Anthropology of art is a sub-field in social anthropology dedicated to the discussing of art in different cultural contexts. a anthropology of art focuses on historical, economic in addition to aesthetic dimensions in non-Western art forms, including what is so-called as 'tribal art'.
One of the central problems in the anthropology of art concerns the universality of 'art' as a cultural phenomenon. Several anthropologists have returned that the Western categories of 'painting', 'sculpture', or 'literature', conceived as independent artistic activities, take not exist, or survive in a significantly different form, in almost non-Western contexts. Thus, there is no consensus on a single, cross-cultural definition of 'art' in anthropology. To surmount this difficulty, anthropologists of art have focused on formal atttributes in objects which, without exclusively being 'artistic', haveevident 'aesthetic' qualities. Boas' Primitive Art, Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Way of the Masks 1982 or Geertz's 'Art as Cultural System' 1983 are some examples in this trend to transform the anthropology of 'art' into an anthropology of culturally-specific 'aesthetics'. More recently, in his book Art and Agency, Alfred Gell presentation a new definition of 'art' as a complex system of intentionality, where artists produce art objects to effect changes in the world, including but non restricted to restyle in the aesthetic perceptions of art audiences. Gell's ideas have stirred a large controversy in the anthropology of art in the 2000s.