The American Indian art world and the (re-)production of the primitive: Hopi pottery and potters

The First Mesa Hopi Reservation community has long been recognized for its pottery, an indigenous medium that has achieved recognition as art. Ethnographic and historical documentation provide data to explore the transformation of Hopi pots from artifact to art and potters from vanishing Indians to Native American artists in the twentieth century. Yet contemporary art world practices codify concerns about an authentic "primitive technology" developed in the nineteenth century natural history paradigm of collecting and evaluation. How the codification of value came about, the tension over authenticity generated by pottery's recontextualization within Anglo institutions, and the impact of a century of market production on the community are examined in this study. A multi-sited ethnography of the production, circulation, and consumption of traditional Hopi pottery as American Indian art, the study investigates the social organization, cultural construction and historic formation of this Indian art world.;The study analyzes the articulation of American concerns with the primitive in the Indian art world, their relationship to the disciplines of anthropology and art history, and the centrality of Hopi pottery and this community to them through time. Routine technological adaptations to the larger society are symbolically re-produced as pre-industrial through a pervasive representational overlay that structures the market. The study examines the hierarchical relations among potters, dealers and collectors, as well as the processes of commodification and potters' resistance to them.;An emphasis on representing material production as primitive has misconstrued the local value of pottery making as culturally-constructed knowledge, and obscured the fact that selling pottery provides potters necessary knowledge of the larger society. The study examines potters' conceptions of authenticity and the social contexts of pottery production and sale. Selling has resulted in the alienation of knowledge from the community while also providing acquisition of new knowledge to construct a new pottery tradition, now threatened with alienation through saturation of art world practices. The study addresses issues in primitive art, commodities and consumption, and the processes of alienation through linking local and global sites in capitalist institutions and regimes of value.