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UNDEFINING ART: IRRELEVANT CATEGORIZATION IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF AESTH ETIC$

Toni Flores Fratto

In the past decade or so, social scientists have been, somewhat belatedly, turning their atten- tion to the serious study of "aesthetic" phenomena. We now have a few ethno- graphics of art, along with a budding sociology of art, and quite a few studies on the psychology of creativity and kindred subjects. What we do not have is an anthropology of art; in particular, we lack a philosophically sophisticated aesthetic theory, inductively at- tained, and decisively shaped by field experience. We do not lack the materials neces- sary for a theory of art. It seems, rather, that the heart of the problem is definitional; we are constrained from realizing the theoretical im- plications of ethnological work by a continuing adherence to old definitions, which shape inter- pretation and understanding quite as much as do the data themselves. A central instance in this situation is the fact that we seem unable to jettison the civilized Western categorical di- chotomy between the rational and the emo- tional faculties.

That mind and body, intellect and emotion are distinct, actually and conceptually is a posi- tion (or assumption) which is at the root of Western thought. The dichotomy, formally stated, is at least as old as Plato, but it will suf- fice here to recapitulate the position as ex- pressed by Schiller. Taking his essential position from Kant, Friedrich Schiller maintained a theory of dichotomy in the essay The Aesthetic Education of Man [ 1 ]. He posulated two oppos-

Toni Flores Frat to is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York.

ing universal human impulses. First, there is the sense impulse, the object of which is life, all material being, matter, experience, emotions, and sensations; it is concerned with feeling and happiness, and it is compelled by the laws of nature. The second impulse is that of form. Its object is shape, the formal qualities of things, their relations to the intellect and rational ideas, the laws of reason, spirit, and morality. These two impulses represent for Schiller an irreconcil- able duality; the gap between them is infinite; it splits man and prevents him from achiev-

.ing his full humanity unless and until he activates a third, mediating impulse. Indeed, it seems that Schiller was forced by the intellec- tual ambience of the times to assume the dual primary impulses of emotion and reason but driven by his own dislike of the notion, he con- structed a mediation, which was, for him, the play impulse. "Man shall only play with Beauty" [2]. Thus play, the mediator, is transformed into art, the mediator. Thus, we were provided, during the German enlightenment with a pos- sible alternative to the dogmatic categorization that subsequently emerged. Schiller, in his in- sistence that the play impulse was the basis for freedom, even foreshadowed the apparently contrary notion that art could be social action, but Schiller himself never developed the pos- sibilities in his theory. By "play" he seemed to mean pretty much the same thing we do when we say that a child busy in the sandbox is "at play". That is, the child is not compelled to do what what he is doing; he is not doing it for reward; he has no purpose beyond his own

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satisfaction; he is doing it for fun. Play, the perception of beauty, for Schiller was done for the enjoyment in the doing, and for nothing else, which implies that it ultimately falls within the realm of emotion and sensation.

The major architect of modern sociology's fundamental paradigm, Talcott Parsons, takes a manifestly similar position. In his synthesis Toward A General Theory of Action [3] and in The Social System [4], Parsons defined all acts as being in one or another of three categories: cognitive, expressive, and evaluative. While he admitted that any single act would be likely to be influenced by components of the other categories, he made it clear that these are in- fluences only, and that each action belongs primarily in a single category. It is necessary, he stressed, to distinguish systems of ideas (which have cognitive primacy), systems of expressive symbols (which have cathartic primacy), and systems of standard of value orientation (which have evaluative primacy) [ 5 ]. Expressive symbols have as their major aim the communi- cation of affect; "the interest in immediate gratification is primary and neither instru- mental nor evaluative consideration have primacy" [6]. Expressive symbols, which appear in the purest form in art objects, "serve as direct objects for the gratification of the relevant need-dispositions" [7]. Art, then, or the object of the aesthetic judgment, is for Parsons a symbol which expresses and com- municates affect or emotion and is the vehicle for the individual's cathexis with the social reality symbolized. In Parsons we get Schiller and Durkheim at once, or better, Schiller re- duced to Durkheim.

Parsons is hardly alone in his categorization of art. He merely systematizes what students of society both before and after him have held, and his approach is the same as that adhered to by sociologists and anthropologists now work- ing on problems of aesthetics. Two fairly recent and important examples of similar classifica- tions are to be found in essays by George Mills and Jacques Maquet. Art, says Mills [8], is

primarily a matter of quality, which he characterizes as "presence, impact, sensuousness". "Art is a sacrament, an objectification of quali- tative states" [9], a state in which the artist controls and creates the conditions and qualities of experience. In other words, one experiences, sensuously, an "impact", which consists of emo- tion, feeling, sensation, ego-involvement, or, in Parson's terms, cathexis. This experience could be described in the formula "I • it" [ 1 O] (or perhaps "it • 's me"? - by implication this would be equally proper) and for Mills must be contrasted to the formula for cognition, "it is X". He distinguishes sharply between the cognitive and qualitative modes of experience. Although he admits that any single experience must have elements of both, and that cognition is favored precisely by those "who find this occupation more deligiltfui than any other [or who need] to satisfy the qualitative yearning to know how the universe is ordered [ 11 ], he insists that practical action, cognition, and the qualitative modes of experience are separate categories of experiencing, each with its unique demands. Mills, then, perceives the aesthetic experience as the most intense and controlled of the qualita- tive experiences: "No conscious effort but that of giving oneself to the experience offered by the work can cause the seeds to break open, put out roots, and flower" [12].

In another recent, rather extensive comment on the anthropological study of aesthetic forms Jacques Maquet [ 13] has suggested that there cannot be an anthropology of art because "art" is a concept too narrowly defined, too ethno- centric, to be useful in cross-cultural study. Aesthetic awareness, aesthetic objects, the crea- tion of aesthetic forms are, he says, cultural universals and may therefore be fruitfully studied by the anthropologist. He has, however, fallen directly into the same pattern governing Mills' thinking in declaring that a person, a sub- ject, relates to the world in a limited number of logically discreet, fundamental ways: action ("the subject transforms things, modifies his environment"), cognition ("the subject builds a

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mental representation of a segment o f the world in order to understand it"), and con- templation ("the subject is in a state of aware- ness of the object"). [14]. The aesthetic experience, he goes on, is "the contemplation of objects reached through the senses," and an ob- ject has aesthetic quality when it is non- instrumental, perceived through the senses, and conducive to contemplat ion[ 15]. Robert Plant Armstrong takes rather the same position. "Art ," he suggests, is a poor term which needs to be replaced, but his term, "the affecting presence" implies virtually the same, accepted definition of art as feeling.

From Parsons to Maquet and Armstrong then, a fundamental agreement has been devel- oping in the social sciences on the classification of art, or at least of the aesthetic experience. Art is not understood as action, it is not valua- tion; certainly it is not cognitive, much less logical, or intellectual. Rather, art is said to be marked by sensation, emotion, affect, con- densed symbolism, quality, and expression.

Not surprisingly, what social scientists see art as expressing is society, or culture. Thus, the major contribution of the sociology and anthro- pology of art has been to describe, and then to theorize on, the way various arts have acted as reflectors and reinforcers of the cultures in which they are imbedded; where change is dis- cussed, art is seen largely as a tbrce working to- ward re-integration after or during upheavak While some students, such as Biebuyck and Thompson [161 and Goodale and Koss [171, have emphasized the creative, rule - altering aspects of the aesthetic processes, literatures and visual arts alike have typically been studied for the functional contributions they make and have made to the maintenance of stable social orders. This constitutes a serious contribution to the theory of art, and a necessary antidote to the continuing Western assumption that the artist is, almost sui generis, a "creative individ- ual," a great and lonely frontiersman struggling with the fetters of his society and constantly exploring new depths and distances. It has been

necessary, in the face of this metaphysical as- sumption about the artist as hero, to show the extent to which the artist reflects or expresses his culture. Rivers' [ 18 ] early work on the role of myth in integrating diverse cultural systems, Radcliffe-Brown's [ 191 discussion of Andaman legends as expressions of the social values in- herent in the social organization, to Malinowski's explanation of myth as validation or charter [ 20], Kardiner's [21] suggestion that art is a system projected from the culturally-derived group personality, Gerbrands' [ 22] insistence on the need to understand art forms in their cultural contexts, Barry's [23 ] analysis of the complex relations between the social order and the visual arts, and Fischer's [24] study of the correla- tions between various aspects of social struc- ture and the style of a culture's arts, - demon- strate from complementary perspectives that, far from being a hero and a stranger in his own culture, the artist has been both its creature and more or less faithful mirror. With disconcerting regularity, anthropology has punctured the elitist notion of the singularity of the artist, again and again showing the story-teller, painter, carver, dancer, (and who could not paint, carve, dance, spin a tale) as acting in respense to cultural cues and in accordance with cultural rhythms, creating artistic events that are culturally conceptualized as much a vehicle of the culture's stability as any other cultural undertaking.

This notion of art as a cultural agency has been a necessary one, an important corrective of the traditional Western viewpoint. Nevertheless, this functional notion has had a decidedly limiting effect. Its very fruitfulness has fixed social science in general and anthro- pology in particular on a definition of art as cathexis with society, as the expression of society, or projection of social personality, as the affect engendered by the cooler facts of cultural life. Malinowski's [25] famous posi- tion on myth is a perfect case in point. Myth, he says, is not a rational explanation for the social world, it is not an attempt to create or

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alter the world, it is a validation of it. Myths validate the social order; they provide the people with the emotional ties that bind them to the social order.

THE FAILURE OF CATEGORIZATION, CATEGORIES, AND DEFINITIONS

One of the prime influences initiating work on alternative approaches to aesthetic forms has been the influence of Kenneth Burke. It was Burke [26] who pointed out that art is not just expressive (the form he calls poetic or dream), but is also cognitive (which form he calls "chart") and evaluative (which he terms "prayer," "rhetoric," and "magic"). It is particularly on this last form that Burke has been most stimulating, emphasizing to a scholarly world habituated to thinking of aesthetic experience as exclusively affective, the generative capacity of symbolic thought. Art is, or at least can be, a form o f action. The artist does not simply project or express, he also commands. The world is in flux, a chaos of events and images, with form and meaning resid- ing only in the minds of the perceivers. The artist, who chooses elements from this flux and combines them into forms, thus defines the world-as-perceived. The artist, in other words, creates the perception of order and therefore creates reality. As Burke paraphrases the pro- cess, "every 'it is so' is also a 'so be it' "

We have among studies of the verbal arts numerous examples of the aesthetic making or altering of reality. Abrahams, for example, in Deep Down in the Jungle [27] convincingly argues that black men in American ghettos create an image, a sensation, and a reality of strength and self-worth through their declama- tions of toasts and stories about "Shine," "The Signifying Monkey" and "Jesse James". Somali oral poets, living in a segmentary lineage society, in a region of scarce resources and violent competition, manage to work on their recalcitrant relatives and reluctant allies through the powerful use of song, creating

unities where the social structure alone could not [28]. In a yet more extreme example, L6vi- Strauss [29] tries in "The Effectiveness of Symbols" to demonstrate that a myth as chanted to a woman in difficult childbirth was able to redefine the perception of the birth process and thus, literally, to effect its course. Nor is action an attribute solely of the verbal arts. For the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands, the sculpted funeral poles do not merely symbolize the movement of the spirit from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead, they move it from the one to the other. Thus, through the mediation of an actual object, the social locations of the dead and their living relatives are altered and the contem- porary configuration of the society itself actually changed [30].

While a growing but still small number of anthropologists have followed Burke's theoret- ical suggestion regarding art as action, there have been a number of recent studies, in- lluenced by Burke or independently derived, which examine various art forms as instances of cognition. The central theoretical point made in these studies is that through the making and per- ceiving of art, one not only feels and wills some- thing about the environment, one thinks about it. Thus Fischer [31 ] can discuss visual arts as cognitive maps which provide the individual with a model for social interaction. The percep- tion of order in a painting can provide a frame- work for thinking about the order in society; the use of hierarchy as a principle of organiza- tion in the arts of hierarchically structured societies is not simply an emotional expression of the society but represents also a means of thinking about the underlying principles com- mon to both art and society. In several per- tinent papers, Munn [32] has provided an analysis of Walbiri iconography as arranging visual images into categories which provide clas- sifications for social and natural phenomena. In so doing, she follows ethnoscientific studies based on the supposition that categoi'ies are in- vented, not discovered, and that they aid the in-

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dividual in his efforts to think about, and understand, his world as well as to feel about and act on it. Forge's [33] recent work on Sepik art goes a step further and convincingly demonstrates that Abelam paintings form a closed system not reducible to social structures, but with their own visual grammar and highly charged meanings. The major proponent of the concept of arts as cognition is L6vi-Strauss, whose central insistence is that the universe for all men is or can be the object of thought and that thought can be cast in the form of art. Briefly, his argument is that each people has its system of classification, which proceeds through the progressive building-up of pairs of opposites. They think about their world by constructing polarities arranged into taxonomies. The polar- ities, however, both represent and stimulate dis- comfort and there seems to be a concomitant impulse to mediate them. It is for L6vi-Strauss universally the function of myths to provide logical models capable of overcoming the contradictions inherent in the very structure of the thought process. Thus myth, a universal form of art, has cognition as its very heart; in myths one thinks about the world and more- over, thinks about thinking. Unfortunately, however, L6vi-Strauss reduces cognition to certain universal, repetitive structures, and in the end it is myths that think men; there are no emergent, constitutive realities.

It is a rare study which takes into account both theoretical positions - that art is action and cognition. James Peacock's Rites of Modernization [34] is a notably (if not com- pletely) successful attempt to do just this. In analyzing ludruk, a form of Indonesian proletarian drama, he points out that the older plays made much use of the terms alus (refined) and kasar (crude), which provided the headings for an important way of classifying the social world. The more recent plays lay stronger emphasis on the categories subsumed under the headings madju ~modern) and kuna (old- fashioned). By casting characters and situations in the newer categories, the play facilitates the

proletarian play-goers' shift to thinking in the new categories and hence to acting in new ways. It is worth noting that there is an interesting in- stance of cathexis here as well, in that the category of alus, which had a positive valuation, is linked in the person of the transvestite with the madju category, while the quality of being kasar is linked, in the person of the clown, with being kuna. Thus the positive "charge" in an old category is carried over into a new; an emotional reaction, evoked by the "refined" transvestite, is transferred to the new category of "modernness," making the required new pat- tern of behavior appear literally desirable.

A second example of art as both cognition and action is even more pertinent. There have now been several studies [35] on the riddle genre, and the implications are important, For riddles, generally considered a minor genre, have certainly been classed among the forms of the aesthetic, and these recent analyses have in- dicated that they are also vehicles for cognition and for action. Riddles proceed from the rec- ognition of cognitive categories, through the exploration first of their content and then of their boundaries, to questioning of the categories, pushing out of the boundaries, and the clarification of the possibility of change.

As the ethnoscientific studies have suggested, the construction of categories is a (if not the) basic human mode of cognition. Riddles proceed by a recognition of a culture's categories and of the fact of categories. That is, to pose a riddle, one draws from one's culture's traditional categories a pair of terms; the pair are from separate (but not necessarily opposite) classes. In the riddle they are juxtaposed in such a way that the terms and the classes they represent are compared and contrasted. Tile riddle teller and his audience, then, have before them a pair of images and can explore where they diverge and there they converge. In so doing, they are examining the content of the categories from which the images are drawnand simultaneously exploring the boundaries of these categories. The means of this exploration,

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as Elli Kbng~is Maranda so thoroughly demon- strates, is usually metaphor (which proceeds by logic), not metonomy (which proceeds by identification, cathexis). The important action of riddles, however, is not the structuralist re- inforcement of boundaries and categories, but the questioning o f them. Riddle images are not only different, they are also alike. The very fact that they are fused into a single rubric il- luminates the tenuousness of the categories and the fact that the world may indeed be arranged and understood in a number of different ways. Thus, by deliberately high-lighting old dis- sonances and new assonances, the riddle-maker enlarges or simply exercises his capacity and that of other members of his culture to transcend categories and thus promotes the availability of culture change. As Barnett [36] has suggested of innovation in general, the primary process of culture change involves a cognitive reorganization in which innovators do not create ex nihilo but mentally juggle ele- ments from various classifications until a viable new combination is hit upon. The suggestion does not imply an overwhelmingly mentalist vision of all change being, in essence, in priority, mental change, but it does make an epistomol- ogical point about reality having its human as opposed to a structuralist, locus not in objects (physical or social "facts"), but in human per- ceptions o f objects. A change in perception is indeed a change in pertinent reality, and a change in objective reality is not a pertinent change i f it is not perceived as such. The point about riddles, then, is that orte does not ordinarily "learn" them. Riddling is itself a learning process. The most fully human learn- ing, as Jerome Bruner [37] asserts, is not memorization, but discovery or creativity, and one learns how to make riddles, how to juggle material and cultural givens - both content and substance -- into new formations. If a myth is (as L~vi-Strauss claims) a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction, then a riddle is a contradiction capable o f overcoming a logical model. While myths may acknowledge the dis-

sonance inherent in a set of categories and try to reduce or soften it, ultimately they maintain the same questions and the same answers; they are system reinforcing. Riddles, in contrast, consciously, deliberately heighten cognitive contradictions, throwing the riddler and his audience into a chaos from which they may come up with a new set of questions and new answers. It is in this sense that, since the riddle is art, riddling is and art may be, not just isolated feeling, but a creative mode of acting and thinking.

UNDEFINING ART

I return to the question of definitions. After the more recent work in the anthropology of aesthetic forms has been assimilated, we will no longer be able to define art exclusively in terms of "expression", "emotion", "cathexis"; art is, at the same time, cognition, and action. Consequently, the fact that "ar t" can be categorized under all three headings suggests that we are both using the wrong categories, and reifying them. The very forms and pro- cesses which we all too readily group together and label "ar t" thus are just as rationally grouped under other categories of human activity. In saying that "ar t" is feeling, "art" is thinking, and "art" is acting we reverse the dominance and subsume feeling, thinking, and acting, insofar as they involve the imagination, sensual pleasure, and the judgement o f relative formal values, under an over-arching class of artistic activity. As Arnheim [38] has most con- vincingly demonstrated in his studies of art and psychology, "the qualities that give dignity to the activities o f the thinker and the artist distinguish all performances of the m i n d . . , the same principles operate in the various mental capacities because the mind always functions as a whole" [39]. Perhaps we need a riddle to point out to us that we have created an artificial category, a Platonic construct, namely, "art" and assume that it corresponds to an objective reality. Perhaps we need a riddle to help us

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perceive and therefore arrange the world o f human productions in a different way.

It is by now a commonplace in anthropology that few societies have a separate category analogous to our "art", or religion, or any other rubric that corresponds to our fragmented divi- sion of labor, and hence of cognition. For in- stance, (and to take a case which might seem to point to the opposite conclusion) Schneider [40] describes for the Pakot a word pachigha which seems to translate as "pre t ty" or "beautiful," but he also implies that things are pachigha, as it were, incidentally, and cannot otherwise be grouped together under a single salient rubric. It is as though we were to isolate all things colored red; together they do not constitute a significant class of Red Objects, although they do reveal something about our concept of "red". The Pakot may call things "pret ty ," but all we really learn from that is which qualities are con- sidered "pachigha" or "pre t ty" ; we do not know about Pakot "art".

The problem is not simply that of recogniz- ing that other cultures have different sub- classes of art. Forge [41 ] among others, cor- rectly points this out, emphasizing that western categories of painting, sculpture, or architecture, do not fit comfortably with other people's use of, for example, masks or house supports. Of course, we knew this already, if only with reference to such Western "multi-media" crea- tions as cathedrals and stage sets. But the problem is more encompassing than that, and involves the question whether there is, in actuality, such a thing as "art".

A separate, significant class of objects or events labeled "ar t" may be unique to the Western world; at any rate, it does seem limited to stratified and specialized societies and to co- incide with the individualistic conceptions of the artist-genius. In Western music, for example, up until the time of Bach, the composer was, whatever his talent, in the minds of his audience and indeed in his own mind more artisan that "artist". The medieval idea of music as being correlated with something else, was still in force.

Music did not "emancipate" itself from non- musical aims and contexts nor come to be con- sidered "pure music" until after Beethoven [42]. In the visual arts, the process involves a trans- formation occurring somewhat earlier in the Italian Renaissance, a shift from the early period, when Cimabue, Giotto, Filippo Lippi, even Botticelli and Ghirlandajo were con- sidered artisans, working under guild rules and not differentiated in any serious way from weavers and iron-workers, to the later period, when Titian and Michaelangelo could take on the guise of the sublime genius, above society and yet richly deserving all of its rewards. From the humble Giotto to the "divine" Michaelangelo there was a leap into the modern aesthetic world, when one makes, not fountains or songs or doors, but "ar t" [43]. In English poetry the same leap occurs just after the Renaissance, when the puritan, learned, bourgeois poet retired from the coarse, rich, public world of the court and the theater, into the library, to produce for the first time a poetry deliberately removed from, and "above" life, the first truly "ar t" poetry in English [44]. Beginning in the Renaissance, with the rise of the consumer oriented burgers, but not culminat- ing until the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generated a fully developed market economy, the artist, in the seeming interest of working freely, apart from the wishes of a known patron, found him- self producing for an abstract market, and what he was producing was a commodity now called "art" [45]. It is only in the modern, civilized, specialized, stratified world, that we have had "art".

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH THE

CONCEPT OF ART?

What, then, does one do with the concept of art? I suggest that we simply drop it. The fact is, there is no such thing as art. That is, there is no such thing as art in itself. Art in itself is not a universal human phenomenon, but a synthetic

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Western category, and a relatively recent one at that. The concept has generated endlessly mis- leading ethnography, art history, and esthetic theory, and has acted mainly to mystify the social conditions which keep acts of creation and sensual pleasure out of the experience of the socially exploited majority. I suggest that those acts and products which we have been cal- ling art simply be returned to the domain of labor, or better, work. Work, in that sense, is the application of human energy to matter, and the consequent production and reforming of that matter in new forms. Work is human making, culture creating. Verum factum. For humans, that which is true or real is that which is made; the very basis of humanity is the drive to transform the socio-natural world through the imaginative application of work.

In "making," a person may at almost anytime exercise the human aesthetic faculties, that is, he or she strives to get pleasure, formal or sensual, from the making, and to give a similar formal or sensual pleasure to other people who will perceive that which is made [46]. In this sense, the Pakot have a more fruitful and probably more accurate definition of the aesthetic process than we have. One makes things, and where one can, one makes them "beautiful," pleasing to the senses and to the apprehension of form. So - one throws a spear and throws it with a smooth flow and sharp snap beyond what is necessary to the kill. One makes a garden and lays it in rows, with an eye to varied heights and colors and textures. One paints a wall and lays on figures as well as color. One dances to honor the gods, and also takes pleasure in the blending of body and music. Most elementally, and most poignantly, one makes a social self and concomitantly makes it as aesthetically pleasing as one can; the Nuba, for example, in marking their bodies with the signs of the appropriate patrician, physiological condition and ritual status, also make their bodies objects of beauty [47] and therefore, for them, specifically human. A Tikopia man [48], in making and using a headrest is at

once differentiating himself from women, stating and preserving the sacredness of his head, and taking and making pleasure in something beautiful. My point is precisely that abstract beauty is not at the core of art. One makes, and sometimes the thing made, or a part of it, is beautiful and sometimes the thing, or any part of it, is not. The beautiful things do not cluster together into a significant category. The "made" things do; they are the emergent, constituted human products of human labor.

Let us say, further, that I make a picture of a fountain in Galicia, to give to a friend who has lived there. The given or, better, the series of givens, include the appearance of the fountain, the state of my relationship with my friend, my paints and paper, and my complex and ambivalent feelings about Galicia. I am making: a gift, a statement of my affection for the friend, a concretization of my feeling for Galicia, an affirmation about myself as a friend and as a maker of beautiful things, a picture of a fountain, and a pleasing arrangement of lines and colors. In making my picture, I am doing nothing fundamentally different from that which the potter making a pot, the housewife cooking a meal, the farmer planting a field is doing. I am taking a given and by my work transforming it into a new reality so designed that it gives sensual pleasure in a new context. The great danger is that of mystification, of cal- ling art, as Mills [49] does, "a sacrament," in which the artist controls, while creating, the conditions of qualitative experience. Such a position both magnifies and diminishes the real actions of real artists, whose conceptual and material artifacts are drawn from the experi- enced world. The material-social world is changed by the artist (that is, everyone) and the artist is changed by it; the result of the dialec- tical relation between actor-artist and cultural given is a "new world," a synthesis, a new con- text, with the two components (the human actor-subject and the nature-culture object) in a new relationship to each other.

When work is such that it no longer trans-

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forms the given world, where it is no longer directed by the imagination and by the creatively constituted needs of the human worker, where it acts only to reinforce a stultifying status quo, it has become a less than human action. A man on a General Motors as- sembly line is not applying his imagination to alter the world in consonance with emergent human possibilities; he is simply reinforcing the current state of affairs. The painter making a picture that will sell in an art gallery and gain him a small income and a place in the catalogue of Contemporary American Artists, is in much the same situation; put to the service of something called "Art ," his skill is failing to transform the world or even his perception of it in any meaningful way.

Our primary, over-arching category, then, should be work, and is is this on which we should be focusing for both our ethnography and our theory. Such an un-defining, or dis- alienation of art, has a number of advantages. It changes our understanding of human effort by allowing for the possibility that work may be both creative and pleasurable - (hardly a new point), and yet a consideration rarely in the minds of ethnographers studying people at work. Surely it would help to get rid of those superfluous, half-hearted, and pen-ultimate chapters on "art" in most anthropology text- books, and describe aesthetic activities in the same way they are actually integrated into people's lives. More to the point, the non- definition of art can contribute to the de- mystification of aesthetics in our own society. In recognizing that "art" is not separate from "life" and is indeed simply a form of work, that ordinary people (that is, those not labeled "artists") are doing something not basically dif- ferent from that which "artists" are doing, we can encourage the laymen, the non-artists to take more legitimate pleasure in their activities and to reclaim for themselves the right to make their work pleasurable and beautiful. We might, simultaneously, help the socially proclaimed "artists" to drop the illusion, which is shared in

our civilization at large, that they are indeed a special class, higher than, and hence unaccount- able to society. Yndeed, it is precisely that illu- sion which, paradoxically, privileges the artist, while isolating him and his activities as a con- venient object of repression; the artist becomes a symbol of everyman's potential challenge to the civilized order, the unwitting assumption being that everyman is potentially an artist.

I suggest, then, that we define art along with Rousseau in his widely misunderstood First Dis- course on the Arts and Sciences, by undefining it, that we in reality, acknowledge it by denying its reified existence. By assuming that there is a class of activities and consequent products which pertain to special areas of life and to privileged people, we have denied the exercise of the aesthetic faculties to the majority of people. We may now help to undo that repres- sive assumption-action, and acknowledge and thus foster the unity, in human work, of making, creating, and beautifying.

This is, of course, a political position, not political in the sense of insisting that architec- ture or painting or poetry serve overtly propagandistic, or even ideologically explicit revolutionary ends, but it is political in the insistence that the exercise of the aesthetic faculties is a human imperative and a human right. Any society, cultural order, or set of de- finitions which acts toward denying that right is destructive and de-humanizing. With that acknowledgement, the anthropology of aesthetics begins.

NOTES

1 Friednch Schiller, The Aesthetic Education o f Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 74-93.

2 /bid., p. 80. 3 Talcott Parsons and Edward Shills (eds.), Towarda General

Theory of Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).

4 Talcott Parsons, The Soctal System (Glencoe, II1.: The Free Press, 1951).

5 T. Parsons and E. Shills (eds.), op. cit., p. 165. 6 T. Parsons, op. cit., p. 384.

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7 Ib/d., p. 386. 8 George Mills, "Art: An Introduction to Qualitative

Anthropology," in Carol Jopling (ed.), Art and Aesthetics in Primitive Societies (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), p. 84.

9 Ibid., p. 87. 10 Ibid., p. 90. 11 Ibid., p. 92. 12 Ibid., p. 97. 13 Jacques Maquet, Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology

(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1971). 14 Ibid., p. 5. 15 Ibid., pp. 6-8. 16 Robert Thompson, "Abatan: A Master Potter of the

Egbado Yoruba," and Daniel Biebuyck, in D. Biebuyck (ed.), Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

17 Jane Goodale and Joan Koss, "The Cultural Context of Creativity among the Tiwi," in June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (Seattle: American Ethnological Society, 1967).

18 W.H.R. Rivers, "The Sociological Signiticance of Myth," Folklore, vol. 23 (1912), pp. 307-331.

19 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).

20 Bronislaw Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology," in Magic, Science and Religion (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1954).

21 Abram Kardiner, The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939): and The Psychol- ogical Frontiers of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

22 Adrianus A. Gerbrands, Art as an Element of Culture Especially in Negro Africa (Leiden: Mededelingen van her Rijksmuseum veer Volkenkunde, No. 12, 1957).

23 Herbert Barry, "'Relationships between Child Training and Pictorial Arts," Journal of Abnormal and Soczal Psychology, no. 54 (1957), pp. 380-383.

24 John L. Fischer, "Art Styles as Cultural Cognitive Maps," American Anthropologist, vol. 63 (1961), pp. 79-93.

25 B. Malinowski, op. cit. 26 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New

York: Random House, 1941). 27 Roger Abrahams, Deep Down m the Jungle (Chicago:

Aldine, 1970). 28 B.W. Andrejewski and I.M. Lewis, Somali Poetry: An

Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 29 Claude L~vi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," in

Structural Anthropology (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1967), pp. 181-201.

30 J. Goodale and J. Koss, in J. Helm (ed.), op. cit. 31 J. Fiseher, op. cir. 32 Nancy Munn, "Visual Categories: An Approach to the

Study of Representational Systems," American Anthropologtst, voL 68 (1966), pp. 936-950; "The Effectiveness of Symbols in the Murngin Rite and Myth," in Robert Spencer (ed.), Forms of Symbolic Action (Seattle: American Ethnological Society, University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 178-207; and "The Spatial Presentatton of Cosmic Order in Walbiri lconography," in Anthony Forge (ed.), Primitive Art and Society (London: Wenner- Gren Foundation, Oxford University Press, 1973).

33 Anthony Forge in A. Forge (ed.), op. cir., pp. 168-192. 34 James Peacock, Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and

Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

35 Ian Hammett, "Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles," Man, N.S. 2, no. 3 (1967), pp. 379-392; Elli K6ng~is Maranda, "The Logic of Riddles," in E.K. Maranda and Pierre Maranda (eds.), The Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); and E.K. Maranda, "Theory and Practice of Riddle Analysis," Journal of American Folklore, vol. 84 (1971), pp. 51-61.

36 Homer Barnett, Innovation. The Baszs of Cultural Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953).

37 Jerome Bruner, On Knowing." Essays for the Left Hand (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

38 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

39 1bid., p. viii. 40 Harold K. Schneider, "The Interpretation of Pakot Visual

Art," in C. Jopling (ed.), op. cit., pp. 55 -63. 41 A. Forge, op. cit., p. xiv. 42 See especially Sidney Finkelstein, How Music Expresses

Ideas (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 21-73.

43 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1951), Vol. 4.

44 See especially Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (New York: International Publishers, 1937), chapters III, IV and V.

45 See especially Adolfo S~inchez VLzquez, Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Mare Riofrancus (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 177.

46 For independently conceived and stated expressions of these views, see Lewis Crust, "Art in Society," n.d.; Peter Newcomer, "Aesthetics as a Productive Category," 1973, ms.; Sidney Finkelstein, "The Artistic Expression of Alienation," in H. Aptheker (ed.), Marxism andAlienation (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1965); and A. Siinchez V~zquez, op. cit.

47 James Faris, Nuba Personal Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), passim.

48 Raymond Firth in A. Forge, op. cir., pp. 25-48. 49 G. Mills, op. cit., p. 84.

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