Social Aesthetics and The Doon School: Page 1

Social Landscapes

There are moments when the social world seems more evident in an object or a gesture than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions. Through our senses we measure the qualities of our surroundings—the tempo of life, the dominant patterns of color, texture, movement, and behavior—and these coalesce to make the world familiar or strange. In the 1920s Ruth Benedict suggested that the aesthetic sensibility was an important component in the cultural "configuration" of societies, although her schema of cultural types soon seemed overly reductive to most scholars. Recently, social scientists have increasingly drawn attention to the senses and to how responses to sensory experience may be culturally constructed and specific. Attention has also been given to indigenous aesthetic systems, including, but also extending beyond, artistic activities. Some writers have analyzed the forms and "poetics" of social performance, both public and private. Others have described how the emotions and social interactions of individuals may be closely associated with a society’s aesthetic principles and concepts of bodily harmony.

The emergence of these studies points to a desire to remedy certain apparent omissions in anthropological description, often concerning subjects such as art, ritual, and religion about which a good deal has already been written. It also suggests that new methods may be needed to explore these interests, or at least new applications of existing methods. This has led to considerable experimentation in the writing of ethnographies. If one were to look beyond the written literature, one would also have to include filmmaking in this démarche, most notably the work of Jean Rouch, beginning in the early 1950s. Since then, visual anthropologists have been looking for alternative ways of representing social experience, often (like Rouch) at the risk of upsetting more orthodox approaches. Yet it is through such radical moves that anthropology may eventually succeed in reuniting the sensory with the "cultural" landscape.

Defining this larger landscape is not only, or even principally, a matter of making a cultural inventory of the senses—exploring what Walter J. Ong has called the "ratio or balance between the senses" of different cultural groups, or (as another writer terms it) their characteristic sensotypes. Nor does it lie only in describing the aesthetic preoccupations and preferences of certain societies (as has been done, for example, of cattle-keeping Nilotes of the southern Sudan), nor even in acknowledging the embodied and performative dimensions of rituals and other community events. These are important aspects of the individual’s social and cultural consciousness, but gaining a fuller understanding of the relation of individuals to their societies would seem to require further analysis of these societies as complex sensory and aesthetic environments.

So far this task has largely slipped through the gaps between anthropology, art history, and cultural studies. Anthropology remains largely concerned with aesthetics as it pertains to particular art objects and practices, and the discourses surrounding them, especially those associated with ritual or myth; art history with artistic production more generally as an institution; and cultural studies with the aesthetics of popular culture, as seen in advertising, mass media, and consumerism. Aesthetics as it relates to everything else in life apart from art or conscious design has received comparatively little attention. As Howard Morphy notes, "in failing to consider the aesthetics of cultures, anthropologists ignore a body of evidence that allows them a unique access to the sensual aspect of human experience: to how people feel in, and respond to, the world."

"Landscape" has seemed to me an appropriate term to apply to these social environments, for like many actual landscapes they are conjunctions of the cultural and the natural. The experience of most anthropologists is that each community exhibits physical attributes and patterns of behavior which, taken as a composite, are specific to itself and instantly recognizable to its inhabitants. That these social landscapes have no individual authors is of no great moment; like the social forces that make individual authorship of art works relatively unimportant in broadly historical terms, their "authorship" has been collective over time, employing the full range of available media: stones and earth, fibers and dyes, sounds, time and space, and the many expressive possibilities of the human body. Even in its shifts and internal contradictions, a community acquires a character that provides a distinctive backdrop for everyday life. The result may not be a well-balanced whole, but the object in studying such social environments is not to reinvent a holistic typology of societies, nor to return to a hermetic sort of functionalism, but to understand the importance of these settings of human life as they exist in experiential terms. This problem can be approached variously through writing, museum exhibits, sound recordings, photography, film, and video. It demands, in addition to a capacity for analysis, a sensitivity to the aesthetics of community life—to forms and resonances that are often as complexly interlaced as the rhymes and meanings of a poem. Differences in emphasis must also be taken into account. Although aesthetic considerations appear to play a part in the life of all communities, the social aesthetic field often appears more systematically ordered in some than in others. This is particularly true of small "constructed" communities such as schools.

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