Eclectic and challenging, What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context seeks to illuminate, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the relation between the functions and objectification of art made in Asia. The expansive intellectual foundations of the book began in discussion of a possible panel proposal for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, and were developed through calls for participation posted to online discussion forums. The result is a provocative book characterized by unusually diverse authors and topics. The specialist reader, accustomed to texts of more narrow chronological and geographical focus, might find the book daunting. Yet, the consistency and strength of the conceptual project of the book enable its chapters to cohere into a readable whole.

What’s the Use of Art? reconsiders objects made in Asia outside Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment notions of “art.” Art history and anthropology have long considered their disciplinary language to be etic, that is, composed of extrinsic concepts and categories meaningful to specialists; these disciplines too often incorrectly presume that this language is culturally neutral and universally applicable. The abilities of objects to transcend language further complicate this problem: an object may be plastic to existing language in a reception context different from that for which it was intended; alternatively, an object may force the remaking of existing language or development of new language in a reception context different from that for which it was intended. Art history has been slow to acknowledge that its foundational Western epistemes, and its disciplinary language, are not necessarily universally applicable.

In his introduction, Morgan Pitelka elegantly characterizes this theoretical project of the volume. Pitelka writes, “Rather than narrate a history of Asian art, this book attempts to frame discussions of art in light of the globalization of European regimes of cultural value, the widespread and continuing plundering of objects from and by disenfranchised communities, and the unregulated circulation of art and information in the burgeoning global marketplace” (2). Rather than think about the movement of objects into Western frameworks of reception, as has been done in recent literature on World’s Fairs (for example, Cheng-hua Wang, “Chengxian ‘Zhongguo’: WanQing can yu 1904 nian Meiguo Shengluyi wanguo bolanhui zhi yanjiu” [“Displaying ‘China’: Research on the Late Qing Participation in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair”], in Hua zhong you hua: Jindai Zhongguode shijue biaoshu yu wenhua koutu [“The Language of Painting: Modern Chinese Visual Representation and Cultural Composition”], Huang Ko-wu, ed., Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003; and Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), this fresh and unexpected approach considers the incursion of Western structures of value into the originary context of the object. This formulation resonates with recent work in colonial/postcolonial studies that interrogates the spectral and fictive Europe that tacitly gives form to the world beyond its geographical borders (explored by, but not limited to, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

While problematizing the globalization of European regimes of cultural value, Pitelka’s introduction nonetheless examines the applicability of Western approaches to art and its functions. Concepts, whose traction comes from their use in the Western academy, support this endeavor: function, art, agency, movement, plunder, circulation, recontextualization, memory, nostalgia, nation. Influential Western texts on art history and anthropology are cited as historiographic and conceptual touchstones for the inquiry that follows. These include: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972); T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Studies of Asian art and culture complement these key Western texts. Pitelka’s conceptual framework of wrapping and unwrapping art, which informs the first and last sections of the introduction, respectively, seeks to craft an emic vocabulary for his inquiry, that is, a vocabulary grounded in intrinsic cultural distinctions meaningful to a member of a given society. Specifically, Pitelka chooses a Japanese vocabulary (see Unwrapping Japan: Society and Culture in Anthropological Perspective, Eyal Ben-Ari, Brian Moeran, and James Valentine, eds., Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990) to provide one possible perspective on Asian art different from that of post-Enlightenment Western art history.

Pitelka cites an array of works that suggest the existence of multiple emic vocabularies for the study of objects of Asian visual and material culture, including: Diana Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1981); Stanley O’Connor, “Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no. 2 [September 1983]: 400–08); Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Stefan Tanaka, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). By invoking this scholarship, Pitelka suggests that to understand Asian objects on their own terms one must use multiple, culturally specific interpretive frameworks.

The core essays of the volume showcase what this reviewer, a specialist in Chinese painting history with broader interests in Asian art as well as in art-historical theory and method, finds to be engaging and stimulating work on Asian art. The topics, explored by a range of leaders in their respective fields and at various career stages, are new, edgy, and refreshingly unfamiliar to those conversant with more established histories of Asian art. These include: Robert de Caroli, “From the Living Rock: Understanding Figural Representation in Early South Asia”; Louise Cort, “Disposable but Indispensible: The Earthenware Vessel as Vehicle of Meaning in Japan”; Richard Davis, “From the Wedding Chamber to the Museum: Relocating the Ritual Arts of Madhubani”; Janet Hoskins, “In the Realm of the Indigo Queen: Dyeing, Exchange Magic, and the Elusive Tourist Dollar on Sumba”; James Hevia, “Plunder, Markets, and Museums: The Biographies of Chinese Imperial Objects in Europe and North America”; Cynthea Bogel, “Situating Moving Objects: A Sino-Japanese Catalogue of Imported Items, 800 CE to the Present”; Ashley Thompson, “Angkor Revisited: The State of Statuary”; Lene Pedersen, “An Ancestral Keris, Balinese Kingship, and a Modern Presidency”; and Kaja McGowan, “Raw Ingredients and Deposit Boxes in Balinese Sanctuaries: A Congruence of Obsessions.” A brilliant essay by Jan Mrázek, “Ways of Experiencing Art: Art History, Television, and Javanese Wayang,” fully and clearly realizes the ambitions of the anthology, serving at once as a case study and as a conclusion to the book as a whole.

What’s the Use of Art? falls prey to one significant flaw: “Asia” is itself a European cultural construct that permits essays on otherwise unrelated cultures to be anthologized together. Engagement with seminal texts on art and anthropology not specific to Asia, which this reader was unable to find cited anywhere in the text—for example, Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983) and George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), as well as more recent classics such as The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)—might have enabled the book to transcend this European epistemological framework. The desire of What’s the Use of Art? to free narratives of Asian objects from post-Enlightenment ideas about “art” nonetheless binds the objects of its inquiry to pre-Enlightenment conceptions of “Asia,” and of its alterity, which were prominent in European thought from the seventeenth century when the Jesuits refined and propagated the Four Continents model of civilization.

Overall, What’s the Use of Art? begins to elucidate the inescapable tautological practices with which historians of art, like their anthropologist counterparts, live: to attempt to write about objects in their own, emic, terms even though those terms cannot be understood a priori in the original, and thus require translation, transliteration, loan words, all of which transpose those concepts into a Western epistemological register of a putatively universally comprehensible or culturally neutral, etic, art history. Individually and corporately, these essays seek to generate new object-based methods for writing art history outside the Western/global idiom. Yet the book’s reification of “Asia” suggests at least one direction for further inquiry.