Resumen de Siberian ornaments, German scholars, and a transitional moment in the anthropology of art, c. 1900
In the years around 1900, museum-based studies focusing on the stylistic evolution of ornaments were giving way in the anthropology of art to field-based studies emphasizing local interpretations of these ornaments. This essay discusses a Siberian case that epitomizes the transition from the museum to the field in the context of German ethnology. It first analyses the interpretative strategies that museum anthropologist Heinrich Schurtz applied to ornaments from southeast Siberia, discussing his approach against both prevailing developmental theories of ornament and the object-focused epistemology of contemporary German scholarship. Challenging Schurtz's approach and conclusions, field researcher Berthold Laufer, along with most of his contemporaries, suggested a radical theoretical shift from objets to subjets, favouring local artists' exegesis of ornaments. In analysing his work, it is found, however, that local research engenders not only methodological opportunities but also challenges, resulting in a far more gradual interpretative transition than suggested by Laufer's explict epistemology.
