What’s in a price?: An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction

Abstract

Typically, the auction house salesroom has been conceived of as an exemplary market: a place in which ultimate price is fixed by persons at a particular moment. This perspective relies on a static a-historical view of an isolated marketplace. This study views the auction sale of tribal art as one part of a wider economic set, within which objects and persons interact to momentarily assign price (or not). It thereby expands the common anthropological use of the notion of a ‘tournament’ of value (Appadurai, 1986). A brief background to the history of the auction and of the tribal art market precedes an examination of the auction as a ‘distributed object’ (Gell, 1998): a series of events from catalogue and viewing, to the performance of sale. Within each of these situations, price is shown to be fixed by ambiguous and malleable processes of valuation over space and time. © 2001, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.