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Applying linguistic models to the decorative arts: A preliminary consideration of the limits of analogy

Anthropologists seeking to understand the organization and variation of the visual and material arts have resorted to a wide range of linguistic analogies. At times the equation is quite general, for example, comparing kinds of material art traditions with kinds of languages (Ben-Amos 1977), or comparing the material arts with specialized speech forms (Bloch 1974; Graburn 1981). On other occasions the analogy may focus on art styles as internally differentiated systems and present detailed descriptions of visual structures. Case studies that present formal accounts or grammars of specific decorative styles (Muller 1966, 1979; Paris 1972; Mead et al. 1975; DeBoer 1975; Van Esterik 1976; Green 1979; Roe 1980; Wright 1981) are of special interest, for they raise the question of the extent of the structural similarity between languages and styles in the visual arts. Although the appropriateness of linguistic modeling of material culture systems has been criticized from a linguistic point of view (Hymes 1969), the formal properties of the structures underlying these visual systems remains an interesting and largely unexplored problem area. This paper explores the analogy between decorative styles and natural human language. The discussion that follows works within the analogy only to the extent that it treats decorative styles as internally differentiated, rule-bound information carrying systems. The scope of inquiry is limited to those essentially two-dimensional systems used to embellish the surfaces of objects. The questions involved are argued from examples drawn from published formal accounts of styles as well as from the author's work with Tarascan and Zuni pottery painting. Examples are selected with specific problems in mind and are designed to strain the limits of linguistic analogy. The discussion presented here is of necessity telegraphic. It is intended as a preliminary report on a project still in progress. Its purpose is to define the problem area and to indicate some of the arguments involved. Three ways in which languages and decorative styles differ significantly are discussed in the paper that follows. First, drawing upon published