The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [5]
It follows from my approach that after the analysis is done, the masterpieces we love so much lose nothing of their beauty importance. This makes The Art Instinct different from recent evolutionary treatments of religion. Religion by its very nature makes grand claims about morality, God, and the universe. It follows necessarily fact or instruct people on how they must behave. Art’s world imagination and make-believe is one where analysis and criticism of the fun.
For the humanities has preached pessimism about the possibility cross-cultural understanding in matters aesthetic. Strands in the philosophy of Wittgenstein were construed as pointing toward the irreducible uniqueness of what he termed “forms of life.” In linguistics, Benjamin Whorf persuaded many people that different languages imposed radically different mental worlds on their speakers. Thomas Kuhn’s influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) convinced generations college students that epochs in science were so intellectually sealed from each other that mutual comprehension and criticism was impossible. If even chemists and astronomers working in different “paradigms” could not communicate, what chance would any of the rest of us have bridging the gulf that separates us from people in remote cultures?
Anthropology appeared to support this outlook. In an understandable reaction against the racism and ethnocentrism of earlier attitudes toward tribal peoples, anthropologists in the postwar period turned away from a search for cross-cultural values that might form a universal human nature governed by evolutionary principles. Under the shadow writers such as Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz, young ethnographers were expected to return from fieldwork arguing that the world-views and values of their tribes were unique, special, and not comparable those of Western culture. Since indigenous tribes constructed their own cultural realities, it was foolish or, worse, imperialistic and demeaning even to compare their ways of life with ours. It went “without saying,” as one anthropologist put it, that indigenous, preliterate tribes did have “art” in our sense. After all, if Eskimos had five hundred words snow, it followed that they must experience a cultural world altogether snow, it followed that they must experience a cultural world alien from ours.
When I headed for rural India as a Peace Corps volunteer after of cultures. In Andhra Pradesh, however, these academic dogmas came up against my experience of village reality. To be sure, ancient culture that speaks a Dravidian language and is permeated by caste system and Hinduism is not Southern California. But the fundamental human categories—the hopes, fears, vices, follies, and passions that motivate human life—were entirely intelligible, as was much India’s art. Although my musical background had been limited to ropean canon, in partic u lar piano literature, I learned the sitar in Hy-derabad at the feet of Pandit Pandurang Parate, himself a student Ravi Shankar. Learning that instrument and some of its repertoire opened doors to a musical world no more remote from Western music than Carlo Gesualdo is from Duke Ellington. The lure of rhythmic drive, harmonic anticipation, lucid structure, and divinely sweet melody cuts across cultures with ease.
Years later I was able to head in another aesthetic direction, expanding a keen interest in Oceanic sculpture with fieldwork in the Sepik River region of northern New Guinea. Based in the Middle Sepik village of Yentchenmangua, I studied with Pius Soni and his cousin Leo Sangi, both redoubtable carvers, along with their mentor Petrus Ava. principal research objective was to find