243 CHAPTER 15 The problem of agency in art 160 LUDOVIC COUPAYE  Paradigm shifts, which lead to profound methodological and theoretical transformations of a field of study, rarely spring out of the mind of a single genius. As these often emerge out of debates and controversies, their consolidation can often conceal the giants on the shoulders of whom they are built. Such has been the case in the anthropology of art, in which the now classical book by Alfred Gell (1998) has spurred a series of discussions and debates over recent decades. Gell’s “Parthian arrow” was an efficacious, rigorous, and at times humorous, critique of classical approaches to “primitive art” which, until then, had been anchored in the search for meaning in art; instead, Gell invited a shift from a hermeneutic stance to a pragmatic one. Yet, the posthumous fame acquired by Gell’s emphasis on agency, through its critiques and its praises, overshadowed in its brilliance previous studies on the topic, and in particular the work of Gell’s own supervisor, Anthony Forge. There is little room to revisit the whole of Forge’s theoretical contributions to the question of “art” from an anthropological perspective, but his analysis of systems of representation of the Abelam of the Maprik area (in the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea) undeniably foregrounded some of the most fertile ensuing discussions about “visual culture”, and managed to address themes still at the core of wider current anthropological discussions. This paper is but a very short attempt to use these theoretical developments and recent ethnography and develop some of these paths. he dramatic drop in production in the Maprik region, due to the abandonment of initiations under the inluence of diverse Christian confessions, hardly ofers the same ethnographic possibilities as in the late 1950s and 1960s. 161 hus, my suggestions have to remain only hypotheses, some of which, however, have been at least conirmed through discussions in 2001-03 and 2014 with Nyamikum painters and people interested in the topic. The relationality of Abelam “art” Though encountered by Richard Thurnwald (1914) before the First World War, the first proper ethnographic study of the Abulës-speakers 162 was conducted by Phyllis Kaberry just before the Second World War (Kaberry 1941). The specific ethnographic