Cross-Cultural Aesthetics

ELIZABETH BURNS COLEMAN

Monash University, Australia

The meaning of “cross-cultural aesthetics” is ambiguous. It may mean the admiration

of the artistic forms (such as performance, literature, or painting) of another culture
or an area of inquiry into the nature of aesthetic appreciation across different cultures.
Generally, within anthropology, the study of aesthetics refers to the study of relation-
ships between physical and temporal qualities, form, and meaning, and the manner in
which these qualities, forms, and meanings are valued. However, the application of the
term is contentious. Even though an object or event may be created with skill and atten-
tion to form and may contain what appear to be ornamental details, many objects or
events are not created with the primary purpose of prompting an aesthetic response in
their audience or for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation. There may be other rea-
sons for creating something beautifully or appropriately or correctly, such as the object’s
religious, efficacious, or political purpose.

Philosophical accounts of aesthetics

The study of aesthetics as a discipline was established in the eighteenth century as an

inquiry into the nature of knowledge from the senses. Borrowed from the Greek term
for sensory perception (aithēsis), the term “aesthetics” first appeared in Alexander Got-
tlieb Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry (1735) and was later defined as the “science
of sensitive knowing” (scientia cognitionis sensitivae) in his Metaphysics ([1739] 2013,
§533). Baumgarten thought the mind intuitively fuses the manifold of sensory percep-
tion into a coherent whole that has intensive and extensive clarity. These intuitions
provide knowledge that is distinct from conceptual knowledge and may have a kind
of perfection that is experienced as beauty. In this view, the appreciation of nature is the
paradigmatic example of aesthetic appreciation. For Baumgarten, the semiotics of sight
and poetry are equivalent. Artworks, such as poems, also express this knowledge inas-
much as they are intensive, in that they invoke a specific object, and extensive, in that
the richness of poetic allusion makes the manifold implicit associations of the object
explicit. Similarly, for Immanuel Kant (1790), the experience of beauty or of the sublime
was not necessarily, or primarily, associated with the experience of art. The discussion
of beauty in nature formed the major part of his analysis. It might be thought that the
fact that the term “aesthetics” was only coined by Baumgarten in 1735 shows that its
meaning is intrinsically historical and that aesthetic experience is not universal. How-
ever, the use of the term “aesthetic” to categorize the experience of beauty or awe did not
bring the experiences into existence. Instead it created a category of experiences based
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2049
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on similarities in their cognition and affect. While Baumgarten’s account of aesthetics

as sensitive knowing has been overshadowed by Kant’s, this epistemological approach
reemerges as a theme in the anthropology of aesthetics.
Kant categorized pleasure into three kinds: pleasure in the good, pleasure in the
agreeable, and pleasure in the beautiful. For Kant, because they are feelings of plea-
sure, judgments of beauty are purely subjective and cannot be true or false ([1790] 2009,
§§1–5). However, the judgment of beauty aspires to a kind of intersubjective validity. To
call something beautiful is to put it on a pedestal; it is to feel that the pleasure derived
from it should be held universally. Kant suggests that this feeling arises because the
experience of beauty reminds a person of the experience of goodness. For Kant, what is
distinct about beauty in works of art is that they contain aesthetic ideas. Kant developed
the concept of an “aesthetic idea” in response to Baumgarten’s theory of “sensitive know-
ing.” Aesthetic ideas are an intuition of the imagination for which there is no adequate
concept. This is the counterpart of an idea of reason for which no empirical experience
is adequate (such as the concept of God, or infinity). However, in contrast to Baum-
garten’s discussion, Kant argued that such ideas do not impart knowledge. The most
influential element of Kant’s work, and the most controversial, is his idea that the judg-
ment of beauty is disinterested, in the sense that it is not associated with a desire for the
object represented in an artwork.
In the twentieth century, artists, critics, and theorists drew on the notion of dis-
interest as specifically relating to the scope of what could count as art, as well as its
appreciation. This became called “the aesthetic attitude.” The aesthetic attitude involves
paying sympathetic attention to an object of awareness for its own sake—that is,
without considering personal interests or goals, the truthfulness of the representation,
or moral or political effects. But an implication of this is that other forms of evaluation
or engagement with an object, such as veneration or moral evaluation, insofar as they
are “interested,” are not considered genuine forms of aesthetic engagement. Similarly, it
might be argued, a person who responds to a work of art with real emotions, as opposed
to a special kind of aesthetic emotion, has also failed to develop an appropriate aesthetic
attitude. The aesthetic attitude is often associated with “formalism,” the idea that in
aesthetic appreciation a person should not refer to the world or truth or externalities of
art but instead focus his or her attention on the composition—for instance, the lines,
shapes and colors, or rhythm and melody. “Functional” definitions of art argue that
something is art only if it has been made with the intention of producing an aesthetic
response. According to a functional theory of art, what distinguishes beauty in nature
from beauty in art is that art has been created for this purpose. Ideas concerning the
aesthetic attitude, formalism, and functional definitions of art have formed the basis of
most of the controversy concerning cross-cultural aesthetics within anthropology.

Anthropological aesthetics

Franz Boas is credited with establishing the study of aesthetics within anthropology,
arguing that, without postulating an aesthetic impulse in humans, it is not possible
to understand how artistic behaviors such as elaborate patternmaking could have
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evolved. Boas’s ([1927] 1955) account of aesthetics is Kantian. Aesthetic appreciation

of material forms is a human faculty that is an extension of the appreciation of nature.
This appreciation involves a fascination with, or admiration for, form, including
elements such as rhythm, balance, movement, melody, color, and texture. According to
Boas, it is not possible to determine exactly where a concern of aesthetic appreciation
began. Boas postulates a universal will in humans to create beauty. He observes that
some decorative forms do not appear to have any purpose and suggests that their
presence is to be explained by an aesthetic interest in the form on the part of the creator.
Ornamental art emerges where there is a high level of skill in an industry and where
the creator experiences pleasure in virtuoso or technical performance. Boas does not
argue that aesthetic affect, the sense of beauty, must be based on form alone, as it is also
influenced by ideas associated with the form, but he suggests that the affect resulting
from significance or meaning alone cannot account for the existence of art. Like Kant,
Boas emphasizes the cognitive content of the experience of beauty. He writes that,
“as long as no deeper meaning is felt in the significance of form, its effect is for most
individuals, pleasurable, not elevating” ([1927] 1955, 349). The symbolic meaning of
design and form enhances the aesthetic value through connotations associated with
them and may arouse strong emotions concerning how an object may be used and who
may use it. In this respect, Boas was not a formalist. Yet he did appear to work with what
may be considered a weak functionalist definition of art, in that he considered art to be
those objects that are created as a result of the maker’s interest in the form. However,
he did not identify a classification of art objects as distinct from those with political,
ritual, practical, or social functions, and he suggested that there is no clear line dividing
pre-art and art. According to a weak functionalist account of art, the maker does not
require a self-conscious intention to create art or to create an object solely for aesthetic
appreciation. Whatever the purpose of making the object may be, it is possible to
recognize that these objects, or products, involve skill, care, sensitivity, and intelligence.
Aesthetic attention to form and material is perceptible in the making, and the final
product, of an object made in another culture, even though the purpose of making the
object does not involve making art. The object created would be classified as “art,” where
art is understood as a broad term as opposed to a narrower concept such as “fine art.”
One of the criticisms of Boas’s work is that he did not formulate a definition of art in
order to determine which objects to study but instead identified objects as art through
the qualities they displayed, such as rhythm and balance. This could be considered a
flaw of method. The flaw is that Boas’s method of selecting objects of study based on
their formal qualities and identifying some as art does not necessarily capture what is
important to the creator, and so the results of such a study may be heavily influenced by
the aesthetic tastes of the researcher. This theme can be found in Alfred Gell’s sugges-
tion that anthropologists should adopt a “methodological philistinism” (1992, 42), an
indifference to the aesthetic value of art. The introduction of anthropologists’ specific
taste and ideas of value may interfere with their capacity to provide a clear-sighted
account or description of another culture and what is valued within it.
Researchers have addressed this problem at the level of theory and in practical stud-
ies by exploring style and the “emic” evaluation of qualities (i.e., evaluation from the
perspective of the local community rather than the researcher). For instance, the art
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historian Herschel B. Chipp (1960) used an approach derived from Boas to explore how
studying the emic aesthetic appreciation of formal qualities, combined with analysis of
mythology and ritual, could be used to explore meaning and symbolism in primitive
art. Also influenced by Boas, the art historian Robert Farris Thompson (1973) stud-
ied Yoruba art history and aesthetic values, establishing a method for identifying emic
systems of evaluation. Two important articles extending the account of aesthetics from
an anthropological perspective were George Mills’s “Art: An Introduction to Qualita-
tive Anthropology” ([1957] 1971) and Warren L. d’Azevedo’s “A Structural Approach
to Esthetics: Towards a Definition of Art in Anthropology” (1958). Both these accounts
focus on the manipulation of qualities as a form of expression within a culture in a
manner that provide an opportunity for aesthetic reflection, and they use the process
of aesthetic reflection and skill as the basis for an anthropology of art.
Mills’s contribution was to develop a connection between art and cognition that is
closer to Baumgarten’s interest in the relationship between ideas and qualities as a dis-
tinct kind of knowledge than it is to Kant’s aesthetics. Through the qualitative study
of culture, Mills argued, the aesthetic patterns of cultures (called “styles”) may provide
insight into the interior articulation of cultures and values. Mills points out that art as
a medium of expression is consistently overlooked by anthropological accounts of art.
Art is expressive as “art is the creation, by manipulating a medium, of public objects or
events that serve as deliberately organized sets of conditions for experience in qualita-
tive mode” (Mills [1957] 1971, 95). Qualitative experiences are a result of presentation,
suggestion, and structure. Materials of creation arouse sensations that have qualities.
Paint may be shiny or dull, the tone of a sound may be mellow or sharp, a particular
color is chosen, movements are fast or slow, and so forth. Structures are also perceptual,
such as tight or monumental or swirling or chaotic. Together, structures and qualities
are suggestive and associated with other parts of life that enable expression, such as
when the qualities of action are symbolic, where qualities augment or add to the utility
or purpose of a thing as an opportunity to experience qualities, such as in the decorative
arts, and where arts cease to be an incident in life and life becomes an incident in art
(as in drama, portraiture, or the novel).
D’Azevedo developed a distinction between aesthetic appreciation, which may be
diffused throughout all aspects of life, and artistic behavior, in which objects are cre-
ated through a specific process involving technical skills and aesthetic perception. In
aesthetic appreciation, he noted, there is an affective aspect of enhancement or enjoy-
ment and a rational aspect of ideation associated with the form of an everyday event
or object, such as the recognition of the gracefulness with which a gift is presented. For
d’Azevedo, aesthetic appreciation is possible through “a faculty of cognition by which
values are selected, organized, and reinforced from the general experience of the indi-
vidual in correspondence with the symbolic values evoked by the intrinsic elements and
qualities of an object” (1958, 708).
Similarly, Clifford Geertz (1976) explored a semiotic approach to art that is more
reminiscent of Baumgarten’s theory of aesthetics than Kantian. Against formalist
approaches to art, Geertz argues that the formal relations of qualities such as sound,
volume image, or color cannot explain the aesthetic power of art, nor the concerns
of the artist. In this claim, he moves away from Boas’s theory, in that he suggests that
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the concern of an artist grows out of more than a detached pleasure in the intrinsic
properties of a medium or the marks being made, instead deriving from the meanings
of the marks. Arts are “never wholly intra-aesthetic” (Geertz 1976, 1475). The chief
problem for anthropology, he suggested, was how to connect aesthetic phenomena
into a particular pattern of cultural significance. This connection is cognitive because
the central connection between art and life is semiotic in that qualitative features
materialize a way of experiencing the world.
More recent anthropological work has focused on the nature and role of aesthetic
affect, rather than the question of whether something is art. For instance, Ellen
Dissanayake (1992) argues that the origin of art is a “making special” or elaboration,
akin to ritual and play, that emerged as a biologically adaptive feature of humanity.
While no society demonstrates all the behaviors commonly considered to be art to
the same extent, all societies develop the human potential for material poetic and
expressive forms, and most have some kind of evaluative vocabulary for excellence in
those forms. Dissanayake approaches aesthetics from the perspective of evolutionary
ethology and anthropology, arguing for the existence of an unconscious aesthetic
impulse in the objects we view as art from other civilizations and cultures, even if
they were not made to be art. Jeremy Coote developed an anthropological concept
that consists in “the comparative study of valued perceptual experience in different
societies” (1992, 247). Coote explored how Nilote cattle keepers, who had no material
arts, valued the various markings on cattle and how they perceived, appreciated, and
described the world through terms drawn from this value system.
These different approaches to cross-cultural aesthetics have not only influenced
the anthropology of art but also inspired new anthropological methods and foci
including visual and sensory anthropology. The focus of study is not necessarily on
art but on the aesthetic sensibilities of communities and the means by which sensory
qualities constitute a kind of epistemology and knowledge. Such studies enrich not
only anthropology but also the new areas of philosophical analysis called “everyday
aesthetics” and “social aesthetics.”

Criticisms of cross-cultural aesthetics

One of the most common criticisms of the adoption of a concept of cross-cultural aes-
thetics is that there is no universal standard of beauty; aesthetic taste is clearly different
from culture to culture. However, the suggestion that aesthetic experience is universal
is distinct from whether everyone experiences the same thing as beautiful. As men-
tioned, for Kant, as feelings of pleasure, judgments of beauty are purely subjective, and,
in his view, cannot be true or false. This feeling is not related to a fact about whether
some particular thing is found to be beautiful universally or whether there is a universal
standard.
A second criticism focuses on functional definitions of art in which something is art
only if it has been created for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation. Bourdieu’s article
“The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic” (1987) presents one of the most influential
accounts of why aesthetic appreciation cannot be thought of as a cross-cultural concept.
Bourdieu argued that the aesthetic attitude is not shared by all humanity, or even by all
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people at all times in Western societies. According to Bourdieu, art is not defined by a
type of creation but by a kind of social institution. The disinterested contemplative atti-
tude of the art lover is a product of history. This is because the process of aesthetic appre-
ciation is inseparable from the historical appearance of producers of art motivated by
artistic intention and from the production of fine art as autonomous and as having ends
and standards that are found or created by the artist. The “pure” aesthetic response, how-
ever, has more in common with twentieth-century formalism than Baumgarten’s epis-
temology of sensitive knowing. Bourdieu’s argument is based on what is known as an
institutional account of art. The argument is that objects and events created specifically
for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation emerged in response to, or at the same time
as, the philosophical analysis of judgments of beauty and taste in Britain in the eigh-
teenth century. At the same time, there emerged the fine art institution or “art world” of
galleries and dealers, academies, critics, and museums of art in relation to the objects.
Artists create works for contemplation by an audience in the context of this institution.
Any culture that lacks this institution, or a similar institution, therefore lacks art and the
practice of aesthetic appreciation associated with it. Moreover, if the institutional theory
of art is true, the objects of other cultures in museums are art only because they have
been “metaphorphosed” into art objects through a process of selection by a curator.
Much of the debate concerning the applicability of aesthetics as a cross-cultural
concept concerns differing definitions of art and aesthetic appreciation that are at
cross purposes. Joanna Overing argues that the concept of aesthetics disconnects art
“from the social, the practical, the cosmological” and makes “artistic activity especially
distinct from the technological, the everyday, the productive” (1996, 210). In contrast,
she argues, for some cultural groups, such as the Piaroa, the notion of beauty “cannot
be removed from productive use,” and the conception of beauty is different because
“beautification empowers” (1996, 210). Similarly, Alfred Gell argues that art functions
as a “technology of enchantment” and provides an example of the prow-boards of
Kula canoes, which are intended “to dazzle the beholder” (1992, 94) rather than to
be contemplated aesthetically. Such approaches emphasize formalism in aesthetics.
In contrast, twentieth and early twenty-first-century philosophers, historians, and
anthropologists of art have engaged in cross-cultural aesthetics argue that aesthetic
features, such as color, tone, or pattern, may serve functional purposes other than
contemplation. The purpose of the object need not be aesthetic, and the aesthetic
features may enhance the instrumental purpose of the object. If body painting or dress,
or certain patterning, is undertaken to make the wearer more beautiful (in order to be
more powerful or effective) or, as in the case of the prow-boards Gell (1992) discusses,
more dazzling, then that use is aesthetic.
Overing’s criticism overlooks the fact that aesthetic appreciation is not limited to the
appreciation of art, but she does point to a significant problem concerning how objects
in art museums are viewed and displayed. Not everything created with aesthetically
rewarding properties is created for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation. This has
raised numerous ethical issues in relation to the display of cultural forms in museums
and galleries about whether the aesthetic appreciation of them is always appropriate, or
deep. In Western societies, art and aesthetics are often considered among the highest
human achievements. On this view, to suggest that fine art and aesthetic appreciation
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are specific to European cultures is to suggest that European cultures are superior
to others. However, to consider the objects created in another culture fine art is to
overlook the fact that it is a Western institution naming and categorizing the objects,
which is expressive of unequal power relations and control. This issue of categorization
and control over the meaning of artifacts has arisen in postcolonial countries such as
Australia, Canada, and the United States and manifests itself in conflicts over what may
be shown or displayed in art galleries and museums. Such conflicts are connected to the
historical looting of colonies but also to a failure of imagination concerning the nature
of aesthetic evaluation that does disconnect it from everyday life and that overvalues
form. For instance, the Zuni people of Mexico have demanded the repatriation of their
war gods, or Ahauutas, from the Smithsonian on the basis that they are inalienable
property and cannot be morally or legally owned by anyone else. The Iroquois have
asked for the removal of masks from the National Museum of Canada on the grounds
that the masks are not only sacred but also dangerous. The institutional theory of
art may provide an unsatisfactory definition of art, or an unsatisfactory explanation
of why those objects belong in a gallery, but it works well as a description of what
happens to objects from other cultures within a museum context. The challenge for
museums, beyond recognizing indigenous property rights, is how to educate audiences
and deepen appreciation beyond surfaces.
In general, the critics who reject the usefulness of aesthetics as a cross-cultural
concept argue that aesthetics as a field of study involves a strong functionalist definition
of art and a formalist approach to aesthetic appreciation (both of which those critics
reject). A third feature that these critics may share is acceptance of an institutional
definition of art. A strength of these criticisms is that they alert us to ethical issues of
appropriation and display within museum contexts. What characterizes cross-cultural
aesthetics as an area of study, however, is a broad definition of art that is only weakly
functionalist, in that it presupposes that the creators of some material culture are
aesthetically engaged with their medium in the process of creation. This aesthetic
engagement is not based on formalist assumptions but takes a cognitive, or ideational,
approach to aesthetic appreciation and attempts to uncover the emic perspectives
that inform aesthetic value. In the process, anthropologists engaged in cross-cultural
aesthetics have opened up new methods of exploring human culture and engagement
with the world around them.

SEE ALSO: Art and Agency; Art, Anthropology of; Boas, Franz (1858–1942); Bourdieu,
Pierre (1930–2002); Cognition and Visual Art; Colonialism and the Museum; Dance,
Anthropology of; Design, Anthropology of; Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938); Geertz,
Clifford (1926–2006); Gell, Alfred (1945–97); Iconography and Style; Kant, Immanuel
(1724–1804): Influence on the Origins and Development of Anthropology; Montage;
Objecthood; Senses, Anthropology of; Shimmer; Visual Anthropology

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. (1739) 2013. Metaphysics. Translated and edited by Courtney
D. Fugate and John Hymers. London: Bloomsbury.
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Boas, Franz. (1927) 1955. Primitive Art. New York: Dover.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic.” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 46: 201–10.
Chipp, Hershel B. 1960. “Formal and Symbolic Factors in the Art Styles of Primitive Cultures.”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19 (2): 153–66.
Coote, Jeremy. 1992. “‘Marvels of Everyday Vision’: The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the
Cattle-Keeping Nilotes.” In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and
Anthony Shelton, 245–73. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
d’Azevedo, Warren L. 1958. “A Structural Approach to Esthetics: Towards a Definition of Art in
Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 60 (4): 702–14.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 1992. Homo aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Free
Press.
Dutton, Dennis. 2009. The Art Instinct. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1976. “Art as a Cultural System.” MLN 91 (6): 1473–99.
Gell, Alfred. 1992. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.”
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Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2009. Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Overing, Joanna. 1996. “Aesthetics is a Cross Cultural Category: Against the Motion (1).” In Key
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Thompson, Robert Farris. 1973. “Yoruba Artistic Criticism.” In The Traditional Artist in African
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Van Damme, Wilfried. 1996. Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aes-
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