4. Social Science.
When beauty is considered in the
context of a whole society or
culture, a number of
significant questions suggest themselves: What are
the
social causes and effects of people's ideas of beauty
or
experience of beauty? How is the capacity to ap-
preciate a certain kind of beauty, or the preference
for it,
associated with other cultural traits, or with
social class, role, or
status? Though the pioneering
sociological thinkers of the nineteenth
century, for
example, Jean-Marie Guyau, L'Art au point
de vue
sociologique (Paris, 1889), began to consider such
ques-
tions, even today it cannot be said
that we have ob-
tained very conclusive
answers. This is partly because
the specific questions about beauty have
been sunk into
more general questions; there are many studies of the
variability of taste, of connoisseurship, of artistic repu-
tations, etc., but it is not clear in many cases what
light they shed on the social aspects of beauty. Adolf
S.
Tomars, for example, begins his Introduction to the
Sociology of Art (Mexico City, 1940) by marking out
the
“phenomena of art” as those referred to in making
the
judgment “this is beautiful” (Ch. 1). And he defends
a relativistic account of beauty, which he holds to be
required by the
scientific character of his investigation
(Ch. 12). But for the most part,
beauty drops out of
his inquiry into relations between characteristics of
art
(“styles”) and types of community, social class,
or insti-
tution. Vytautas Kavolis (Artistic Expression; A Socio-
logical Analysis, Ithaca, N.Y. [1968]) discusses many
discoveries about preference: for example, according
to the Lynds' study of
“Middletown,” homes of lower
middle-class urban
families in the 1920's “were more
likely than those of other
class levels” to have Whis-
tler's
portrait of his mother (Chs. 3, 7); and highly
ethnocentric people prefer
regular, balanced designs
(B. G. Rosenberg and C. N. Zimet, 1957). But
Kavolis
himself does not use the term “beauty” at
all.
Cultural anthropologists have made a beginning in
the investigation of
beauty (again almost always ap-
proached
through aesthetic preference, especially in
view of the linguistic
difficulties), with cross-cultural
comparative studies, and intercultural
functional stud-
ies. There is evidence to
support two generalizations.
First, “the appeal of what a people consider sur-
passingly pleasing, beauty as an abstraction, that
is,
is broadly spread over the earth, and lies deep in human
experience—so wide, and so deep, that it is to be
classed as a
cultural universal” (Melville J. Herskovits,
in Aspects of Primitive Art [1959], p. 43). This is
seen,
for example, in the Pakot (Kenya) distinction between
the
“good” milk pot and the “beautiful”
lip of the pot's
rim or the severely critical attitude of the Tlingit
audience toward their dancers, and in the artistic ac-
tivities of Australian aborigines: “aboriginal
art is pre-
dominantly nonmagical, i.e.,
used in the secular and
ceremonial life by men, women, and children, to
satisfy
an aesthetic urge or to portray their beliefs”
(Charles
P. Mountford, in Marian W. Smith, ed., The
Artist in
Tribal Society, New York [1961], p. 8). Herbert
Read,
commenting on this paper, however, suggested that
“tribal art in general is vital rather than
beautiful”
(ibid. p. 17).
Second, there is a significant cross-cultural conver-
gence in standards of beauty, despite evidence
that
some standards of judgment applied by experts in one
culture are
not applied in others. “I believe that there
are universal
standards of aesthetic quality, just as there
are universal standards of
technical efficiency,” wrote
Raymond Firth (Elements of Social Organization,
Lon-
don [1951]; 3rd ed., Boston [1963], p. 161).
Irvin L.
Child and various collaborators in a number of studies
have provided evidence against the earlier prevalent
view among
ethnologists that taste is completely vari-
able. They found, for example, significant correlations
between
BaKwele and New Haven judgments of
beauty (or aesthetic likeability) in
BaKwele masks
(I. L. Child and Leon Siroto, 1965).
