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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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


214

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).