User:Androsgoggin

Carl Schuster, 1904-1969, art historian and student of human tradition and design. While he published little and never achieved public fame, he was widely known and respected by a network of contacts and associates that spanned the globe. In 1952, he outlined his life’s work in an essay entitled ‘Genealogical Patterns in the Old and New Worlds.’ (Sao Paolo, 1958) The resulting silence would have been thunderous had not his friend Claude Levi-Strauss commented (in a Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1965):

If social anthropologists were half as interested in material culture as they ought to be, the would probably have paid more attention to Carl Schuster’s fascinating survey of the world-wide occurrence of a type of geometrical pattern which, from its geographical distribution and from known early examples, he thinks goes back to Paleolithic times. These patterns are best understood when compared with kinship diagrams not unlike those used by modern anthropologists. Let us recall that in Australia and Melanesia, natives have been actually observed making such drawings [Levi-Strauss had sent such a drawing to Schuster. – Ed.] If Schuster is right, not only the facts of kinship, but the theory as well, may be scores of thousands of years old. What we have painstakingly unearthed beneath the facts might be nothing else than this age-old theory.

A significant and extraordinary portion of Schuster’s work was presented posthumously in book form as Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art: A record of tradition and continuity, edited and written by Edmund Snow Carpenter, with drawings by Miguel Covarrubias and others. This is an enormous, 12 volume work with 7,000 illustrations that Carpenter had privately published and deposited in 600 libraries around the world. Later, a one-volume summary was published under the title Patterns that Connect, by Schuster and Carpenter.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Schuster studied at Harvard University (BA, 1927, MA, 1930), and in China (1931-33). He earned a doctorate in art history from the University of Vienna in 1934, writing a dissertation on Chinese peasant embroideries. During the second world war, he served for a time as a cryptanalyst for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He later worked for the Museum of Natural History in NY, where he had a major exhibit of his photos in 1945. Until his untimely death in 1969, he traveled and worked tirelessly to collect designs and other evidence from tribal artists on every continent.

His archives, housed in the Museum of Ethnology in Basel, Switzerland, include 18,000 pages (typed, single-spaced, w/small margins), written in more than 30 languages; it also includes 250,000 photographic prints, 80,000 negatives, 5,670 bibliographic references; he cross-referenced each item multiple times, and catalogued the entire collection in 30 languages and five alphabets.

His work, as presented by Carpenter, focuses on two things: the variations and meaning of the Sun Bird (a widely occurring symbol), and a genealogical pattern language for which he found evidence in examples from sources otherwise unrelated by language, geography, or social history. Carpenter describes the latter as "a graphic representation of the puzzle of procreation itself, in which there is neither beginning nor end..." and concludes that "...of the many symbolic systems invented in history, surely none, save language itself, survived longer than this iconography."

The significance of his work is perhaps best expressed by his contemporary, Ananda Coomaraswamy, who saw the traditional arts as expressing a "catholic or universal doctrine" or a "philosophia perennis” rooted, not in an elite literature, but in common craft and cultural practice. Coomaraswamy’s understanding suggests a practical view of the common ground that unites humans, despite divergent backgrounds and histories. In the physical patterns made by the hands of thousands of unrelated artists, Schuster found recognizably similar expressions of what humans live for.

Whether or not this interpretation is correct, Schuster's work demands discussion simply because his evidence is so impressively wide-ranging, specific, and detailed.

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