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By Root 944 0

cases, from the Lascaux caves to Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes to the amazing cattle markings Dinka herders so enjoy, there enough indisputable examples to give talk about art an intelligible place to begin. In this respect, art talk is like the sciences: physics, or medicine. As mature disciplines these sciences have developed hard-won theories that cover phenomena remote from mundane encounters with physical objects, ordinary speech, or the experience headaches, but they nevertheless begin with such common experiences. There was, for instance, human awareness of good health and physical well-being, and with it a contrasting acquaintance with broken legs, and death, long before there was a germ theory of disease, double-blind placebo testing, or any of health at all. Medicine clinically effective cures, but not in ten thousand years has it abolished ordinary distinction between robust good health and feeling nauseated or bleeding to death.

A naturalism about art would therefore take us back to the broad we have about everyday experience, including cross-cultural and historical experience. In ironic confirmation of this claim, it is striking even writers who would reject “our” intuitions as shot through with bourgeois ideology or ethnocentrism, and who prefer to stipulate definitions for their own theoretical purposes, are themselves reliant on the intuitions they repudiate. Overing’s argument, by stressing “the hidden dangers” for anthropologists of bringing concepts of Western aesthetics “to the task of understanding and translating other people’s ideas about the beautiful” is reduced to contradiction and incoherence. She cannot have it both ways: on the one hand denying that aesthetics cross-cultural category, while on the other hand affirming that “other people” also have “ideas about the beautiful” that we can get wrong.

Overing discusses a focus of her fieldwork, the Piaroa people of Amazon. She says variously that the “Piaroa notion of beauty cannot removed from productive use . . . objects and people are beautiful what they can do . . . beautification empowers . . . the beautiful and artistic . . . are all considered to be aspects of the one and the same cess.” These factors, she concludes, make the Piaroa sense of beauty to our aesthetic sensibility.” Hardly. Clearly, the Piaroa have sense of beauty perhaps as different from ours as the Victorian sense from that of the Sung Dynasty. But either beauty for the Piaroa is a kind of beauty—a distinctly Piaroa beauty, to be sure—or not. If it is not, then Overing ought not to call it “beauty” in the place. If it is, then aesthetics is a cross-cultural category that she, despite her theoretical bent, must recognize and appeal to.

III

Similar claims have been made by the anthropologist Lynn M. Hart. She has written of large decorative paintings on mythological themes, jyonti gives a full account of the women artists in their working environment, then goes on to describe the appearance of one such painting in North American dining room and moves from there to the exhibition another of these works in the Magiciens de la terre show in the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1989. Despite the fact that jyonti paintings are straightforward, colorfully stylized depictions of Hindu mythological themes Ganesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu, sun and moon, lovebirds, etc.), Hart insists on using “producer” instead of “artist” and “visual image” instead art” to refer to this work (if it is “work”). Hart is determined, she explains, avoid “inappropriate Western terminology.” Otherwise, she imagines, Westerners might have trouble appreciating that “the images and patterns themselves are based on religion, ritual, and mythic themes and derive their meaning—and their power—from the religious contexts their production and use.” The indigenous aesthetic principles for this or rather visual images, are “different from standard Western aesthetics.” The excellence of the works from an indigenous perspective, she explains, “is seen to lie in the closeness of the central symbol’s approximation to an ideal image,