The German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) was one of the most protean and influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. In part based on his book Primitive Art (1927), this essay considers his theory of the beholder’s share in constructing the significance of visual form and in interpreting its meaning. Boas’s analysis of what he called “contradictions” between his indigenous informants’ exegeses of form lay at the heart of his conclusion that individual agents “read-in” to form some of the most crucial aspects of social experience that are most salient and specific to them. “Reading-in,” I argue, is the verbal speaking of visual “seeing-as,” and it infuses visual form with the diversity and particularity of a speaker’s grammatical choices undertaken within their natural human language(s). This model might now seem self-evident. At the time, however, it opened up the possibility of an “anthropology” of art and, to an extent as yet unrealized, the possibilities of its sociology and history. The essay evaluates Boas’s model in relation to other well-known accounts of the beholder’s share in art history, philosophy, and elsewhere and concludes with a discussion of the uptake of his idea in the “structuralism” of Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss.

中文翻译：

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“读入”

德裔美国人人类学家弗朗兹·博阿斯（Franz Boas，1858–1942年）是20世纪最有教养和影响力的人类学家之一。本文部分基于他的著作《原始艺术》（Primitive Art，1927年），考虑了他关于旁观者份额的理论，以建构视觉形式的意义并解释其含义。博阿斯（Boas）对他的原住民信息提供者形式之间的“矛盾”的分析是他得出结论的核心，即个体代理人“读经”形成了社会经验中最突出和最具体的某些社会关键方面。他们。我认为，“朗读”是对视觉“即视即视”的口头表达，它使说话者在其自然人类语言中所进行的语法选择的多样性和特殊性为视觉形式注入了活力。现在，该模型似乎不言而喻。然而，在当时，它开辟了艺术“人类学”的可能性，并在某种程度上尚未实现的范围内，开辟了其社会学和历史的可能性。这篇文章评估了Boas的模型与其他在艺术史，哲学和其他方面的旁观者份额的知名度之间的关系，并在讨论罗马阿科布森和克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯的“结构主义”中对他的思想的接受进行了讨论。