In: and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

The Problem with Beauty: An Anthropological Perspective

Susanne Küchler UCL

The question of beauty tends to be responded to with examples drawn from the world of the concrete – a face, a stretch of landscape, an artefact or a building -, but also from the world of abstract mathematics. The intuitive nature of our response to things of beauty has allowed neuro-scientists to raise the question of whether the brain has a system that is responsive to beauty in the abstract, and to query the extent to which the experience of beauty is bound to knowledge.1 This move in science to build a model for, and to claim understanding of, a domain the humanities have long considered to be their own – the study of beauty and judgements provoked by its manifestation – is of particular interest to anthropology, whose method of classification and comparison is one it shares with science. The models anthropology builds, however, are also informed by the inherently subjective method of observation of the particular unfolding of actions and events, and it is this unique combination of generalized and particularized dimensions at the core of the social anthropological method that has placed the study of the form taken by beauty squarely in the centre of anthropological theory, while also making it the focus of debates over the use of the comparative method in anthropology. From Pitt-River’s evolutionary ethnology and Alfred Cort Haddon’s study of the life- histories of design in the English tradition, to the American and French tradition of morphological analysis exemplified by Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the integrative efforts of , influenced by both American and the English approaches, anthropology has, in the spirit of the comparative method, long contributed to our understandings of the difference made by ideas of beauty to society and culture.2 The comparative frame of analysis, which aimed to expose a referent of an aspired form not in a depicted reality, but in a formalized world that exists in the mind alone, came to a sudden halt with the disciplinary framing of the study of such forms as the anthropological study of art, accompanied by a move away from the study of the systemic properties of language of which the assemblage of motivic forms was seen to be a manifestation, to the study of communication within which images served as metaphors. This move, from systemic

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 relations between forms to meanings and values understandable in context alone, was part of a wider shift away from the comparative method that defined anthropology for decades to come – a shift which relegated the study of beauty to the margins of anthropological theory. No further contribution to the study of beauty was to emerge from anthropology until the recuperation of earlier approaches by the late Alfred Gell and more recently by Carlo Severi, both strictly comparative studies that aim to understand the nature of imagines agentes or ‘stylized’ images that abduct attention with an immediacy that cancels out interpretations of referential meaning.3 Drawing on these studies and tracing the tradition of thought they invoke, this essay will argue that images recognized as manifesting beauty have their referent not in an external, independently verifiable reality known through experience, but in their own internally held relation to a prototype, the pre-hermeneutic and yet action- based identity of which will enable us to locate beauty in the nature of being human, both generically and subjectively, freeing anthropology to engage productively with science once again.

Formalization, memory and mathematical imagination As anthropologists educated in the era of hostility toward comparativism, much of our interest in beauty tends to lie in the idea that the diversity of its articulation shows up the social nature of the ideas and actions that inform its manifestations.4 In fact, compositions of all kinds, from architectural structures through to music and dance, manifest this socialness in non-random, cohering and formalized relations of proportion and multiplication that are intuitively recognized and responded. During the heyday of revolt against comparativism, when anthropology turned away from the formal analysis of compositions, amplifying instead the metaphoric qualities of images as the content of acts of communication, interest in the patterns and the processes by which they are formed, later referred to by the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese as ‘the relational nature of action’, fell almost completely into abeyance.5 Manuscripts demonstrating formal analysis and an acute interest in pattern as a vehicle of information processing, rather than as content, were only published again after the path- breaking work on Art and Agency by Alfred Gell had reasserted the active role played by cohering formal properties in relating persons to one another.6 Today neuroscience can tell us that the properties and processes underpinning formalization and pattern formation support not just the capacity for humour and consciousness, but also a sense of self that is recognized by those that are bound to us.7 While

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 we know that the patterns created by neurons in the brain and in the material world created by us mirror each other and make possible predictable and thus stable human relations that allow for a biographical perspective, extending both into the past and the future, we do not yet fully understand how patterns are discriminated, bringing about not just positive but also negative reactions with equal consistency and durability.8 Distinct styles of music, for example, can stand in for one another in one and the same context. However, when musical forms are selected on the basis of their coherence, their synergic and yet difficult to unpack cooperation with one another, style assumes a ‘psychological saliency’9 that subtly informs empathic and inter-subjective understanding of modalities of personhood, the recognition of which binds people together more firmly and lastingly than even a shared language. This psychological saliency of style, resonant of patterns of constancy and variation within and between its manifold manifestations, is arguably acutely important in the identification of and response to beauty, and it is only by turning to the question of its formalization that anthropology can return to a productive inquiry into its nature and the difference it makes to culture and society. Anthropology has long argued for the socialness of pattern. That patterns work in distinct modalities informed by ideas fundamental to the working of different ‘types’ of society has famously been advanced in a classic article by the anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss that approached the question of why the phenomenon of split representation, involving the characteristic splitting of an image so that two halves face one another, can be traced across both Asian and American art.10 By tracing the splitting of an image to the actions informing the process of the creation of this pattern via the translation of an image from three dimensional into two dimensional form, Lévi-Strauss was able to draw a parallel with the characteristic collapsing of the concept of person with a socially effective office in ways symptomatic of hierarchical societies in which men compete over structurally and genealogically conferred status that outlasts the individual person. Split representation and competition over partly divine, partly achieved status was also practised among the Marquesas Islanders of Polynesia at the time of contact, although here it involved the inverse translation of an image from a two dimensional to a three dimensional surface, made apparent in the pattern reflections depicted on the front of a figure across its back.11 Marquesan figures in fact are wrapped in composite and modular motivic images that were cut, pasted and transformed through geometric translation, rotation or reflection in a manner appropriate to two dimensional surfaces.12 Formalized ideas of relation are shown to underpin both action

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 and action representation in these case studies, which show pattern to be a key factor in the durability of systems of hierarchy in which status competition is endemic and identity is perpetually threatened both from within and beyond the social world. In acknowledgment of the epistemic nature and formative capability of pattern, the anthropologist Carlo Severi has argued for the need to reappraise the formal properties of images as manifestation of the workings of mnemonic systems that are of acute importance in societies in which knowledge of political office that transcends human lifespan is not stored in ways that make its access and verification independent of remembering.13 With their dependence on archives of memory, the defining factor of such societies is that the incantations of the patterns they live by are subject to shifting passions, subjective interests and intentions, and that they are informed by strategic, future-directed thinking rather than directed towards verification or understanding of the past.14 Severi shows in his work on the ‘chimera principle’ that the comparative study of mnemonic systems was long prevented in anthropology because the apparent representational quality of images led anthropologists down the path of interpretation when they should have searched for the ways these images serve as devices for incantation and as vehicles of transmission. By exposing the formalization supporting the workings of mnemonic images, Severi continues the unfinished work on the nature and properties of Mnemosyne undertaken by the early twentieth century art historian Aby Warburg. 15 The relation between image and word, standing in for remembering and imagination, at work in Severi’s approach to formalization takes us towards a comparative approach to pattern, as it seeks to account for the imagination at work in language which Warburg’s work famously showed to have a ‘Nachleben’ that is constitutive of transmission. To get at the imagination that is at work in language and pattern we need to turn to the work of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his ideas on translation. For Benjamin, translation thrives on the intuitive and imaginative grasping of mimetic relations within and between things, and is practised most acutely when thought is unshackled from memory, in contexts that Benjamin identified as symptomatic to childhood and modernity.16 Ignoring the conventional understanding of translation as supporting communication between languages and between worlds of things, Benjamin’s concern with translation was directed to recover a ‘language of things’ by exposing acts of translation within language and within things, which happen when memory is detached from experience. Benjamin shows how by disrupting the temporal schema underlying the notion of remembering, translation folds time back on itself

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 by making all articulations equally present.17 Most important for our understanding of the nature of imagination driving the formalization supportive of mnemonic systems is his argument that translation is not in fact simply a linguistic matter alone but requires a ‘magical’ synthesis or ‘participation’ that merges the subject of translation with its object of reflection, so that ‘we find ourselves reflected in things we know [as much as] things recognized themselves in their knowledge of other things’.18 The use of pattern instead of content to elicit mnemonic transmission is thus, according to Benjamin, a reflection of the subject’s capacity to recognize the similar as language’s material reflection of itself. It is on the basis of the ‘similar’ in the world (Merkwelt), concretized in geometric and mathematical forms, that the mind can be seen to look both back to the past and forward to the future, enabling the opening of ‘the window of the monad’, in the words of the art historian Horst Bredekamp who reflected on the enduring significance of Gottfried Leibniz’s thesis on the ‘theatre of nature and art’.19 Leibniz, according to Bredekamp, saw the knitted garter worn by men in the seventeenth century as the conscious manifestation of mathematical patterns that link interior thought to material and social worlds, like an onomatopoetic word whose sound pattern is a concept made material and thus socially efficacious. The mathematician and philosopher Alain Badiou has taken forward these ideas about the vehicular capacity of formalization in pattern.20 Badiou starts his analysis seemingly at the opposite end – asking not how the similarity that constitutes pattern is recursively tied to a prototypical form, but how prototypical forms themselves give rise to new patterns precisely through the process of comparison incurred by a prototype’s casts-offs of self-similar patterns. Badiou’s idea that the mathematical nature of formalization both enables recognition of the similar and also the imagination of the new should be of profound interest to anthropologists and neuroscientists intent on understanding the difference the work patterns do makes to society. Anthropology has been adept at pointing out that ideas in mathematics are good to think with when projecting an understanding of the nature of being in relation.21 The anthropologist Marcia Ascher has been most comprehensive in her comparative account of how mathematical imaginations are expressive of concepts of relation that are operative in both ritual and everyday situations, enabling us to see how mnemonic systems articulated in patterned images are carried by ideas that exist partly outside of the realm of experience yet are also informed by experience.

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

In anthropology we have a famous example of the workings of mathematical ideas in the making of seemingly unremarkable graphic designs drawn into the sand, twisted into string, plaited into palm fronds or woven into vines described by the early anthropologist A.B. Deacon, who was stationed as missionary in in the South Pacific and conducted fieldwork there until the 1930s.22 Trained originally in physics, Deacon was able to translate the geometric diagrams that were drawn, plaited and lashed by the islanders into quaternion number systems, showing thereby that patterned artefacts worked as temporal maps of relations of affinity, and with this documenting the existence of the most complex marriage system known to us, consisting of six classes. His insight that people model biographical relations using material translations between geometry and number system inspired in turn Claude Lévi-Strauss to conceive of the analytical method of studying kinship we still rely upon today.23 From this insight to the acknowledgement that mathematical ideas model the workings of society via seemingly abstract artefacts and associated narratives is a small, but, for an anthropology looking for ways to embrace again the comparative perspective with new tools, radical step.24 We could see the use made of number systems that permit a topological view of the world to be accidental, motivated by the ingenuity of Vanuatuan islanders alone. It so happens, however, that rotational and transformational geometries have been demonstrated across wider Oceania, where social groups are not on the ground, but in the head: multiple, heterogeneous and fluid, bar ritual moments where their singularity and homogeneity is staged in artefactual assemblages.25 The prevalence of topological imagination in island Oceania is without a doubt supportive of ocean living, as it permits the drawing together of visible and invisible factors informing navigation by allowing temporal relations to be assigned spatial values that are consistent under deformation and that allow an imagination of continuity to exist alongside the multiplicity and heterogeneity of spatial referents. Yet how rotational geometry works when it is made use of in the making of patterns that attract attention for their recursive transformational coherence, and the difference that this elicitation of a canonized graphic imagination makes to society, has not yet been fully understood.26 That we do not yet know much about rotational geometry and its workings in Oceanic arts is the result of our own conceptual bias that assumed pattern to work like drawing in representing a three dimensional referent in two dimensions. Graphic elements and compositions that do not appear to represent a prototype the identity of which we can independently verify are dismissed as abstract and as untranslatable into linguistic concepts.

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

Whole categories of artefacts and associated performances, from baskets to mats to music to dances have as a result been simply ignored in analysis, relegated to the stores of ethnographic museums and to the niche of craft, leaving us bereft of a vital resource to understand the potential workings of a new aesthetics of computer-interaction design that works with texture to create new global and yet local material connectivities and of course removing data of significance to understanding the workings of societies producing such artefacts.27 The solution correcting our assumption is simple and has been in the conceptual tool box of anthropology since the now classic essay by the Claude Levi-Strauss on split representation described above. As neatly put by Alfred Gell in his analysis of Marquesan style, patterns in Oceania are the product of not of dimensional representations, but of ‘graphic gestures’ that are in turn constitutive of the inter-subjective and thus legitimate understanding brought to efficacious action, and of a conscious deployment in deflecting recognition.28 Not recognizing the beauty of such graphic gestures we realize may be grounded in complex intentions and unleash equally complex consequences.29

The Graphic Constitution of Continuous Multiplicity and the Mobilisation of Alterity: The Case of Oceania In a classic essay on visual categories among the Walbiri of Central Australia the American anthropologist Nancy Munn established the systematic use of graphic elements that work as like gestures, lacking direct referents in the world as seen, but conjuring up connections between heterogeneous and multi-referential entities.30 Such graphic elements that are eloquently made use of in anything from sand painting and painting on and off the body are circular path, referencing anything from waterholes, fruit, fire, yam, tree and so on, straight line, referencing a straight tail, a spear, a tree trunk, a backbone and so on.31 Other graphic elements such as winding path, cave and actor sitting/standing likewise have, what Munn calls, ‘discontinuous meaning ranges,’ that is they are marking heterogeneous spatial referents whose identity is offered up only in association with neighbouring elements brought into relation through ever changing combinations that invite to be engaged with as manifold and yet connected sequences of a coherent graphic system rather than as substitution for an entity whose identity is singular and discontinuous. Ethnographic research has shown up the relation between the production of a graphic system that constitutes spatial relations as heterogeneous and yet continuous and the social organisation common to Australian

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

Aborigines, whose topological underpinning has allowed objects of beauty to work in the conscious deflection of recognition and positioning of alterity.32 Further to the West and into the heart of the South Pacific, just South of the main island of in an island region known as the Massim, a similar graphic system is practiced by the Trobriand Islanders.33 Decorating the prow-boards of outrigger canoes that carry valuables and food stuffs between the islands are graphic designs in non-random and yet difficult to disentangle combinations which Alfred Gell famously alluded to as formidable weapon in ‘psychological warfare,’ causing “the overseas Kula partners of the Trobrianders, watching the arrival of the Kula flotilla from the shore, to take leave of their senses and offer more valuables shells or necklaces to the members of the expedition than they would otherwise be inclined to do.”34 The impression management Gell refers to depends upon the recognition of what is relational about the action conjured up by the graphic gesture of the prow, an understanding of the complex intentions it outlines (the expectation of news, food and valuables and of the need to reciprocate), and of the position of the canoe in a continuous sequence of journeys (indicating where the canoe would have come from and what it may carry, given the specialisation of many of the low lying archipelagos in the region). Somehow the prows graphic design allows a spatio-temporal map to be made overt and conceptually graspable in the absence of a linear map that allows complex relations of exchange to be as securely navigated as the ocean. Unlike the maps we are used to deploy, using Euclidian finite geometry that holds for three-dimensional linear point configurations, these graphic maps are using a different approach as they account for the neighbourhood around discrete points, which then are assembled conceptually into a continuous sequence that offers itself up to narrative accounts rather than visual representation.35 My own research into island Melanesian and eastern Polynesian has brought to the fore that seemingly distinct pattern systems, one articulated in three dimensional and the other in two dimensional artefacts, both utilize such topological geometry to map space-time by assembling relations around a multiplicity of discrete points.36 A brief outline of the way topological geometry is used to similar ends and yet in very different ways will show how the understanding of the work of beauty enables us to understand similarities and differences in social organisation whose reach and resilience have surprised generations of anthropologists who expected their work to be not more than salvage what soon would be a matter of the past.

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

The first pattern system is known under generic name of malanggan, a ritual system of images that reify relations over land held internally by a number of distinct biographically related social groups on an island north-east of mainland New Guinea. The island has seen a great impact from the annexing of land for use as foreign-owned plantations in the decades leading up to colonial administration in the early nineteenth century. The malanggan figures overtly invite interpretation via seemingly representational motivic elements, such as snakes, birds and fish whose identity can be independently verifies and whose naturalistic flair coupled with surrealistic enchainment has incited the interest of Western collectors for over a century. Carved from wood for the secondary burial rituals that culminate in the demonstrative gesturing towards future relations over land, malanggan are designed to captivate those who arrive from beyond the horizon in ways strikingly differently and yet with similar ends as outlined above for the Kula canoes sailing the Massim in search for exchange partners. Enticing recognition based on encyclopaedic knowledge of a foreign ecology, the carved assemblages of graphic motives are working their magic by trapping the gaze in a futile attempt at reconstructing how they came to be and relate to one another.37 Quite to the contrary to what we would assume, the sale of the ritually used artefacts, once deployed, was desired rather than inhibited, with the remains of ritual action taken tot the houses of local missionaries to be exchanged for money offered up by captains of passing ships or in latter days by passing tourists and collectors. It is only when looking at collected artefacts as assemblages of graphic elements one realizes that discrete combinations map the points of temporally and spatially connected sequences of exchange in a manner that demands a sense of the continuous nature of combinatorial actions that result in local and temporally specific figurative articulations. Rather surprisingly, what we find as cohering principle informing the graphic manifold of malanggan is the inside view of the geometry of the to bind all possible combinations together into a coherent and yet invisible whole.38 The three dimensional appearance of the assemblage, typical and distinctive for malanggan art, is a deliberate and yet conceptually inconsequential decision that further seeks to entrap the western collector keen to see in the figures a likeness with what makes this culture human – its capacity to remember the dead with a spectacular display of local lore. Not remembering, however, but in fact systematic forgetting of past assemblages supplants the dynamic of malanggan, which incites local attention to its future directed mapping of relations and connections that traverse discrete local neighbourhoods. For hidden in full view beneath the surrealistic combinations of expressive motivic elements, islanders used this

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 system to manage the distribution of land and the patterns of its use untrammelled by institutions until the enforced land registration of the late 1980s, which made it unnecessary for relations over land to be mapped via this graphic system. The second pattern system is that of tivaivai, giant piecework that involves the patching of pieces from fragments of pre-dyed cloth into iterated, self-similar and transitively arranged motivic elements. 39 Like the motivic elements of the malanggan, the pieced together elements that are replicated across the surface of a tivaivai are seemingly representational. Mostly floral in nature, an inkling that the piecework element on the surface of the tivaivai is quite unlike a drawing in that it is not ‘of’ something that exists separately from the depiction comes only when we realize that the views depicted are impossible ones to have unless one presses and thus flattens the flower, splitting and reassembling its parts in ways that allow us to see it in the round while laid out on a two dimensional surface. Rather than working as a drawing or a depiction of something that exists independently, the alternation of hyperrealism, with pollen and stamen embroidered in bewildering detail, and of abstraction, with coloured patches arranged as mirror image of themselves within a single motivic element, points up that what matters is the assemblage itself, that is the juxtaposition of pieces that are not attached to one another. Assemblage and patching as graphic gestures, constitutive of connectivity and continuity, touches at the core of a sentiment that pervades Cook Islands’ social organisation. Nothing can quite convey the sense of disparateness that exists between households populating the tiny islands, where proximity alone would seem to condition people to be pervaded by a sense of relation, as the practice of adoption from beyond the island. So called ‘feeding children’ are taken into a household by a couple in their later years to raise the child as the spiritual owner and guardian of knowledge that connects the living with those that have come before. Like the occupants of a household and a village living side by side as foreigners on discrete patches of land, women who come together in sewing bees for the stitching of the piecework are rarely related through ties of blood or marriage. As they sew the patches with the same stitch and pull to create seamless and even planar coverlets they turn their manifold relations into a coherent whole. The back of the tivaivai is the mirror image of its front, laying open in the continuity and the evenness of the stitch the connections that women have wrought through their actions upon the fabric. The pieced together hexagons or diamond shapes cut out from pre-coloured cloth, like the flower petals, leaves or stems cut in precise scaled relation to one another, find their

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2 similitude in the patchwork of local spaces marked by cement gravestones that cover every corner of the islands. Hidden inside the graves, wrapped around their inhabitants, are tivaivai that have ended their journey as shrouds made for the dead, having conjoined those that live in their shadow. Viewed from above, the tiny island of the Cooks are covered in an array of rectangular gravestones covering tiled tombs that in their early years have superstructures like the houses next to which they stand. As inhabitants of the house next to the tomb die or move away to find work in the metropolises of the West, the house is abandoned leaving only the tomb with its tivaivai to mark the position for a new house occupied by those who eventually return to be buried themselves in the islands. To understand the importance assigned to the beauty and correctness of assemblage and the arrest of movement in the face of lived in worlds that are as separate and as they are similar to one another, like the islands on which this living is staged, we need to be mindful of the recent history of the Cooks which had placed its islands into the zenith of forces unleashed by successive endings and irreparable losses. The swift ending of paietua, the great ritual the Cook Islands shared with Tahiti aimed at securing the continuing connection between the dead and the living, in response to the adoption of Christianity, followed by the disappearance of young men aboard ships that frequented the islands during the days of whaling and blackbirding, left Cook Islands women, no strangers to making connections as newcomers to islands through adoption or marriage, to literally put fractured lives back together again. The beauty of the tivaivai lies in its moral connotation of securing continuity and connectivity in the face of the enduring fracturing of resemblance, felt perhaps most strongly by the inhabitants of the Cooks many transnational communities that engage in the making and gifting of tivaivai, and its associated performance of dance and music, with a fervour that calls attention to the relational nature of the action that ‘is’ tivaivai. The graphic systems that have been briefly presented here show a capacity for ‘gesturing’ ideas of how to be in relation with persons and with objects in ways that are constitutive of what we may call the ‘fabric’ of society, that is of the intuitively shared expectations and responses that take on their most orchestrated and overt form in actions that are future directed. In Oceania such actions tend to inform the making of artefacts and of ritual, when legitimated gestures come into their own. Understanding these nature of gestures, their multiplicity, coherence and potential for alterity, enables us to understand how things of beauty work and why they continue to matter in conjuring up how to be in relation.

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

Conclusion This chapter has argued that it is beauty’s intuitive and yet inter-subjective response which has been the chief reason for the lack of studies of beauty in anthropology. By tracing the nature of the response to the work of pattern in connecting the inner world of the mind to the lived in world, the paper has argued that anthropology can find a way to engage with beauty ethnographically and comparatively. This is because, subject at once to mathematical imagination and situated formalization, patterns are constituted by a relational nature of action and it is this that enables us to understand why the response to beauty is inter-personal and also why it may occasionally responded to with lack of attention or even negatively. While our understanding of the role patterns play in human consciousness and emotive response has been advanced significantly by neuroscience over the past decade, anthropology and comparatively situated ethnography can offer an understanding of how the intertwining of intention with imagination in action and action representation, situated at the cross roads of practices that are vital to the resilience of communities, are informing the predictability of response on which empathy relies. Anthropology has a lot to offer to our understanding of how beauty works, what it does and why it matters to the human propensity to intuit how to be in relation with persons and with objects via objects that are made with beauty in mind. The study of beauty therefore may lead the way to the return in anthropological theory toward big questions and big issues, enabling its theories to engage with those developed in the sciences in new and productive ways.

1Kawabata and Zeki 2004; Zeki 1999; Zeki et al. 2014. 2 On Pitt-Rivers, see Bateson 1973; Haddon 1911; Hicks and Stephenson 2013. 3 Gell 1993 and 1998; Severi 2015. 4 Boivin 2008; Knappett 2005. 5 Gallese 2001:33–4. 6 Campbell 2002; Gell 1998; Küchler 2002; Myers 2002 – all three books emerged from research conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 7 Eagleman 2015. 8 Descola 2013; Latour and Weibel 2002. 9 Gell 1998:163. 10 Lévi-Strauss 1963. 11 Gell 1998:195. 12 Gell 1995. 13 Severi 2015. 14 See Pomian 1999, which argues for a return of the narrowing of the gap between history and memory in the digital age. 15 For an excellent write up of Warburg’s ideas and his influences see Severi’s ‘Warburg the anthropologist’ (2015:25–68). See also Warburg 2012 [1929].

In: Anthropology and Beauty: From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December. Routledge. Chapter 2

16 Benjamin 2002. 17 Benjamin 1999; Bracken 2002:327–8. 18 Bracken 1999:327. 19 Bredekamp 2007:21n51. 20 Badiou 2007. 21 Cf. Ascher 1991, 2002a, 2002b; Ascher and Ascher 1981; Biersack 1982; Eglash 1999; Urton 1999. 22 Deacon 1934. 23 Lévi-Strauss 1966:15. 24 Rio 2005. 25 Harrison 2006. 26 Bennardo 2002; Hutchins 1995. 27 Wiberg and Robles 2010; Ledderose 2000. 28 Gell 1998:190-191. 29 Gell 1998:83. 30 Munn 1966. 31 Ibid: 938; Myers 2002. 32 Gloczweski 1989; Povinelli 2002. 33 Campbell 2002. 34 Gell 2006:164-165; this paper was originally published in 1992, based on a seminar presentation given in 1985. 35 Bennardo 2002; Hutchins 1995. 36 Küchler 2002; Küchler and Eimke 2009. 37 Gell 1996. 38 Küchler 2003. 39 Küchler and Eimke 2009 References

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