Would any cultural anthropologists apply Dutton's list of cross-cultural art characteristics in their field work?
"The last few generations of anthropologists have been prone systematically to overemphasize the differences between world cultures" Which has led Maurice Bloch (quoted yesterday for his obituary for Claude Levi-Strauss) to accuse his colleagues of "malpractice" when they "exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures" Dutton then presents us with text from these errant anthropologists and rebuts each of them.. First there is Joanna Overling who said that "the category of aesthetics is specific to the modernist era". "the 'aesthetic' is a bourgeois and elitist concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the rationalist Enlightenment........ we have disengaged 'the arts' from the social, the practical, the moral, the cosmological and have made artistic activity especially distinct from the technological, the everyday, the productive" Dutton accuses this statement of "conflating the idea of art, broadly conceived (i.e. Dutton's own 12 characteristics) with the specific inflections the idea is given in local cultures" But if anyone is guilty of such a conflation, it is Dutton himself. Then he accuses Overling of self-contradiction when she discusses her field work in the Amazon and states "the Piaroa notion of beauty cannot be removed from productive use.. objects and people are beautiful for what they can do.. beautification empowers". Dutton asserts that if the Piaroa sense of beauty is unrecognizable as such, Overling "ought not to cal it beauty in the first place" But this would only suggest that Overling's text was not edited tediously enough for a journal of philosophy. Then there is Lynn M Hart - who, unlike Overling, avoided "inappropriate Western terminology", as she wrote that the jyonti paintings made for Hindu marriage ceremonies in Uttar Pradesh have an excellence that "is seen to lie in the closeness of the central symbol's approximation to an ideal image" -- and though they should be "as beautiful and pleasing as possible", this is all "quite distinct from Western aesthetic canons" (unfortunately, I can't find any images of jyonti painting on the internet) Dutton says this claim is either trivial (if it merely means that Western painting does not include Hindu mythology) or false (if it means that a Western notion of art cannot be applied to it. But, Hart was only claiming that a modern western notion of art was not applied by the Hindu women who were making or admiring it. -- which is more relevant to the assertion under discussion, "But they don't have our concept of art" Hart went on to claim that "The Western producer of a painting destined (he or she hopes) for the wall of an art gallery is conscious of himself or herself as "artist", making an object that is contrived, posed, set apart from everyday life -- the producer of the ritual images in Hindu village is not conscious of herself in that particular way" (the same idea that Bloch attributed to Levi-Strauss in that obituary) A contrast which Dutton attacks as "nonsensical" since "the history of the West is replete with countless mothers and mothers-in-law who have labored at ..beautiful artifacts for their children's weddings" But that just means that Hart's distinction would apply to Western folk arts as well -- and her point remains unchallenged that "the Western producer of a painting destined for an art gallery or art museum" is working with a concept of art that is not found in other contexts. Finally, there was Susan M. Vogel, whom Dutton applauds for "an eloquence and intellectual sophistication unmatched by the previous authors" - which is interesting because she is not an anthropologist at all, but rather an art historian, curator, and documentary film maker of African art ( here's her website:http://www.susan-vogel.com/about.html ) Vogel tackles this issue directly in her book "Baule: African art, Western Eyes" (BTW - examples of Baule Sculpture can be seen here: http://www.hamillgallery.com/BAULE/BauleSculpture.html ) Based on her field work in Ivory Coast, she wrote that the Baule people "who made and used these objects do not conceive them as 'art', and may equate even the finest sculptures with mundane things, devoid of any visual interest, that have the same function and meaning..... 'Art' in our sense does not exist in Baule villages, or if it does villagers might point to modern house decorations rather than famous traditional sculpures still made and used in villages and evoked by the tern "African Art" The Baule "attribute great powers to their artworks - powers that Western culture would mainly relegate to the realms of superstition... enormous powers of life and death are integral parts of the sculptures we admire in museums, and Baule people do not consider them apart from those powers" One might question whether Vogel's conclusions are accurate. How many people did she interview? What kinds of questions did she ask? But Dutton attacks her argument by noting that "an art genre that is implicated in a spiritual world is not uniquely Baule phenomena. Many Christians who have been inspired by Giotto's great frescoes at Padua might have been just as moved by similar frescoes that did not approach Giotto's high level of artistry" (which is the point that Kate was making yesterday) Which, as with Dutton's discussion of Hindu jyonti wedding paintings, only suggests that Europeans have traditions of making liturgical objects, just like the Baule -- but what remains different is the modern European concept of 'art' that re-contextualizes selected sacred objects as something called 'fine art' What surprises me about Dutton regarding all three of these writers is that he does not attack the accuracy of their conclusions which are doubly problematic. I.e., not only is it problematic to characterize the thinking of the culture in which one grows up -- but it is even more problematic to characterize the thinking of a culture that one has studied for a few years as an adult. A skeptic can have a field day with all such gross generalizations. But Instead, Dutton avoids the question that he presented in the title of this chapter: "Do they have our concept of art?" Rather, he continues to ask: "Do they do things which might meet some of my 12 characteristics of art?" And despite his infectious enthusiasm for conflating them, these two questions are not the same. ____________________________________________________________ Weight Loss Program Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=xPTvYUhOQSLh7wVHOQWSbgAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=
