Anthropology and Beauty

From Aesthetics to Creativity

Stephanie Bunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138928794
• eBook ISBN: 9781317400547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Organised around the theme of beauty, this innovative collection offers insight into the development of anthropological thinking on art, aesthetics and creativity in recent years. The volume incorporates current work on perception and generative processes, and seeks to move beyond a purely aesthetic and relativist stance. The chapters invite readers to consider how people sense and seek out beauty, whether through acts of human creativity and production; through sensory experience of sound, light or touch, or experiencing architecture; visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings; experiencing the environment through 'places of outstanding natural beauty'; or through cooperative action, machine-engineering or designing for the future.

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Anthropology and beauty

Introduction

Stephanie Bunn

Collections: wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one, and from one all things.

Heraclitus

The following 28 chapters in this volume explore diverse perspectives and approaches to the experience and production of what the authors take to be ‘beauty’. The aim of the book has not been to make pronouncements on what is beautiful, nor to give an overview of thinking on the subject, nor even to philosophize a great deal about it. Rather, the intention is to see the value of an anthropological approach to beauty. To this end, I have aimed for a gathering together of diverse cultural insights through a juxtapositioning of writings around the experience of ‘beauty’, including the experience of thinking about it. As such, this volume provides a kind of contemporary ‘anthology’, and one which, as Michael Jackson puts it, aims to “illuminate some of the shared themes and preoccupations” of thinkers and practitioners who are addressing this subject today (1996, viii), intending to deepen insight and understanding, not to analyze nor rationalize beauty, nor “fetishize it as a product of intellectual reflection” (ibid 1).

The book does not take a purely phenomenological approach, although most chapters approach beauty through its experience. However, an anthropological approach to beauty does not necessarily mean an exclusively experiential one, since as with American and European approaches, where ideas about beauty have not been exclusively tied to Classical and Enlightenment thinking, so diverse societies may think of beauty (if they have a term for it) as emerging through engagement in many different ways; as residing in the object; as relative; as eternal; and so on.

It was Alfred Gell who first sought to “wrest the anthropological study of artworks away from the soggy embrace of philosophical aesthetics” (1999, 17). Following this spirit, contributors to this volume were asked to extend thinking beyond either the Classical view of beauty (as seen in the work of Plato and Aristotle, who saw beauty as residing in the form of the object, the so-called Platonic solids), or the purely Enlightenment approach (as in the writings of Kant, Burke, Hegel and others, who saw beauty as subjectively experienced, yet only honestly so through disinterested contemplation). Instead, they were invited to explore why people care about beauty, why it matters. They were asked to consider it as a form of action alongside the result of actions; to address it as universal and/or relative; and to consider it as much a quality that people sense, seek and strive for, as an object or a thing to judge, assess or simply delight in.

There have always been thinkers who have taken a more dynamic, integrated approach to aesthetics. Thus Heraclitus predated Platonic ‘solids’ with notions of flow and unity (500 BCE). More recent thinkers who have argued that things can be ‘known together’ include radical empiricist William James (late 19th century; see Taylor 1996, 117); pragmatist John Dewey (see his Art as Experience, 1934); along with phenomenologists such as Henri Bergson (Matter and Memory) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Their work is paralleled by the work of anthropologists such as Michael Jackson, Paul Stoller, Tim Ingold, Eric Hirsch, Martin Holbraad and others.

Such diverse views are also recounted through the everyday experiences of field companions, interlocutors and other fellow travellers, and the aim is to give these everyday experiences a voice too. This diversity is reflected in the strong interdisciplinary composition of the book. Chapters include a piece by Elizabeth de Freitas, who considers the bodily experience of understanding complex mathematical problems; an exploration of how Navajo interlocutors describe the beauty in a Navajo weaving (like lightning; see D’Alessandro); sound artist Peter Cusack’s discoveries of favourite urban sounds; contrasting First Nation American views of beauty either as in objects linked to ancestors and memories, or as processes linked to effort, skill and time (see Krmpotich’s account of Haida and Cree visitors to museum collections). Performers, anthropologists and neuroscientists give accounts of negotiated and reciprocal understandings of beauty in communication and movement (see Trevarthen and Malloch; Potter; Trimingham); and explorations of everyday beauty in work, effort and moments of grace (see Cusack, Gudeman, Higgin).

Through these real-life accounts of beauty, contributors have thus looked beyond lodging beauty in the eyes of the critic or the consumer, to its experience – through the work of producers, makers or creators, or through the whole person of the observer, all of whom, through engagement, may strive for some kind of balance, order, disorder or revelation, something as wholesomely satisfying to the hand and heart of the producer as it is to the eyes of the beholder.

An aesthetic, judgemental or evaluative approach to beauty tends to lodge beauty in the object or artefact under consideration. Yet a relativistic approach (so key to anthropology) also usually takes such judgement (since it is being made by a subject) to be purely subjective. This is one reason why, as Gell described, we have been stuck in Enlightenment thinking’s soggy embrace (1999). This books aims to bridge this divide, and consider beauty as experienced through relationships, whether between person and thing; maker and the made; person and process or action; person and environment; or person and person; but always as experienced as a dynamic, living process (see Dewey 1980 [1934]).

By focusing on beauty, rather than judgements about it, we are released from a purely evaluative, aesthetic approach to human creativity, enabling us to address more experiential, relational approaches. This enables us to extend our discussion to include diverse kinds of attention and action, whether outwards to wider social and environmental understandings, or inwards to contemplation. In this vein, we can explore how people might be moved towards or respond to beauty, whether in the immediate locality or in a ‘place of outstanding natural beauty’; through shared acts of human creativity and production; listening to music or local sounds; performing ritual; experiencing architecture; visiting art galleries or ancient buildings (age, it seems, brings beauty); or in simple technology or designing for the future. The insights that this provides take us towards a perspective which addresses how the experience of beauty can inform intuitive understandings of the world, and provides new perspectives on how diverse social histories and cultural practices might contribute towards understanding creativity.

The eight parts in this book aim to provide approaches to exploring beauty from such a relational position. Beauty is addressed through its generative potential; through perception, skill, and bodily and performative capacities; and through its spatio-temporal qualities. The role of beauty in work, economy and design is considered, as is its collective experience, and its manifestation as synthesized meanings from diverse aspects of social life. These approaches are not intended to be exhaustive.

Beauty as generative: patterning and number

From very different backgrounds in anthropology, art and mathematics, both authors in Part I have reached similar positions in regard to the generative potential of patterning, maths and beauty. The authors, Susanne Küchler and Elizabeth de Freitas, break with the analytical habit of assuming that patterns articulate meanings which are somehow “produced elsewhere” (Strathern 1990, 38), and instead show how patterning and mathematical cognition can be understood and experienced as directly affective through action of the body and the social. This understanding is similar to that which Victor Turner noted in the Forest of Symbols (1970), where, towards the end of his book, he proposes that there are aspects of patterning which simply by-pass meaning, symbolism or conceptual referencing, and are directly affective and transformative. For mathematics, Paulus Gerdes proposed that geometric thinking is fundamentally linked to patterning as practiced through cultural forms such as basketry and drawing (1999, 2007). In regard to number, Jadrun Mimica argued that humans have a form of consciousness, a mythopoeia, which is instrumental in how we generate and structure cultural knowledge such as mythic narratives, forms of aesthetics linked to art or poetics, science and maths (1988, 5). Just as Diana Young has shown that we do not experience colour as abstract or separate from the material with which it is imbued (see for example Chapter 10 this volume), so Mimica argues for number, that societies such as the Iqwaye experience number as embodied, linked to counting on fingers and toes (Mimica 1988, 23). Yet this does not preclude them from comprehending the abstract aspects of maths, whether in reference to counting or more complex understandings such as the “intimation of infinity” (ibid 96–100). The difference among Iqwaye, it appears, is that there is a more holistic approach to the relationship between quantity and quality, pattern and body, body and cosmos.

Küchler (Chapter 2) explores the affective potential of patterning as a form of direct translation, as a synthesis of mnemonics and spatio-temporal meanings, linking land with kinship groups. She argues, following Benjamin, that patterns (in Pacific art forms) provide a recognition, or a kind of visual onomatopoeia of the similar, “concretised in geometric and mathematical forms” that, through the beauty of the patterning, are immediately affective. Thus, specific neighbourhoods express their socio-cultural knowledge and relationships – whether of kinship systems, exchange sequences, memories or navigational knowledge – through graphic gestures encapsulated in patterning, so that incorporated within each society’s art, their patterns take the form of unique spatio-temporal maps which are at the same time affective.

Exploring a similar approach to pattern, though as if through the opposite end of a telescope, Elizabeth de Freitas discusses how new solutions to mathematical problems arise. Mathematical beauty, she explains, has frequently been depicted as tied to inexplicable operations of the mind, as remote and pristine, citing for example Bertrand Russell: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere… yet sublimely pure” (2014, 60). Thus, she argues, creativity and beauty in maths may be used to “[erase] all traces of its labour” (Chapter 3). Yet ancient maths was a far more applied state of affairs, where mathematical invention, a process which may entail looking for patterns, resonances and surprises, was (and is) “deeply embodied” (ibid), and was frequently produced through practical activities such as drawing diagrams. This mathematical diagramming does not just represent or illustrate a problem; it is part of the generative process of developing new ideas. In similar vein to the visual onomatopoeia of Pacific patterning, the mathematical diagram provides a synthesis of past understandings and a development into the new. In both cases, the beautiful, patterned process indicates, or becomes a part of, the solution or resolution, and the labour involved brings into being the relationships expressed. And these relationships, “in being experienced as beautiful, indicate their significance” (Arkani-Hamed 2013).¹

Grace, beauty and the work of art

Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas.

Pascal

The moment of experiencing beauty in art or performance has been described by Plante as an “act of grace” (cited in Gablik 1995, 161). Bateson similarly proposes that: “Art is a part of man’s quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure” (1995, 235). Grace is not, says Bateson, an aspect of art that can be reduced to words, or even symbolism. Art cannot be translated nor does it represent, he says. He is concerned, as William James was before him, with what is implicit “in style, materials, composition, rhythm, skill and so on” (ibid 236) – that “complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness that creates difficulty when we try to discuss art, or ritual, or mythology” (ibid 240).

If one can pin it down, for Bateson grace is a “perfect way of seeing, or drawing” that provokes a moment of balance or integration (ibid 234, 248), what he calls ‘empathy’ and James calls ‘sympathy’ (the term ‘empathy’ was yet to be coined in James’s day), and in the beauty of what emerges, we see for a moment the revelation of how the artist sees the world. Such an experience is, of its nature, profoundly synaesthetic. As Higgin says, here the viewer and producer encounter the “rules of transformation” when perception, feeling and thought are brought together with gesture and learned skill (Chapter 5).

For Gell, in contrast, experiencing grace through an artwork is closer to an act of ‘enchantment’, ‘captivation’ or ‘awe’ (1988). As Hirsch notes (Chapter 6), Gell had a tendency to downplay beauty, perhaps reflecting his preference for the conceptual or interpretive aspects of art. Thus Gell tended to avoid the artwork as production or creativity, approaching it more as an image with a history, subject to interpretation. However, Gell’s attempt to reach across the viewer-object divide, through the use of terms such as ‘enchantment’, ‘awe’, even ‘magic’, links to a perceived opaqueness in the process of production, implying a similar mystification to that which de Freitas outlines (Chapter 3), and to which Ian Ewart and Tim Ingold return to later in this volume. This mystification of beauty returns Gell’s approach, in some ways, to the separation between subject and object in Enlightenment thinking that he aimed to avoid. Nevertheless, Gell’s ‘abduction of agency’, where artefact or event act as an ‘index’, is very relevant here, and is expanded upon by both Higgin and Hirsch in this part.

It is rare to find the experience of beauty articulated more forcefully than in the Navajo notion of Blessing/Beauty Way or hozhóóji, as D’Alessandro describes (Chapter 4). Navajo hozhóó can be realized through the act of weaving, and, as D’Alessandro’s communicants recount, the tranquillity of weaving creates harmony and brings beauty into the world, encapsulated in woven blankets. The power conveyed by this kind of creative act remains in these blankets, so that later weavers, through seeing and touching them, share in the experience. It is, as D’Alessandro describes, as if the weaving harnesses the energy of lightning, and through this makers or viewers experience grace. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Anthropology and beauty: introduction
• PART I Beauty and pattern
• PART II Beauty as grace
• PART III Perceiving beauty
• PART IV Beauty and skill
• PART V Beauty, the body and performance
• PART VI Beauty in space and time
• PART VII Beauty, work and design
• PART VIII Beauty as synthesis
• Index