Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called "art," and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species' four-million-year evolutionary history.



This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species.



In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that "make special," and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival.



Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; "primitive" and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and children's art. The final chapter, "From Tradition to Aestheticism," explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art.



This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The author's attempt to substantiate her thesis ``that although the arts are a cultural phenomenon, Art might profitably be viewed as a prior, biological one'' is thwarted by her muddled approach to biology, anthropology, psychology, cultural histories, and aesthetics. At best, her text is argumentative; more often, it sinks into overblown phraseologies, self-contradictory assertions, and blatant oversights of seminal thought. That artistic behaviors might have a biological basis is an interesting idea, but we shall have to await another work on the subject before evaluating it.Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Dissanayake draws on 15 years of Third World experience and numerous interdisciplinary resources to conduct a bioevolutionary review of the interrelated activities of ritual, play, and art. One significant advantage of this approach is the realization of the recency of the literate mentality, which has substantially changed both the form and content of human knowledge, obscuring the meanings of ritual. Contemporary individualization and abstraction have profoundly changed, and isolated, the "behavior of art" from its roles of facilitating socially important behavior and transmitting spiritual values. Her thesis concerning contemporary art is that it is an "evolutionarily superfluous residue" of earlier adaptive behaviors, which were enabling mechanisms of selective value. Dissanayake concludes that the arts are for the "embodiment and reinforcement of socially shared significances." Her tracing of the evolution of a behavior of art, although speculative, provides a conceptual framework linking tool usage, language, concept formation, symbolization, self-consciousness, and the creation of culture over a period much longer that that following the "creative explosion." The author also makes fascinating forays into the animal precursors of a "behavior of art," broadening the search for the biological foundation of our contemporary cultural experience of art. Photographs supplement the text. For general and advanced readers. -L. M. C. Abbott, formerly California School of Professional Psychology--Fresno

Author notes provided by Syndetics

ART