fascinated by the hard sciences until I was one year from receiving a BS degree in chemistry. As I approached a career in science, however, the culture of 1970s America convinced me that it was more important to understand the human world than the material world. Consequently, I abandoned chemistry for cultural anthropology. I got my MA and PhD degrees in that field after doing field research in the Republic of Ireland.

KLF: So, your own training in anthropology was quite traditional, i.e., it involved doing fieldwork in a culture different from your own. But for most of your career, you taught at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, where most of your students were aspiring to be artists, not anthropologists, and most of your colleagues were artists, not social scientists. How did this change affect you, i.e., did you ever feel out of place and if so, how did you cope with that? How did you go about convincing American art students that they might benefit from the kind of topics featured in your classes? And what advice might you give to someone considering a similar change of professional milieu?

RLA: Teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute was indeed an improbable turn of events for me! I confess that I felt ill-suited to become a university professor on two scores: teachers are expected to have all the answers and to be comfortable speaking before an audience. Therefore, before my first teaching semester, I resolved that when a student asked a question I couldn’t answer, I would admit my ignorance but take care to find an answer to the question before the next class meeting. Also, I would try my best to act as if I were at ease before an audience—and thereby perhaps fool both my students and myself. Adapting to a liberal arts environment proved challenging, but in this way, it was navigable.

In the first years, my department chairman disparagingly referred to me as “the resident empiricist.” However, as a professor, I found it relatively easy to hold discussions about non-Western art given my students’ background in Western art. In general, the art and design students in my classes were happy to have their facile stereotype of non-Western people replaced by fieldwork-based accounts. I assumed I would eventually teach in the anthropology department of a university, but with the passage of time I came to appreciate the freedom my situation afforded me. I found art and design students to be interesting and challenging partners in the academic endeavor. The mission of teaching cultural anthropology to art and design students seemed at least as valuable as helping to train more anthropologists. So, to someone entering a new work milieu, I guess I’d say, “go into it believing it’ll work, listen to the folks around you, and be flexible in your responses.”

KLF: Some years ago, you and your wife decided to pull up stakes and move from Kansas City, Missouri to Queretaro, Mexico, a place where you had no family and where your language was not the native tongue. Clearly, this involved adapting to many new things—diet, dress, customs, political scene, etc. What inspired you to make such a major change of residence? How, if at all, did your background in anthropology and the arts aid you in the adapting process? What advice might you give to someone planning a similar shift of residence?

RLA: I first visited Mexico in 1997, and I fell in love with it immediately. Indeed, I liked it so much that I resolved to spend as much time there as possible. I had hated the French and German classes I had to take as an undergraduate, but I thought I could gain sufficient fluency in Spanish to conduct a normal life in Mexico. Eventually, that hope became a reality, thanks in no small part to the Mexicans who became my friends there.

After numerous small trips around “the Republic,” in 2008 I began dividing my time between living in Kansas City and Tlaquepaque, Jalisco. Mexico’s colorful history, its vibrant culture, and the warmth of its people continue to fascinate me. Every day Mexico stimulates my anthropological and artistic imagination. Since 2010, I’ve counted myself lucky to live near the city of Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico, with my wife, the painter Kimball (Kim) Anderson. My only regret is living so far from friends and family in the United Staes. Fortunately, online video chats make it easier to stay in touch with them.

As for advice, I’d say, “if a new place really calls out to you, don’t be afraid to make the move. There’s a good chance you’ll find local people ready to help, and FaceTime will let you visit with the folks you’ve left behind!”

KLF: When you retired from the Art Institute and moved to Mexico, you turned from your highly prolific academic writing to the writing of fiction, and found publication much more difficult. What prompted you to make the switch? How have you dealt with the challenge of publication? What advice would you give to someone contemplating a similar switch of genre?

RLA: In recent years, yes, I’ve been writing historical fiction set in Mexico. Writing fiction allows me to merge my creative impulses with my knowledge of anthropology and Mexico. As a professor, when I wrote about the cultural anthropology of art, there were so few college-level books available, it was not difficult to get my work published. By contrast, the easy availability of computers and word processing software make it easy for anyone to write fiction, and publishers are far more selective. Consequently, I spent a year of frustration looking for an agent or publisher for my first novel, Smoking Mirror (2015). Fortunately, self-publishing is relatively easy these days, and I finally went that route with that and subsequent works of fiction. For example, Smoking Mirror and my collection of stories drawn from Mexican history, Bajio Stories (2021), are both available from Amazon.com. As for advice on switching genres, I’d simply say, “go for it, experiment, be patient, and if traditional publishing doesn’t work out, be flexible—there are other options out there now for getting into print.”

KLF: What are your current projects?

RLA: I’m currently working on a ghost story set in the town of Celaya, with its allegedly haunted tunnels. When it is finished, I intend to publish my short works of fiction in a single volume comparable to Bajio Stories.

KLF: Today anthropologists have so many fields of study they can choose from—everything from forensic practice to globalization to comparative medicine—on and on! Why might you encourage an up-and-coming anthro student to specialize in the arts?

RLA: Well, for that, I’d have to go back to Leslie White. I’ll never forget his quote from The Science of Culture: “science is one of two basic ways of dealing with experience. The other is art… (their) purpose is one: to render experience intelligible, to assist man to adjust himself to his environment in order that he may live” (White 2005, 3). In other words, when you’re able to understand life using both approaches, you’ve got it covered! And that’s what art anthropology allows you to do!

KLF: Looking back over your life and career, what wisdom would you impart to a young person contemplating a life in anthropology, or in art, or—shall we say—simply “in life?”

RLA: I guess I’d say, “find something creative you love to do, try to do a kind thing for someone every day, make enough money to pay your bills (don’t worry about making more than that), and hopefully find a lot of love along the way.” Then I believe that, like me, you’ll be able to say, “What a lucky life I have led!”

Works cited

Anderson, Richard L. 1979. Art in Primitive Societies. Prentice-Hall Anthropology Series. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

———. 2000. American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

———. 2004. Calliope’s Sisters: A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

———. 2015. Smoking Mirror. Self-Published.

———. 2021. Bajio Stories: Two Families, Five Hundred Years. Self-Published.

Anderson, Richard L., and Karen L. Field. 1993. Art in Small-Scale Societies: Contemporary Readings. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

———. 2023. Gonzalo Guerrero: A Conquistador Conquered. Self-Published.

Boas, Franz. 1955. Primitive Art. New York: Dover Publications.

Falconer, Morgan. 2025. How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Field, Karen L. 1979. “Doing What I Love: The Socialization of the Artist in the United States.” Stanford University.

Lundy, Brandon, ed. 2013. The Art of Anthropology/The Anthropology of Art. Knoxville: Newfound Press.

Maquet, Jacques Jérôme Pierre. 1986. The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism, to Civilization. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Sheehan, Elizabeth A. 2013. “Arts Integration as Critical Pedagogy.” In The Art of Anthropology/The Anthropology of Art, edited by Brandon D. Lundy, 283–301. Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society. Knoxville: Newfound Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. 2010 [1871]. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

White, Leslie A. 2005 [1949]. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. Clinton Corners: Percheron Press/Eliot Werner Publications.