The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

The essays in this collection signal a new relationship between anthropology and the study of art. The authors explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and their "traffic" in non-Western objects.

Starting from the premise that the traditional anthropology of art has been developed within categories and practices of Western art worlds themselves, this volume develops a new framework for understanding how western art--its avant-gardes, scholars,...

Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied--often as a participant-observer--the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated...

Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied--often as a participant-observer--the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated...