Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (review)

Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics, by Wilfried van Damme. Leiden: E. J. Brill. xv + 400 pp. hardcover.

"A thousand African languages and no word for art" was a Dutch newspaper's headline commenting on the exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent in the Royal Academy in London a few years ago. But how could that newspaper be so sure that in all those languages no word would exist for art? And how is art to be defined? Such questions should be answered before it can be concluded that "they" have no word for art. All cultures have ideas about beauty and ugliness, and about what is well made and what is not. Would there be a thousand cultures that have no word for art? Or is the statement based on the primitive idea that things we are not aware of do not exist?

In our globalizing world, relatively little inventory has been made of the world-wide, varied conceptions of "beauty," "artistic creation," and "aesthetic experience." Comparative material about the various cultures' criteria for beauty appear to be rare. Such criteria are, on the basis of cultural ideals and artistic traditions, established and adjusted by artists and critics, by those who call themselves connoisseurs, and by ordinary people. What do connoisseurs know that ordinary people do not know or are not supposed to know? On what basis exactly is a collective beauty judgment realized? Wilfried van Damme has mapped in great detail the field in which aesthetics and anthropology have begun their interdisciplinary discussions over the past decades.

Van Damme is the first scholar to have ventured a study of what he defined, for lack of a better term (as he admits himself), "non-Western" art. He is especially interested in the question of how beauty is defined in cultures without a written tradition of their own. His examples originate from Indian America, Irian Jaya, Polynesia, and especially Africa. Intercultural comparison is difficult, because all cultures are conditioned by their own traditions. Research into what people think about their own art and culture yields interesting material on the underlying conceptions of art and beauty conceptions. Their results can be compared. The question of whether aesthetic universalia exist might ultimately be answered on the basis of all those patiently collected data. Thanks to what he calls empirical data--descriptions of observations--Van Damme demonstrates how notions of beauty result from sociocultural ideals. Formal and thematic characteristics of objects (or poetry, myths, music, dance, etc.) can be described and can also, in a number of cases, be explained. Comparative perspectives yield further insight into the universality or relativity of aesthetic preferences.

One of the problems, as far as comparison is concerned, is that the origin of many concepts and categories has been "colored" by Western traditions. The rather recent term aesthetics dates from an eighteenth-century philosophical context. How Western is aesthetics or is it all a question of Westhetics? And the other way round: anthropological studies on Western art are still exceptional. More knowledge should finally lead to the global applicability of the concept of aesthetics. Only then will it be possible to find out to what extent certain characteristics are unique for a specific culture and others more general.

Some principles that have been established, however, seem to be generally valid. Van Damme restricts himself to the visual arts, and sculpture in particular: art as ability--good craftsmanship, especially the creative skills, virtuosity--appears to be an important aesthetic criterion. Also symmetry, harmony, and regularity are standard norms in many cultures; smoothness, brightness, and youthfulness are attractive everywhere.

To what extent is the human mind programmed for the appreciation of certain qualities? Aesthetics has learned from psychology that people are afraid of chaos (with death and decomposition as its ultimate forms), and therefore they strive for order in their existence. To create harmony is fundamental: e.g...