We
can identify two issues which are important with respect to anthropology’s
approach to aesthetics in non-Western societies: firstly, are we obliged to
consider the anthropology of *art and the anthropology of aesthetics as
inseparable? We are first confronted by the problem of those societies which
either do not produce material objects of art or do not produce many artefacts
at all. The Foi of Papua New Guinea and the Dinka of southern Sudan are good
examples of societies that have no artefactual or artistic elaboration
whatsoever but which have a highly developed form of verbal art in the form of
poetic songs (see Coote 1992; Deng 1973; Weiner 1991). There is also the case
of the Papua New Guinea Highlanders, for whom the *body is perhaps the only
site of aesthetic elaboration (O’Hanlon 1989; Strathern and Strathern 1983).
This throws into relief our Western commitment to the objet d’art as the
focus of aesthetic elaboration, which has been criticized by anthropologists as
†ethnocentric. We can thus picture an aesthetics without art objects; can we
similarly picture an artistic world without an aesthetic?
To
consider this problem we turn to the second issue: we must separate at least
two distinct, though related, senses of the term ‘aesthetics’. The first
pertains to the judgement of taste, of what is beautiful (identified in Kant’s Critique
of Judgement). The second is more general, and pertains to the form of our
sensible intuition (identified in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). Most
studies of non-Western artistic practices until recently confined aesthetics to
the identification of the beautiful in any society, while more recently,
anthropologists of art such as Morphy (1991) have defined aesthetics as the effect
of sensory stimuli on human perception. But there is no effect of such stimuli
by themselves, that is, apart from some prior cognitive schematism that makes
such stimuli recognizable in their particular form, and this is exactly the
point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While I think a case can be
made that we cannot export our notions of the beautiful to other non-Western
cultures, as Overing and Gow have recently argued (Weiner 1994), I think no
anthropological theory does not contain within its implicit rationale some idea
of how form itself is brought forth in different communal usages. It is this
general appeal to the transcendental aesthetic of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason— without which Kant’s notion of schematism (upon which modern
anthropology is founded) makes no sense—that anthropologists such as Marilyn
Strathern invoke in her concern with seeing Melanesian social process as a
matter of making the form of social life appear in a proper manner (1988). The
question then becomes why art, whether it be graphic, verbal or whatever,
should be the method by which attention is drawn to the form-producing process
as such.
The
answer may lie in an appeal to transcendance, without which art would scarcely have
the special properties we attribute to it. But our Western world of communal
life activity, totally mediated as it is by the image industry, has become so
thoroughly aestheticized that the ability of art to achieve this
stepping-outside has become attentuated (Baudrillard 1983). Our tendency to
aestheticize our subjects’ social world can perhaps be seen in the increasing
attention to the phenomenon of *‘poetics’, where the expressive and
constitutive role of social *discourse is brought into focus (see for example
Herzfeld 1985). We thus see our world as well as the world of peoples like the Foi
and the Dinka as a total aesthetic fact, because we are both said to inhabit a thoroughly
mediated *environment upon which a body image has been projected and expanded.
But it is in the very different roles that art plays in these two societies
that this similarity is revealed as illusory. Dinka cattle songs focus on men,
cattle and their embodied relationship and thus reveal in everyday communal
discourse the way human production, reproduction and politics are mediated by
bovine fertility. They constitute their economy through the body. But such
embodying force has been totally appropriated by the symbolic economy in the
West—it is advertising that mediates social body image and conceals the
transcendant nature of its own construction; we constitute the body through our
economy and leave art to the marginal discourse of the academy.
It
could thus be argued that to save the aesthetic from collapsing into a new *functionalism,
a new appeal to the transcendance afforded by the work of art might be necessary.
The merit of such an approach is that it side-steps the productionist appeals that
our ordinary social constructivist view of art contains implicitly within it,
and allows us to accept once again the complete interdependence of aesthetics
and art, as the formproducing regime in any society, and its mode of revelation
respectively. But most anthropologists insist on seeing art and aesthetics as
the expressive form of social order or cohesion and attribute to them a
function in maintaining such order. It is inevitable that under such
conditions, either art or aesthetics is seen to be redundant with respect to
that functionality. But the relation between the two demands dialectical
thinking, opposed to functionalist thinking. It is reasonable to assume that,
just as is the case with our own art, the artistic practices of non-Western
people might have nothing to do with making society visible and everything to
do with outlining the limits of human action and thought.