The Debate

Ingold & Group 1996

• Vital work in understanding the debate - The motion stated being ‘is art a cross-cultural category’

Proposer

Howard Morphy

• Aesthetics (human capacity to assign qualitative value to properties of the material world) is a legitimate analytic concept to apply cross-culturally, just as anthropologists use concepts like "exchange" or "gender."

Seconder

Jeremy Coote

• Indigenous peoples themselves have categories that substantively overlap with what we call aesthetics 

• Dinka concept of dheeng (encompassing beauty, nobility, grace, and proper social conduct all at once) is an example indigenous discourses on beauty, not Western projections.

Opposition

Joanna Overing

• The term aesthetics is not a neutral tool and is a specific historical enlightenment category that cannot be seperated from the idea that art exists in a separate

• For the Piaroa, beauty and utility are conceptually unified and beautiful objects are beautiful because of what they can do realm from everyday life

Seconder

Peter Gow

• Western aesthetics is fundamentally discriminatory and is not really about beauty 

• When Western people engage aesthetically, they judge it to be good/bad art →  Aesthetic taste is how social hierarchy reproduces itself.

Implications from Gow’s argument

• Makes comparative aesthetics impossible for anthropologists as anthropology committed to not judging the cultures it compares

• The moment you say "let's compare Western aesthetics with Piaroa aesthetics," you have invited the question: which is better