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Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why
"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."―Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of original and critical thinking. It will inform and irritate specialist, student, and lay reader alike."―American AnthropologistA thoughtful, elegant, and provocative analysis of aesthetic behavior in the development of our species―one that acknowledges its roots in the work of prior thinkers while opening new vistas for those yet to come. If you're reading just one book on art anthropology this year, make it hers."―Anthropology and Humanism
320 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1992
About the author
Ellen Dissanayake
9 books15 followersEllen Dissanayake is an independent scholar, author, and lecturer whose writings about the arts synthesize many disciplines, including evolutionary biology, ethology, cognitive and developmental psychology, cultural and physical anthropology, cognitive archaeology, neuroscience, and the history, theory, and practice of the various arts. She is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Washington.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 18, 2009
This is an extremely interesting book that attempts to explain the universal human behavior to create art. She defines creating art as "making something special" and explains how this behavior has helped humans cope with uncertainty and the unknown and, thus, ultimately given us a survival edge over other species. She claims this behavior is just as important as our tool making and analytical capabilities. It is quite fascinating!
March 21, 2018
Good concept, rough execution. The main idea, expressed in the most deliberately convoluted (read: exclusionarily academic) way possible, is that art is a natural evolutionary human drive that developed from ritual and play.
As if that weren't Freudian enough, Civilization and its Discontents is referenced at least once per chapter. It's an interesting theory, and prescriptive enough that there's no concrete proof or disproof, but I'm of the mind that if you need to bully and guilt-trip your audience into "giving your hypothesis a chance" every few paragraphs, you probably also think your argument is pretty weak.
Let's focus on the good. Art grows out of "making special", an innate human characteristic that probably developed for the purpose of wooing mates and increasing likelihood of genetic propagation through sexual selection, and probably led to a feedback loop with the growing human potential for empathy that eventually... ranaway? runawayed?... into traditional religious ritualization, itself just a modification of communal play. I'm obviously not talking about taking communion here. More tribal drum circles, dancing around maypoles, riding with the loa, fertility rites, that kind of thing.
Sure, five by five, but when you get to the part about how art is as necessary a human function as eating and sex, you lose me. Too lofty and idealistic. You're just trying to make something pretty, which, meta as that may be, isn't going to come from these raw materials. Art may have developed as a means of attaining food and sex, I could be on board with that. The critics got more discerning so the art became more complex, and we did it for so many generations that it became ingrained as a sort of pseudo-instinct... okay, that sounds good, but I've read way too much evolutionary bio to go any further than that.
As if that weren't Freudian enough, Civilization and its Discontents is referenced at least once per chapter. It's an interesting theory, and prescriptive enough that there's no concrete proof or disproof, but I'm of the mind that if you need to bully and guilt-trip your audience into "giving your hypothesis a chance" every few paragraphs, you probably also think your argument is pretty weak.
Let's focus on the good. Art grows out of "making special", an innate human characteristic that probably developed for the purpose of wooing mates and increasing likelihood of genetic propagation through sexual selection, and probably led to a feedback loop with the growing human potential for empathy that eventually... ranaway? runawayed?... into traditional religious ritualization, itself just a modification of communal play. I'm obviously not talking about taking communion here. More tribal drum circles, dancing around maypoles, riding with the loa, fertility rites, that kind of thing.
Sure, five by five, but when you get to the part about how art is as necessary a human function as eating and sex, you lose me. Too lofty and idealistic. You're just trying to make something pretty, which, meta as that may be, isn't going to come from these raw materials. Art may have developed as a means of attaining food and sex, I could be on board with that. The critics got more discerning so the art became more complex, and we did it for so many generations that it became ingrained as a sort of pseudo-instinct... okay, that sounds good, but I've read way too much evolutionary bio to go any further than that.
September 4, 2018
2.5 / 5 stars
This was an assigned book for one of my History of Art classes.
I liked the concept but I hated the execution. It bore me at times and was quite presumptuous. I really liked the "Core of Art" chapter but other than that, I wouldn't give this book another read.
This was an assigned book for one of my History of Art classes.
I liked the concept but I hated the execution. It bore me at times and was quite presumptuous. I really liked the "Core of Art" chapter but other than that, I wouldn't give this book another read.
May 13, 2021
I enjoyed the idea and chapters with at least some references to neurobiological mechanisms. But the text itself seemed very irritating. Every other sentence has enumeration or multiple synonyms or details in brackets. Half of text seemed redundant.
October 19, 2007
Pretty much awesome. Looks at art as a universal (innate) human tendency, one expression of a behavior she calls making special, also expressed through ritual (religion, rites of passage) and play. Through embellishing, exaggerating, patterning, juxtaposing, shaping, transforming, we're trying to heighten, make realer than real, what's important (to our culture, to our survival). Also discusses emotion as inseparable from perception and cognition and explores the aesthetic predispositions - spatial thinking, prototypes and binarism, analogy and metaphor - that lead to an emotional experience of art. Okay, it might sound boring, but I love this stuff.
August 26, 2011
Fascinating and thoughtful, if a little unnecessarily dense at times. I found of particular interest a section that called into question the arbitrariness of language, a concept intrinsic to semiotics and both structuralism and post-structuralism.
September 11, 2008
I loved the central idea of this book, but if I recall correctly, it was impossible to read.
September 22, 2007
creativity explained as a universal tendency
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews