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From Aesthetics to Creativity. Edited by Stephanie Bunn. Publication 2017 December In: Anthropology 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 Gregory Bateson, 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.
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