What Is Art For?
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What Is Art For?

Ellen Dissanayake

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eBook - ePub

What Is Art For?

Ellen Dissanayake

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About This Book

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art, " and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species. In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that "make special, " and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival. Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; "primitive" and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children's art. The final chapter, "From Tradition to Aestheticism, " explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art. This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.

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I

The Biobehavioral View

To recognize that human beings are animals need not be repugnant. To say we are animals is not to say we are “nothing but” animals. In fact, our “humanity” is made more impressive and precious by the realization that it resides in the complex development and interrelatedness of the same elements that are present in other animals. Like them, and like the rest of life, we are subject to the conditions and the vagaries of an inanimate, ultimately uncaring universe; unlike them, we “humanize” that universe, and in our image give it meaning. Humans are “something more” than animals because they do not take their world for granted on its own blind terms, but interpret it, fashion their experience of it in multitudinous and multifarious ways. Without human awareness, the world is a chip off a star, mechanically wheeling in a silent blankness.
These “ways” of fashioning our world can be called “culture,” whose variformity is invoked by cultural anthropologists to challenge recent claims by human ethologists that underlying the forms of culture are genetically endowed fundamental principles of behavior. The resistance to such a claim is, I suspect, at bottom an irrational one—a dislike, based on misunderstanding of what is meant, of assuming oneself to be an animal; and an unwillingness to accept that, being a part of nature, human beings are in certain essential ways constrained or “limited.” Rational argument is not likely to change such convictions, especially since many of those who object to the biologically based approach often are arguing against what they think are dangerous or demeaning implications of the point of view more than against the theoretical claims themselves. An evolutionary view does not (or should not) deny that culture is of the utmost importance; the opposite view tends to insist that genetic evolution, though having some indeterminate broad influence on humankind, has been superseded—for all practical purposes—by its cultural adaptability.
It should be possible to encompass both the nature and nurture vantage points. One is not right and the other wrong. Saying that behavior is genetically programmed does not mean that it is restricted to narrow, determined manifestations. Saying that human nature is dependent on culture does not mean that human nature is not also a product of natural selection. One can be fascinated by the incredible diversity of humankind and equally impressed by its fundamental sameness—and choose to specialize in the investigation of either.
My own inclinations are to look for the similarities rather than chart the differences, and my approach is based on principles of biological evolution in general and human evolution in particular. Because “evolution” (especially in studies of the arts) often implies cultural evolution, or the development of a particular art over decades or centuries, a more neutral term is desirable to encompass development over millennia. Such a term is biobehavioral.
A biobehavioral approach to human behavior and institutions seems called for once it is recognized how long we have been becoming human, and what the process implies.* Until ten thousand years ago we were all living in the same way, as gatherer-hunters, and it was in the previous four million years that our species nature was being laid down.
If it is accepted that for four million years a species has been adapting to a particular environment and a particular way of life, then it seems to me inarguable that changes in individual populations of that species over a ten, twenty, or even fifty thousand year span can be only superficial. The fact that individual members of the human species can interbreed, or that individual infants of any society can be brought up to be successful adult members of any other society, indicates our essential underlying sameness.

Background

In 1975, Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a massive tome that demonstrates with a wealth of examples that genes (the protoplasmic mechanism of evolution by natural selection) are a major factor influencing the social behavior of animals. Before Wilson’s book, it had already been established that genes influence behavior that is not specifically social—such things as vomiting, sleeping, scratching, and numerous other “behaviors” that make individuals fit (i.e., help them survive). Animals that are not naturally (without being taught) able to vomit, sleep, or scratch when necessary will not survive as well as those who are. (Those who perform these activities excessively will similarly be at a disadvantage. There is a range of optimum variability in the genetically affected tendency to display these and all behaviors.)
Wilson’s book extended this unexceptionable postulate of evolutionary theory to social behavior as well, showing that behaviors related to animals’ dealings with others (e.g., maternal-infant, sexual, aggressive, and communicative interchanges; spacing, territory and group size, and so forth) are similarly influenced by genes that delineate a range of adaptive behaviors characteristic for each species.
Wilson reiterated the ecological postulate that the habitat and the way of life (or behavior) of animals are interdependent and—since each animal species occupies a slightly different habitat—that each species’ range of characteristic behaviors will vary as well. Forest-dwelling creatures will usually be more solitary than savannah-dwelling ones, who tend to be gregarious: in open spaces there is safety in numbers (for prey); in the forest it is easier to hide if you are solitary and also easier to sneak up on a victim. Solitary animals tend to be more unfriendly (aggressive) to other members of their species, and develop behaviors, such as special displays, whose ultimate effect is to give each individual his own space or “territory.”
The type of habitat also influences the body of the animal who exploits it. Good vision and speed are desirable for plains dwellers, good olfaction for nocturnal, cryptic creatures of the forest floor, strong tusks for root eaters, and so on. Behavior and body both evolve, and the selective pressure of the environment will produce bodies and behaviors that fit it and each other.
Opponents of “sociobiology” do not quarrel with the 96 percent of Wilson’s book that refers to animals. What raises cries of outrage is the final chapter (“Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology”) and subsequent books published by Wilson, and others, that apply the theory to humans.
Critics concede that humans are affected by biology to the extent that they need to breathe and eat, to vomit, sleep, and scratch. But, they say, human social behavior cannot be said to have been genetically affected by the requisites of habitat because humans have the ability to modify their habitats, and much more. Because of their unique attributes, such as language and culture, humans have stepped out of the animal mold and are no longer affected in any interesting way by genetic imperatives. Cultural evolution has replaced genetic evolution.
We shall return to the controversy at the end of the chapter. It is enough for now to point out that the evolution of social behavior is accepted insofar as it applies to the behavior of animals. Whether or not it applies to the behavior of people would seem to depend on whether or not humans are animals; since they are, it boils down to whether or not one animal can make a case for proclaiming itself to be exempt from biological imperatives that affect the rest of evolved life.
Before returning to the fray, and to help us understand the implications of a bioevolutionary approach to humanistic studies, we must acquaint ourselves with other terms: human nature, ethology, and, of course, evolution.

HUMAN NATURE

Although all doctrines about how humans should live—political, ethical, philosophical—are based on some belief of what human nature is fundamentally like (even those that assert that humans have no nature), conscious awareness of a concept or problem of human nature seems to occur only when one meets someone who is different from oneself. Until then, people assume that what they and their associates are is what others are, and all pronouncements about how the world is (or should be) follow from that.
When two Australian gold prospectors first entered an unexplored region of the New Guinea highlands fifty years ago, they carried a movie camera and filmed their encounters with tribesmen, who had never seen Europeans. Indeed these people did not know that their valley was only a minute part of a great land-mass, which contained hundreds of other tribes, nor could they begin to suspect that the great island was itself part of a vast region of islands, and so forth. After the initial fear and incredulity of the tribesmen had turned to curiosity and attempts to explain the shocking intrusion, the white men were construed as ancestors, ghosts. Only after one was secretly observed defecating, and the product later examined and found to be “just like ours,” was it realized that there was a larger world outside the valley and that these too were men. (The tribeswomen who had become “brides” of the “ancestors” said they had already suspected as much.)
This old movie, part of a recent anthropological film called First Contact, reverberates in the viewer long after watching it. One tries to imagine the profound change of view demanded by suddenly learning that the familiar secure, confined world that has been “all there is” is suddenly violated. One’s previous innocence can never be regained, as the completeness of one’s known world shatters and it becomes merely one of millions of tiny parts of a vast and unknowable universe.
Many tribes call themselves by the word in their language that means people (or human). Neighboring tribes are called other (or not-human). What a revolution in worldview takes place in order to learn that one’s very notion of oneself and one’s people which heretofore has been self-evident and uncontested is severely limited. “Inuit” or “Mundurucu,” instead of being the model as well as the name for humans, is only one of thousands of variants on a concept one didn’t even have.
Such blinkered solipsism is hardly confined to illiterate, isolated tribesmen. Judging by its ubiquity, one might even suspect it is a component of human nature. Humans everywhere, even when they know there are other specimens, tend to consider themselves and their immediate kind to be the measure of all things. From the fate of the “wild men” brought back as curiosities or worse by slavers and explorers (less than a century ago Proust recounted going to view “a Cingalese” in the Jardin des Plantes) to the atrocities that befell and are still visited upon the original inhabitants of so many parts of the world, it is all too easy to consider people who are different from ourselves to be animals or savages (not-human) and with impunity to devastate them and their way of life. Even now such a view of one’s own centrality lies behind many justifications for missionary activity, war, and economic development as well as exploitation.
Gradually, since the Renaissance when more and more parts of the world had more and more contact with each other, people have learned that there are more—and more different—ways of life than any tribesman or metropolis resident could dream of. Indeed, analogous to the painful process of growing up, the history of knowledge about the world can be said to be a process of continuing discovery and persisting confirmation that one and one’s own countrymen are not the center and raison d’ĂȘtre of the universe.
By the eighteenth century, the implications of accepting that there are others different from one’s own kind became unavoidable and the nature of human nature was specifically addressed. Hobbes and Rousseau came to opposite conclusions about the probable personality of man in a state of nature. David Hume wrote an essay, little read at the time, called A Treatise of Human Nature. Two centuries later, although we have read Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume, and many others, we have still not agreed on the nature of the beast. E. O. Wilson’s recent sociobiological essay on the subject won a Pulitzer Prize but has caused ardent controversy.
Social scientists who are well acquainted with the undeniably vast and variable range of human behavior generally prefer to claim that apart from certain biologically determined behaviors shared with other animals, humans are infinitely malleable. Biologists are more likely to accept that insofar as all other species have a specifiable nature (that is, after all, what “species” means), the human species must have one as well. Often the disagreement is essentially over just where on the spectrum of human behaviors to draw the line (or shade the area) and say that culture takes over from nature.
As one who claims allegiance to a biological view, I find it inarguable that human beings have a nature and that our behavior, like that of any animal, evolved along with our bodies as part of our adaptedness to the habitat in which, over four million years, we became what we are, Homo sapiens.
Saying that there is such a thing as human nature, as Mary Midgley (1979) has cogently argued, seems eminently appropriate when we hear of the evil and terrible “inhuman” things that people perpetually do, or when we lament that in spite of their knowledge of the past, people still pursue the same foolhardy concerns. Often the explanation has been that society is to blame—deforming man’s basically “good” or “neutral” nature. But why are torture, cruelty, and killing so easy to instill and so hard to eradicate when many culturally induced acts and ideas come and go lightly, and many others of proven benefit (from wearing seat belts to loving thy neighbor) cannot be easily induced culturally even with the utmost effort and good will?
To say that there is a human nature is not to say that there is an immutable and determined human essence. The most sensible way of putting it is to propose that human nature consists of a certain range of powers or abilities and tendencies, a repertoire that is inherited and that forms a fairly characteristic human pattern that will be brought out under favorable circumstances—circumstances that resemble those that obtained during the greater period of human evolution.
Using the words “powers” and “tendencies” avoids the reductionism of citing specific behaviors and saying such things as “All humans are aggressive killers”; “All endeavor boils down to the operation of the libido and the death instinct”; “All human motivation arises from a will to power.” One can instead say, for example, that, given appropriate circumstances, young humans will form bonds with members of their families, probably most frequently and strongly their mothers; in other circumstances they have the ability to form affectional bonds and the positive tendency to do so even if this ability or tendency is deflected or thwarted.
That the word “powers” implies potentials (not fixed essentials) that can be enhanced or discouraged is an idea inherent, whether they realize it or not, in any scheme proposed by educators, psychologists, or social reformers for improving individual human lives. Such potentials, if they are amenable to change or improvement, must be there—that is, genetically provided for.
Similarly, using the word “tendencies” implies that how we feel about things is important. We choose on the basis of our feelings, and generally do (choose) what makes us feel good. Since emotions (feelings) are psychological correlates of physiological events, and vice versa, they are ultimately influenced by our biological makeup.
Human nature in this view is a complex pattern of separate elements, roughly balanced, but not in any sense perfectly assembled and ready for trouble-free operation. It comprises divergent and even conflicting desires, all understandable as adaptive in appropriate circumstances (circumstances which themselves may conflict).

ETHOLOGY

In the study of music, one can learn about the physics of sound, the way sounds are combined in tonalities (harmonic theory), the history or development of different ways of organ...

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