Four views of “primordiality”. Remarks on the anthropology of art by Lewis H. Morgan, Franz Boas, Aby Warburg and Ruth F. Benedict

These remarks are intended as to recall testimonies of the contact of people of the West with art called primordial or primitive in its natural cultural environment. The goal is here also to “refresh” thinking about art, as well as to look at the ways of recognition of primordial art at the turn of the twentieth century, the representation of which are the classic texts by the field researchers referred to in the title of these remarks. The selection of the texts is not accidental here, because they are connected primarily by the thread of the art of Indigenous communities of North America