CHIMERA, SPANDREL, OR ADAPTATION Conceptualizing Art in H u m a n Evolution
Ellen Dissanayake University of Edinburgh
In every known human society, some kind--usually many kinds----of art is practiced, frequently with much vigor and pleasure, so that one could at least hypothesize that "artifying" or "artification" is a characteristic behavior of our species. Yet human ethologists and sociobiologists have been conspicuously unforthcoming about this observably widespread and valued practice, for a number of stated and unstated reasons. The present essay is a position paper that offers an overview and analysis of conceptual issues and problems inherent in viewing art and/or aesthetics as adaptive, and it presents a speculative account of a h u m a n behavior of art.
KEY WORDS:
Art; Aesthetics; H u m a n universals; Evolution of h u m a n behavior.
At the b e g i n n i n g of the decade, C h a r l e s L u m s d e n (1991) p r e d i c t e d that aesthetics w o u l d h a v e a place in the sociobiology of the 1990s similar to that which ethics occupied in the 1980s. As if b e a r i n g out L u m s d e n ' s prediction, a n n u a l H u m a n Behavior a n d Evolution Society (HBES) m e e t ings in the 1990s h a v e included sessions a n d s y m p o s i a on the arts or aesthetics, a n d the E u r o p e a n Sociobiology Society m a d e aesthetics the focus of its 1993 meetings. Received September 20, 1994; accepted November 4, 1994. Address all correspondence to Ellen Dissanayake c/o Franzen, 180 Cohnan Drive, Port 7bwnsend, WA 98368.
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As one w h o from the humanities side of the discourse has been concerned for some t w e n t y years with u n d e r s t a n d i n g art as an a d a p t i v e (that is, evolved) h u m a n behavior, 1 w e l c o m e m y scientific c o u n t e r p a r t s ' increased interest in aesthetics. At the same time, I note that this interest as expressed so far tends (with a few notable exceptions) to address only part of h u m a n k i n d ' s aesthetic nature. Recent focus has been almost exclusively on aesthetic preferences for discrete features or proportions (e.g., in faces, bodies, landscapes, weather, etc.: see Kaplan 1992; Orians and H e e r w a g e n 1992; Thornhill and Gangestad 1993) or on thematics or "biopoetics" (elucidating biologically salient subject matter in stories or pictures: see C o o k e 1994), without attending to w h a t I claim encompasses t h e s e - - a n d remains to be a c k n o w l e d g e d and described: a w i d e l y observable behavioral predisposition to "artify." (Lack of a suitable verb in English that describes w h a t people d o w h e n they make art or treat s o m e t h i n g artfully p e r h a p s contributes to our blindness at recognizing the p h e n o m e n o n . ) To date, relatively few evolutionary biologists h a v e c o n c e r n e d themselves with art as an evolved h u m a n propensity. A s u r v e y of 24 representative p o p u l a r and academic books on h u m a n evolution, written between 1967 and 1989 (Dissanayake 1992:227-228), revealed that only seven books (by five authors: Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a; Geist 1978; Morris 1967; Wilson 1978, 1984; Young 1971, 1978) expressly a d d r e s s e d art as a characteristic of h u m a n species nature, a t t e m p t i n g to posit its selective value. One-third of the books did not m e n t i o n art or the arts at all, and the remaining third used the w o r d "art" only in passing (e.g., listed with such traits as play and entertainment, or with reference to cultural artifacts such as U p p e r Paleolithic cave painting as e v i d e n c e of symbolizing ability). This lack of attention suggests that for one reason or a n o t h e r art has been considered an u n r e w a r d i n g subject for e v o l u t i o n a r y scrutiny. I can suggest at least three difficulties of conceptualizing art that contribute to its relative neglect b y evolutionary biologists: a) What does it refer to? Art appears to be a general or superordinate term comprising a number of apparently unrelated activities, e.g., beating drums, singing, dancing, painting cave walls, decorating the body, etc., any one of which may be performed by some individuals in some societies but not by all everywhere, and not consistently. Lacking a circumscribable or centripetal notion of what these disparate activities have in common, the manifold aspects seem to add up to a conceptual chimera, i.e., an imaginary beast, made up piecemeal and ad hoc from components of a number of different entities and having no stable or demonstrable existence of its own.
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b) What does it do? As individual arts in all their variety appear to be cultural rather than natural activities, and have varying outcomes, some of which are conflicting, or no apparent outcomes at all, there would seem to be no unequivocal adaptive function that art regularly serves. Thus it would appear to be, in Gould and Lewontin's (1979) well-known term, a spandrel, i.e., a by-product or epiphenomenon of other adaptive features (cognitive/emotional, rather than in Gould and Lewontin's example, structural). c) H o w important is it? In western society at present, and indeed for at least several centuries, the arts have been specialist activities engaged in by the few. Particularly in advanced capitalist society, art is relegated to the periphery of ordinary human activity, and most people seem to exist easily enough without it. One does not see people everywhere spontaneously doing it. There seems no convincing reason to investigate or alter its present chimerical or spandrel-like status. It is then not surprising that e v e n the few scholars w h o h a v e treated art (or an art) as an e v o l u t i o n a r y p h e n o m e n o n h a v e d o n e so in idiosyncratic and f r a g m e n t a r y ways, m u c h like the p r o v e r b i a l blind m e n investigating an elephant. M y reading o v e r the past t w e n t y years of scientific and quasi-scientific writings a b o u t the arts in h u m a n e v o l u t i o n reveals w h a t a m o u n t s to a c o n c e p t u a l ragbag. There are interesting ideas but, apart from m y s e l f (Dissanayake 1988, 1992), no one has proposed an overarching ethological perspective within which to place them. Therefore, if interest is growing, it seems wise at the outset to try to d e t e r m i n e in w h i c h w a y or w a y s art (including b u t not c o n f i n e d to aesthetic preferences and salient subject matter) is a subject w o r t h evolutionary attention, articulating a n d a n a l y z i n g f u n d a m e n t a l concepts and issues. M y o w n position is that there are g o o d reasons to consider art evolutionarily (see Section II). I believe and have tried to s h o w (Dissanayake 1988, 1992) that art (adequately defined) can plausibly be c o n s i d e r e d an adaptation. In the present p a p e r I will indicate w h a t seem to m e to be inadequacies or misperceptions in earlier b i o e v o l u t i o n a r y contributions to the subject of art (Section 1) and suggest w h y and h o w art m i g h t be v i e w e d as an adaptation (Section II). I will also set out briefly, as illustration of the latter, my o w n h y p o t h e s i s that is d e v e l o p e d m o r e fully in Homo Aestheticus (1992) (Section iII). W h e t h e r or not the latter survives subsequent scrutiny, Sections I and II are m e a n t to establish that bioaesthetics as presently conceived is only part of a larger subject area and that a c o m p r e h e n s i v e u n d e r s t a n d i n g of h u m a n b e h a v i o r a n d e v o l u t i o n should include and elucidate a b e h a v i o r of art as a universal and indispensable part of h u m a n nature.
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I. LIMITATIONS OF EARLIER E V O L U T I O N A R Y VIEWS OF ART
Previous speculation by scholars about the origin and function of art unwittingly contributes to the supposition that it is either a chimera or a spandrel--i.e., they inadequately define art or unsatisfactorily conceptualize its function, or both, thereby limiting their scope of theoretical applicability. Errors of D e f i n i t i o n
1. Careless use of the word "art" in undefined, imprecise, or too narrow senses. Many writers use the word "art" to refer to one art, usually visual art, or even painting, or to decoration and ornamentation. Similarly, "art" may be used to refer to so-called aesthetic preferences based on sensory appeal--e.g., the fact that humans show preferences for certain colors, proportions, shapes, tones, or musical intervals, or that they are attracted to certain types of facial features or landscapes. While such phenomena may be addressed within a broader general theory of art, they do not constitute a theory in themselves (just as describing human sexual organs, responses, or preferences may imply but does not in itself constitute a theory of human sexuality). Without having a theory of art, assigning individual arts or aesthetic phenomena casually to a category of art is simply confusing. Why not just call them by their individual names (e.g., body decoration, cave painting, poetry, dancing) or describe the preference without presupposing or invoking a superordinate category? 2. Conflation of art with, or i n s u f f i c i e n t l y d i s t i n g u i s h i n g it from, other activities. Among the other behaviors with which art is often associated (or equated) are play, display, amusement and pleasure, creativity and innovation, symbolmaking, transformation, the joy of recognition and discovery, the satisfaction of a need for order and unity, the resolution of tension, the emotion of wonder, the urge to explain, and the instinct for workmanship. It is often not clear whether these activities are considered to be themselves art or the putative origin of art. In any event, such merging of meanings does not explain what being "artful" contributes to play, display, symbolmaking, etc., as distinguished from ordinary play, display, symbolmaking, etc.--that is, what art is is still not addressed. Wilson (1984:25), for example, says that art "explores the unknown reaches of the mind." But so do cognitive science, psychoanalysis, and shamanism. What, if anything, makes artistic explo-
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ration different from these? If nothing, then don't call it art; if something, then say what is meant. 3. Assuming that art refers to the content or subject matter of art. Recent sessions on aesthetics at HBES meetings have analyzed the underlying sociobiological relevance of plots and themes in fairy tales, science fiction, and other forms of narrative. While indisputably casting welcome light on w h y literature, paintings, operas, ballets, and so forth are often about humanly compelling subjects, the approach does not always seem aware that Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata is arguably different, not just better, than a police report or newspaper account of exactly the same story, or that biologically insignificant content may also be treated artfully. In other words, even though art-makers may frequently address their attentions to material that reveals their biologically relevant concerns, these concerns or themes are not in themselves art but only the occasion for art. The error of confusing subject matter with treatment characterizes the relatively well known bioevolutionary suggestions that art is a form of "surrogate scenario-building" or is a "mythopoetic" drive. Scenarios are "plans, proposals, or contingencies" that give "social-intellectual practice for social interactions and competitions" (Alexander 1989:459). The mythopoetic drive (Wilson 1978) alludes to the human search for understanding, explanation, innovation, and original discovery by means of myths and images. I do not deny that humans build scenarios and seek to discover and explain, just as they tell stories and relate myths, but the yet unanswered question is w h y they sometimes build scenarios or treat stories, myths, and images artfully, and in what that artfulness consists. Scenarios, myths, and images are like milk and eggs--they nourish, and hence are biologically important. But it is art that turns them into souffl6s and cr~me brul~es. Why? and How? Errors of Proposed Function 4. Presuming that art's function is the same as the function(s) of its elements. As mentioned in the first error of definition given above, art
is often presumed to lie in fundamental sensory, cognitive, or emotionally salient elements, e.g., preferences for certain colors, sounds, or patterns, landscapes, facial proportions, and features like repetition, symmetry, exaggeration, and metaphorical or direct associations, etc. Bioaesthetics in this sense is empirical and quantifiable, a scientifically appealing starting point to look for the origin and function of aesthetics or art.
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Attending to such elements, it is proposed, may exercise and sharpen our perceptual or cognitive abilities, making us more alert and aware of our surroundings. Additionally, it is not surprising that visual analogues of health, youth, and vitality such as smoothness, glossiness, warm or true colors, cleanness, fineness, or lack of blemish, and vigor, precision, and comeliness of movement, are inherently pleasing to humans. Being demonstrably attractive they can be used for social or sexual advantage. While such selective benefits are not to be disputed, it is important to be aware that in themselves such elements or features are only proto-aesthetic. In art, they are presented in an aesthetic context; i.e., it is in what is done with the elements that the art lies. The mere fact that there is a spandrel-like spin-off from the components doesn't tell us very much about art. In addition, as in error 2 above, because these elements may exist in nonaesthetic contexts too, one can ask what it is that being aesthetic or artful adds to them and w h y it should have been selected for. 5. P r e s u m i n g that art's f u n c t i o n is the s a m e as a f u n c t i o n p r o p o s e d for a s i n g l e art. It is not difficult to posit plausible selective value for some instances of individual arts: e.g., dance and body decoration allow individual display of qualities such as beauty, strength, endurance, or grace; music aids cooperative work; poetic language persuades others. We can see these activities performing such functions all around us, and elsewhere. However, apart from the unsoundness of generalizing adaptive value from a particular instance, thereby overlooking other possible advantages, it is also good to be aware that when we examine arts in premodern societies they are often not so distinct as with us. Music typically involves both words (poetry), movements (dancing, clapping, or otherwise marking time), and vocalizing; poetry is generally sung or intoned and moved to. Visual display is part of a multimedia event and not separable from it. This interpenetration of the arts suggests that it would be more accurate and useful in an evolutionary view of art to think of it in a broader sense, both definitionally and functionally, than individual arts. 6. P r e s u m i n g that b e c a u s e s o m e arts s e r v e i n d i v i d u a l c o m p e t i t i v e interests, this is their (or art's) s o l e f u n c t i o n . Most art-like behaviors in the animal world ultimately result in sexual selection. The ornamentations of self, nuptial chamber, vocalizations, and movements by peacocks, bowerbirds, songbirds, and sandhill cranes, respectively, are strikingly like human arts in their beauty, elaboration, and extravagance, so it has been all too easy to generalize and assume that h u m a n art also simply serves individual reproductive interests. 1We have only to look to the present-day adulation of rock stars to appreciate how the vaunting
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of beauty, skill, and prowess--in body ornamentation, dance, musicmaking, and visual display of resources--promotes sexual success. It should be noted, however, that while the arts no doubt are used and can be used for competitive display, so can almost any human activity-growing one's hair or beard, downing pints of beer, or shot-putting in the Olympics. Yet one need not automatically assume that hair-growth, swallowing, or throwing evolved for the purpose of such competition. In a similar manner, I believe that art, in a broader sense than its individual manifestations, originated and evolved (was selected) for a broader purpose. Thus while I do not wholly dispute the commonly held view (proposed by, among others, Alland 1977; Coe 1992; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a, 1989b; Geist 1978; Tiger and Fox 1971; Young 1971) that art's selective value primarily lies in communication, specifically in enhancing important messages (Coe 1992) (which, as described above, sociobiologists would further locate in drawing or guiding attention to features that advertise or promote fitness and reproductive success by the display of status, wealth, strength, or beauty--i.e., one's control of resources and sexual desirability), I do argue that this is not the sole or most important selective benefit of art in human evolution. That is, I claim that in addition to message-enhancement of this general animal type, we can posit a selective advantage for art that resides in and reflects specifically human species characteristics. In Section III, I will suggest that the source for artistic behavior in humans should be sought not in analogies with visual beauty or activities of decorating, beautifying, elaborating, or dancing by other animals, but in the motivations for and development of ceremonial rituals by early humans.
II. ART AS AN ADAPTATION I find good reasons to claim that art is an adaptive human behavior. The fact that other societies do not have a concept "art" need not divert us: they may not have terms for "classification" or "kinship" either, yet anthropologists regularly construct evidence of such an ability and of such systems. Moreover, other societies do generally have words (with varying degrees of overlap with ours) for carving, painting, singing, dancing, fancy speech, tattooing, performing, etc. It seems therefore justifiable to begin by positing a superordinate behavioral category, art, that is composed of the activities that we in western society generally think of as the arts, and not become distracted at the outset by splitting hairs about how Yoruba carving or dancing differs from Abelam carving or
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dancing, or that some societies are relatively richer and others poorer in their arts or artmaking activities.
Indications of Art's Possible Evolutionary Salience 1. Universality. 2 Once we think of art in this broader way, it is clear that all known human societies, past and present, practice it. To those who object that no one has counted, I reply that no one has counted all that have kinship systems or the incest taboo either, yet one has not heard of an exception. The burden of proof would seem to rest on the doubters to find a society that lacks all evidence of arts. Even could one be found, it would not gainsay the overwhelming prevalence of art activity by human individuals in human societies. Similarly one could object that not all individuals practice the arts. This objection similarly loses force if it is pointed out that generally in premodern societies all members do dance, sing, speak poetically, and adorn themselves and their possessions. If they do not in advanced western or westernized societies, it is less because the tendency is missing than that it is not called forth in appropriate circumstances. People who live in deserts do not swim, but this does not mean the ability is lacking--it is dormant or atrophied. What is more, art activities (e.g., drawing, dancing, singing, dressing up, as well as propensities to shape or pattern and elaborate these) are incipient and easily encouraged in young children. Geometric shapes (which do not occur in nature and are to be found widely in human decorative art) emerge spontaneously in their drawing-play (Alland 1983; Kellogg 1970). 2. Energy, Time, and Resource Investment. In most premodern societies great amounts of energy, time, and material resources are devoted to the arts, much more than one would expect for a peripheral and unimportant endeavor, and often to the neglect of more apparently useful activities. 3. Pleasure. In all societies, the arts are commonly a source of immense pleasure, like other intensely valued essentials of human existence sex, eating, resting, or talking and being with familiars in secure surroundings. While it can also be the case that individual instances of arts may be boring, confusing, even unpleasant or painful, the context in which arts are crafted is usually of extraordinary sensory appeal a n d / o r emotional excitement so that people are drawn to participate or watch. Even when performers (in some contexts) or audiences (in other contexts) are not experiencing pleasure, their opposite numbers usually are.
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Although these three features of art activity in h u m a n societies may not be ipso facto proof that a behavior of art is an adaptation, they strongly suggest that one is not inherently mistaken to try to understand it as such. At least it seems no more mistaken than to start out (as evolutionists have tended to do) by assuming that art is simply a neutral or even deleterious byproduct of other activities, or a curious chimera composed of a number of traits evolved in other contexts but having in itself no real identity, or, like an architectural spandrel, no identifiable adaptive function. C o n c e p t u a l i z i n g Art as a Behavior
If universality, energy and resource investment, and pleasure are not proof of adaptation status, they at least suggest that art (considered, at the outset, as a superordinate category comprising the activities commonly regarded as arts) should be of interest to and explainable within evolutionary theory. While it would be difficult to substantiate that art is an adaptation in the same sense as, say, sex, aggression, or language, I would like to suggest that it is at the very least a strongly predisposed behavioral tendency when conceptualized as follows: 1. Art, like other behaviors, is a psychobiological motivational system that impels or predisposes the organism to behave in a certain way or ways in certain circumstances for identifiable proximate and ultimate reasons. (Applying this general formulation to, say, infant attachment behavior, one would describe it as a psychobiological motivational system that impels or predisposes the infant to behave in a certain way [i.e., to cry, smile, cling, raise its arms to be picked up, move toward, lean against, and so forth] in certain circumstances [when alone, when frightened] whose proximate reason is to reduce separation and allay anxiety and whose ultimate reason is to increase maternal care and thus survivorship of the infant.) 2. A behavior of art illustrates Tooby and Cosmides's (1990) admonition to distinguish between an underlying adaptation and its expression or manifestations, which may vary--i.e., art (as described in the following section, or in some other evolutionarily plausible way) and the arts. In the example used above, attachment is the overarching motivational system or adaptation and its manifestations are the individual behaviors of crying, clinging, etc. Note that the manifestations may vary and may occur in other contexts; if named individually without reference to their adaptive overarching psychobiological motivational system, they could seem a chimera-like cobbling together of already existent behaviors.
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III. ART A S M A K I N G SPECIAL
My studies of the arts in cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective have led me to identify what I claim is a distinctive human behavior (or behavioral tendency) that remains undescribed or inadequately acknowledged in the literature and that can serve as a meaningful common denominator of art of all times and places. While not wholly unambiguous, the best term I have found to describe this proclivity is making special. Making special refers to the fact that humans, unlike other animals, may intentionally shape, embellish, and otherwise fashion or regard aspects of their world to make them more than ordinary. ~It is this behavioral tendency, rather than "art," that I propose as a candidate for being recognized as an adaptation,' although I continue to use the word "art" as a synonym because of its common currency. At the outset, it might appear that making special, whatever its other merits or demerits, can be reduced to another behavior (say innovation or transformation) and thereby commits definitional error 2. Alternatively, the term may seem so broad as to be meaningless insofar as it is not clear where a line can be drawn between marking to call attention to something for informational purposes and elaborating or enhancing a thing to give it intrinsic aesthetic specialness--i.e., to call attention to its participation in a special (psychological or emotional) "realm" that differs from the everyday. The term obviously demands more explication than is evident in simply asserting it, although equally obviously, it is not possible to describe it fully in a brief article (however, see the remainder of this section as well as Dissanayake 1992, Chapters 3 and 4). I propose that the tendency to make special emerged evolutionarily from two other human psychological or psychobiological capacities, yet is not reducible to either. The first, shared with other animals, is the ability to recognize an extraordinary as opposed to an ordinary dimension of experience. An unexpected sound or movement is worth the attention of any animal, indicating a possibly extraordinary circumstance requiring response. Moreover, when a jackdaw or packrat picks up a shiny bottletop, its behavior might be called "curiosity" or "neophilia'; when an early sapiens picked up an unusual or "beautiful" stone or shell and carried it home (see Harrold 1989; H a y d e n 1993; Oakley 1971), the motivation may not (or may) have been different. The second capacity, however, is more arguably human. By utilizing increased cognitive powers of memory and foresight, of predicting and planning, evolving humans began to act deliberately in response to uncertainty or immediate need, rather than simply following instinctive programs of fight, flight, or freeze. Lopreato (1984:299), like Malinowski (1948:60), has remarked on the h u m a n "imperative to act" under the
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influence of strong emotion. And with this h u m a n imperative to act, the ability described above, recognizing that some things are special, at some point resulted in deliberately making them special--in themselves or in ceremonial rites. Although it has been most common for evolutionists, like Darwin (1885:617), to find analogies for human art and beauty in animal sexual or territorial ritualized displays, it seems more pertinent to look for the peculiarly human characteristics of art in the circumstances that gave rise to ritual ceremonies, which unlike ritualized displays, are peculiar to humans, yet like them are found in all h u m a n societies. Ritual ceremonies themselves are extraordinary, outside the daily routine. Although they are cultural behaviors that differ from one society to another, they occur in strikingly similar circumstances, times of uncertainty, transitions between one material or social state and another (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 1960). They are engaged in or performed specifically to bring about desired results2 However else they may be described, ceremonies are also notably occasions for and collections of what we call arts: songs, dances, poetic language, visual display. Each of these arts can be viewed as ordinary behavior made special (or extraordinary): e.g., in dance, ordinary bodily movements of everyday life are exaggerated, patterned, embellished, repeated--made special; in poetry, the usual syntactic and semantic aspects of everyday spoken language are patterned (by means of rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance), inverted, exaggerated (using special vocabulary and unusual metaphorical analogies) and repeated-made special; in song, the prosodic (intonational and expressive) aspects of everyday language (the ups and downs of pitch, pauses or rests, stresses or accents, louds and softs, fasts and slows) are exaggerated (sustained), patterned, repeated, varied, and so forth--made special; in visual display, ordinary objects like the natural body, the natural surroundings, and common artifacts are made special by cultural shaping and elaboration that make them more than ordinary. 6
Making Special as Adaptive From what antecedents could a behavior of making special arise? As has been well described in general ethological theory (e.g., Lancy 1980; Tinbergen 1952), the germ of a nonordinary or special dimension exists in both play and in ritualized behaviors, and in the neophilia shown by many animals. Early humans presumably played, engaged in ritualized behaviors and were attracted by novelty. But why should they ever have begun deliberately to make something
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special, and more important, how did this behavioral tendency give competitive advantage to those who possessed it? I suggest because it provided individual and group focus to possible or real sources of material or social uncertainty and, at the same time, allayed anxiety and reinforced group cohesiveness 7 Anxiety or psychological uncertainty has been tailored to fit real experiential uncertainty. Like other emotions, it is adaptive, indicating where we probably need to take action and motivating us to do so. In addition to ordinary measures for dealing with environmental perturbations, predators, illness, scarcity, intergroup conflict and so forth, extraordinary measures directed toward uncertainties even when their danger was illusory--would have (I propose) provided individual and group benefits, as follows: First, simply acknowledging the importance of possibly significant ("fraught") sources of uncertainty is more advantageous than not doing so. Reinforcing this "ordinary" importance by shaping and elaborating the means of dealing with it (e.g., marking tools and implements, vocalizing or moving rhythmically) additionally "freights" them with significance. Second, shaped, controlled, nonordinary behavior helps to relieve anxiety. Not only does rhythmic or patterned movement or vocalization in the self or group provide, by analogy, an illusion of control of the external situation, such behavior, in that it provides a measured and controlled "something-to-do" with respect to uncertainty, would tend to be more soothing and unifying than spontaneous or ordinary random, uncoordinated, individual activity. Third, by periodically reasserting and invoking special behavior that recalls earlier occasions of uncertainty, artificial anxiety is created and handled by orienting it toward what at some point will need to be done. Even when not actually necessary or immediately effective, ritual precepts and action reinforce important knowledge and social structure in the group as well as provide to individuals the belief or psychological certainty that their worldview is right and powerful." Fourth, by reinforcing individuals' beliefs in group efficacy and group verities, the special behavior in ceremonies contributes to group oneheartedness and cooperation. The structures of ceremonies (i.e., events composed of arts) themselves exemplify cooperation by coordinating individuals in the formal patterns required by singing or moving together e.g., matching movements and tones, using call and response, participating according to hierarchy in both space and time, interlocking levels of performers, and promoting the support of one individual or group by another. Deliberately crafted and controlled behavior in human ritual cere-
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mony is intellectual, and thus different from superficially similar ritualized displays that result when, for example, testosterone-flooded male animals are stimulated by the presence of attractive females and virile rivals. Human ritual behavior can be molded and changed, further exaggerated, adapted to new circumstances. That is, human making special arises from and reflects human psychobiology. It is important to note that not all things are made special by humans, and those that are chosen are usually made special for a reason. Until very recently, the arts have been primarily in the service of abiding human concerns. Hence tools for subsistence (spearthrowers, canoes, divining instruments, firesticks) and weapons are frequently made special (by decoration or ceremonial consecration) to ensure that they work better. (In this sense, art as making special is itself a kind of technology.) I suggest that weapons and tools that are treated with special care and concern are likely to be used more carefully and effectively. Thus, in my view, the principal evolutionary context for the origin and development of arts (i.e., manifestations of the adaptive behavioral complex of making special) was in activities concerned with survival-the making and use of important tools or weapons and the ceremonies intended to effect and ensure good outcomes to uncertainties. Selective advantage would accrue to those individuals with more considered use and valuation of important implements as well as to individuals who, first, paid especial attention to possible sources of anxiety and, moreover, joined with their fellows in arts-saturated ceremonies that compellingly and memorably articulated and reinforced communal purpose. Artistic activities are thus demonstrably as important to individual and social life as more apparently practical ones of food acquisition, toolmaking, or attracting mates. Often, if not always, individuals and groups consider these practical activities to require being made special in order that they will be successful. It is not surprising that participants in arts-saturated ceremonies often believe them to be integral to the moral order. Indeed, it would seem that they are, for if lost, or replaced by western video-watching, dancing to rock music, and so forth (as has been so prevalent in contemporary unmodernized societies), the entire society breaks down. A society's ceremonies (i.e., its arts) encapsulate the meanings that animate and perpetuate it.
Comprehensiveness of Theory The hypothesis of making special, as outlined here, avoids the conceptual errors enumerated in Section I (and addressed by corresponding numbers below):
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(1) The word art is not used carelessly or chimerically, but replaced by making special, a centripetal concept that pulls together other art-related activities (arts). I propose that it is making special that is adaptive, not "art" (with that term's ambiguity). The activities to be explained are embedded in a broader theory. (2) While all art is an instance of making special, not all making special is art. This fact would seem to commit error 2. However, the only other human behaviors that make special (in the sense of participating in or evoking a "realm" that is extraordinary) are play and ritual. Play has frequently been confused with art in aesthetic theories (e.g., Schiller 1967; Spencer 1880-1882; Freud 1959). Ritualized behaviors (like greetings and partings) in humans are largely cultural creations although, like ritual ceremonies, they occur in similar circumstances cross-culturally and, like art, w o u l d appear to be related to psychobiological predispositions to regulate and control. Determining whether a particular activity is ritual, play, or art is an academic question: indeed, play and ritual themselves may be hard to distinguish, as in sports events and other entertainment. They are heuristic labels we assign to activities that are not reducible to one another, though they share characteristics. It seems wise to acknowledge the overlaps and note that all three activities of making special or extraordinary are of importance to humans. (3) The hypothesis recognizes that important human concerns were the most likely subjects for being made special, particularly in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), but recognizes that in practice anything at all can be so treated. The question of content (thematics or biopoetics) becomes an area of interest but is not confused metonymically with the behavior. (4) The hypothesis includes protoaesthetic elements, but recognizes that in art, they are taken out of their ordinary context (where they may indicate such good things as vitality, mastery, beauty, strikingness, etc.) and made special or used to make something special, i.e., extraordinary. (See also note 6) (5) Overgeneralizing the function of one art to all arts is avoided. Additionally, the multimedia nature of much art performance is comprehensible within the hypothesis. (6) While it is recognized that direct competitive interests are served by making special (e.g., individual display of reproductively salient resources; more careful and thus more successful individual handling of tools and weapons; focusing and allaying individual anxiety), its adaptive value appears to lie as much or more in channeling group anxiety to collective ends and thereby enhancing cooperative behavior.
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CONCLUSION While speculative reconstructions of h u m a n b e h a v i o r in the EEA c a n n o t be verified empirically, it s e e m s legitimate to s u r m i s e that m a k i n g special, as described in the p r e s e n t paper, is neither a m u t a b l e c h i m e r a n o r a n irrelevant s p a n d r e l b u t an a d a p t i v e , e v o l v e d p r o p e n s i t y in h u m a n nature. It is as if the evolution of o u r species h a s p e r f o r m e d the experim e n t for us of testing w h e t h e r societies (and b y extension the i n d i v i d u als in t h e m ) can s u r v i v e a n d p e r p e t u a t e t h e m s e l v e s w i t h o u t the arts, i.e., m a k i n g special their m o s t i m p o r t a n t life interests. N o n e exist. If b e h a v ioral biologists in m o d e m society d o not recognize this characteristic feature of h u m a n nature, w h i c h D a r w i n himself noticed a n d r e m a r k e d u p o n (see notes 2 a n d 3), w e p e r h a p s reveal a significant deficit in the culture that has m o l d e d o u r p o w e r s of attention. I very much appreciate helpful comments on an earlier stage of this paper by Kathryn Coe, Brian I-Iansen, and Joel Schiff. Two anonymous reviewers, and the editor, also made very useful substantive and stylistic suggestions.
Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar who has straddled the abyss between biology and art for more than twenty years. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.
NOTES 1. This position, suggested by Darwin in 1885, has been echoed in recent times by Diamond 1991; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a, 1989b; Low 1979; and others, and implied by Geist 1978; Harris 1989; and Wilson 1978 when they liken art to display (which may directly serve sexual selection or be used to intimidate rivals). 2. Though universal possession of a characteristic is in itself not a criterion for adaptiveness (e.g., the vermiform appendix), the widespread ("universal") occurrence of similar behavioral predilections in a species would appear to suggest that they arise from an evolved species nature rather than having been diffused from an ancestral cultural tradition or independently invented. In this sense, examples of widely expressed behaviors (like the arts) can be regarded at least as candidates for being considered evolved (adaptive)--particularly when combined with indications 2 and 3, in text. Although he did not use the concept of adaptation with reference to the arts, Charles Darwin mentioned as his first illustration of a common human nature ("the close similarity between the men of all races in tastes, dispositions, and habits"), "the pleasure which they all take in dancing, rude music, acting, painting, tattooing, and otherwise decorating themselves" (Darwin 1885:178). Later he presented many examples of the human "passion for ornament" (1885:573-575), particularly self-adornment, concluding that "It is extremely
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improbable that these practices, followed by so m a n y distinct nations, should be due to tradition from any c o m m o n source. They indicate the close similarity of the m i n d of man, to whatever race he m a y belong, just as do the almost universal habits of dancing, masquerading, and making rude pictures" (1885:577). 3. Darwin may be said to have recognized this tendency, at least in part, when he agreed with H u m b o l d t "that man admires and often tries to exaggerate whatever characters nature may have given h i m " (1885:582). He also noted the widespread h u m a n practice of piling up stones on lofty summits as a record of some "remarkable" event or for b u r y i n g the d e a d (1885:179). 4. My studies (Dissanayake 1974, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1988, 1992) were undertaken originally in order to try out a fresh perspective on a concept (art) which within the philosophy of art discourse seemed moribund. From the mid1950s aestheticians took the position that art by its nature was not a m e n a b l e to general definition. More recently, multicultural awareness has e m p h a s i z e d the narrowness and inadequacy of the historically recent and still prevalent western high culture or " m u s e u m " view of art as elite, refined, useless, and rare. H o w ever, even w h e n the popular arts or the arts of nonwestern peoples are included as art, a satisfactory definition or u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the entity as it is c o m m o n l y conceived of by philosophers and art theorists remains elusive. A n ethological approach that considers art as a behavior--rather than as objects (works) or qualities of works (often an indefinable essence like " h a r m o n y " or "significant f o r m " ) - - s e e m s w o r t h trying. Subsequent interest in m y w o r k by art educators, art therapists, and craftspersons (i.e., people who deal with the arts in the real world of ordinary children, patients, a n d carefully crafted more-or-less-useful obiects ) suggests that my scheme has a cogency a n d relevance to them that m o r e esoteric or relativistic aesthetic theories lack. I still await considered positive or negative attention from biologists and anthropologists. 5. It is of course well known that rituals do not always bring about desired results. Whether or not they work in specific circumstances (proximately) is not at issue in an evolutionary argument that seeks to u n d e r s t a n d ultimate results, though one can p o n d e r the psychological mechanisms of self-deception that enable h u m a n s to engage in behavior that does not w o r k or to explain a w a y its failures. 6. One can speak of the arts as aesthetic m a k i n g special insofar as they use proto-aesthetic elements (see I-1 and 1-4 above)--sensory, emotional, and cobnairive features that are (for various p r e s u m a b l y a d v a n t a g e o u s reasons) pleasing and salient. However, it should be e m p h a s i z e d that in "artification" or a behavior of art, these naturally appealing elements themselves are m a d e a d d i t i o n a l l y special--combined, shaped, and elaborated over and above their intrinsic pleasingness. 7. While current evolutionary orthodoxy tends to claim that i n d i v i d u a l reproductive benefits alone drive the evolution of adaptations, it seems arguable that in a highly social species like humans, selection for cooperative mechanisms that give a social group advantages over uncooperative groups w o u l d also contribute to the individual reproductive success of its members. The arts do a p p e a r to serve and foster affiliation as much as (or more than) competition, which m a y at least partly account for their relative neglect b y c o n t e m p o r a r y evolutionists. 8. The fundamental evolutionary importance for h u m a n s and other animals of reducing psychological uncertainty is well described b y Kalma (1986); Kobasa (1979) concludes that healthy and hardy people have a greater sense of control of
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events in their lives, tend to be committed to others and to themselves, and tend to possess a belief system that includes a sense of the meaningfulness of life.
REFERENCES Alexander, Richard 1989 The Evolution of the Human Psyche. In The Human Revolution: Behavioral and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans, P. Mellars and C. Stringer, eds. Pp. 455-513. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Alland, Alexander 1977 The Artistic Animal. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books. 1983 Playing with Form. New York: Columbia University Press. Coe, Kathryn 1992 Art: The Replicable Unit--An Inquiry into the Possible Origin of Art as a Social Behavior. Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 15(2):217-234. Cooke, Brett 1994 Sociobiology, Science Fiction and the Future. Foundation: The Revierv of Science Fiction 60:42-51. Darwin, Charles 1885 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, second ed. London: John Murray. Diamond, Jared 1991 Art of the Wild. Discover (February):78-85. Dissanayake, Ellen 1974 An Hypothesis of the Evolution of Art from Play. Leonardo 7(3):211-218. 1979 An Ethological View of Ritual and Art in Human Evolutionary History. Leonardo 12(1):27-31. 1980 Art as a Human Behavior: Toward an Ethological View of Art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38(4):397-406. 1982 Aesthetic Experience and Human Evolution. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41(2):145-155. 1984 Does Art Have Selective Value? Empirical Studies of the Arts 2(1):35--49. 1988 What Is Art For? Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1992 Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Free Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 1989a Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 1989b The Biological Foundations of Aesthetics. In Beauty and the Brain, I. Rentschler, B. Herzberger, and D. Epstein, eds. Pp. 29~8. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser. Freud, Sigmund 1959 The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming. In Collected Papers 4:173-183. New York: Basic Books. Geist, Valerius 1978 Life Strategies, Human Evolution, Environmental Design. New York: Springer.
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Gould, S. J., and R. Lewontin 1979 The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Program. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series B, 205:581-598. Harris, Marvin 1989 Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going. New York: Harper & Row. Harrold, Francis B. 1989 Mousterian, Ch~telperronian, and Early Aurignacian in Western Europe: Continuity or Discontinuity? In The Human Revolution: Behavioral and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans, P. Mellars and C. Stringer, eds. Pp. 677-713. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hayden, Brian 1993 The Cultural Capacities of Neanderthals: A Review and Re-evaluation. Journal of Ituman Evolution 24:113-146. Kalma, Akko 1986 Uncertainty Reduction: A Fundamental Concept in Understanding a Number of Psychological Theories. In Essays in Human Sociobiology, J. Wind and V. Reynolds, eds. Pp. 213-241. Brussels: V.U.B. Study Series 26. Kaplan, S. 1992 Environmental Preference in a Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds. Pp. 581-600. New York: Oxford University Press. Kellogg, Rhoda 1970 Analyzing Children's Art. Palo Alto: Mayfield. Kobasa, S. C. 1979 Stressful Life Events, Personality and Health: An Inquiry into Hardiness. ]ournal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(1):1-11. Lancy, D. E 1980 Play in Species Adaptation. Annual Review of Anthropology 9:471-495. Lopreato, Joseph 1984 Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Low, Bobbi S. 1979 Sexual ,Selection and Human Ornamentation. In Evolutiona~ Biology and Human Social Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, N. A. Chagnon and W. Irons, eds. Pp. 462-487. North Scituate, Massachusetts: Duxbury Press. Lumsden, Charles 1991 Aesthetics. In The Sociobiological Imagination, M. Maxwell, ed. Pp. 253-268. Albany: State University of New York Press. Malinowski, B. 1948 Magic, Science and Religion. Boston: Beacon Press. Morris, Desmond 1967 The Naked Ape. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Oakley, Kenneth 1971 Fossils Collected by the Earlier Palaeolithic Men. In Mdlanges de prdhistoire, d'archdocivilisation et d'ethnologie offerts ~ Andrd Varagnac. Pp. 581-584. Paris: Serpen. Orians, G. H., and Heerwagen, J. H. 1992 Evolved Responses to Landscapes. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds. Pp. 555-580. New York: Oxford University Press. Schiller, Friedrich 1967 Fourteenth Letter. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, E. H. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Originally published in 1795) Spencer, Herbert 1880-1882 The Aesthetic Sentiments. Principles of Psychology 2:2. London: Williams and Norgate. Thornhill, R., and S. W. Gangestad 1993 Human Facial Beauty: Averageness, Symmetry and Parasite Resistance. Human Nature 4:237-269. Tiger, Lionel, and Robin Fox 1971 The Imperial Animal. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Tinbergen, Niko 1952 Derived Activities: Their Causation, Biological Significance, Origin, and Emancipation During Evolution. Quarterly Review of Biology 27(1):1-32. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides 1990 The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments. Ethology and Sociobiology 2(4-5):375-424. Turner, Victor 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Van Gennep, Arnold 1960 The Rites of Passay~e.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Originally published in 1908) Wilson, Edward O. 1978 On Human Nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1984 Biophilia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Young, J. Z. 1971 An Introduction to the Study of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978 Programs of the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellen Dissanayake University of Edinburgh
In every known human society, some kind--usually many kinds----of art is practiced, frequently with much vigor and pleasure, so that one could at least hypothesize that "artifying" or "artification" is a characteristic behavior of our species. Yet human ethologists and sociobiologists have been conspicuously unforthcoming about this observably widespread and valued practice, for a number of stated and unstated reasons. The present essay is a position paper that offers an overview and analysis of conceptual issues and problems inherent in viewing art and/or aesthetics as adaptive, and it presents a speculative account of a h u m a n behavior of art.
KEY WORDS:
Art; Aesthetics; H u m a n universals; Evolution of h u m a n behavior.
At the b e g i n n i n g of the decade, C h a r l e s L u m s d e n (1991) p r e d i c t e d that aesthetics w o u l d h a v e a place in the sociobiology of the 1990s similar to that which ethics occupied in the 1980s. As if b e a r i n g out L u m s d e n ' s prediction, a n n u a l H u m a n Behavior a n d Evolution Society (HBES) m e e t ings in the 1990s h a v e included sessions a n d s y m p o s i a on the arts or aesthetics, a n d the E u r o p e a n Sociobiology Society m a d e aesthetics the focus of its 1993 meetings. Received September 20, 1994; accepted November 4, 1994. Address all correspondence to Ellen Dissanayake c/o Franzen, 180 Cohnan Drive, Port 7bwnsend, WA 98368.
Copyright 9 1 9 9 5 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc. New York Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 99-117 99
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As one w h o from the humanities side of the discourse has been concerned for some t w e n t y years with u n d e r s t a n d i n g art as an a d a p t i v e (that is, evolved) h u m a n behavior, 1 w e l c o m e m y scientific c o u n t e r p a r t s ' increased interest in aesthetics. At the same time, I note that this interest as expressed so far tends (with a few notable exceptions) to address only part of h u m a n k i n d ' s aesthetic nature. Recent focus has been almost exclusively on aesthetic preferences for discrete features or proportions (e.g., in faces, bodies, landscapes, weather, etc.: see Kaplan 1992; Orians and H e e r w a g e n 1992; Thornhill and Gangestad 1993) or on thematics or "biopoetics" (elucidating biologically salient subject matter in stories or pictures: see C o o k e 1994), without attending to w h a t I claim encompasses t h e s e - - a n d remains to be a c k n o w l e d g e d and described: a w i d e l y observable behavioral predisposition to "artify." (Lack of a suitable verb in English that describes w h a t people d o w h e n they make art or treat s o m e t h i n g artfully p e r h a p s contributes to our blindness at recognizing the p h e n o m e n o n . ) To date, relatively few evolutionary biologists h a v e c o n c e r n e d themselves with art as an evolved h u m a n propensity. A s u r v e y of 24 representative p o p u l a r and academic books on h u m a n evolution, written between 1967 and 1989 (Dissanayake 1992:227-228), revealed that only seven books (by five authors: Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a; Geist 1978; Morris 1967; Wilson 1978, 1984; Young 1971, 1978) expressly a d d r e s s e d art as a characteristic of h u m a n species nature, a t t e m p t i n g to posit its selective value. One-third of the books did not m e n t i o n art or the arts at all, and the remaining third used the w o r d "art" only in passing (e.g., listed with such traits as play and entertainment, or with reference to cultural artifacts such as U p p e r Paleolithic cave painting as e v i d e n c e of symbolizing ability). This lack of attention suggests that for one reason or a n o t h e r art has been considered an u n r e w a r d i n g subject for e v o l u t i o n a r y scrutiny. I can suggest at least three difficulties of conceptualizing art that contribute to its relative neglect b y evolutionary biologists: a) What does it refer to? Art appears to be a general or superordinate term comprising a number of apparently unrelated activities, e.g., beating drums, singing, dancing, painting cave walls, decorating the body, etc., any one of which may be performed by some individuals in some societies but not by all everywhere, and not consistently. Lacking a circumscribable or centripetal notion of what these disparate activities have in common, the manifold aspects seem to add up to a conceptual chimera, i.e., an imaginary beast, made up piecemeal and ad hoc from components of a number of different entities and having no stable or demonstrable existence of its own.
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b) What does it do? As individual arts in all their variety appear to be cultural rather than natural activities, and have varying outcomes, some of which are conflicting, or no apparent outcomes at all, there would seem to be no unequivocal adaptive function that art regularly serves. Thus it would appear to be, in Gould and Lewontin's (1979) well-known term, a spandrel, i.e., a by-product or epiphenomenon of other adaptive features (cognitive/emotional, rather than in Gould and Lewontin's example, structural). c) H o w important is it? In western society at present, and indeed for at least several centuries, the arts have been specialist activities engaged in by the few. Particularly in advanced capitalist society, art is relegated to the periphery of ordinary human activity, and most people seem to exist easily enough without it. One does not see people everywhere spontaneously doing it. There seems no convincing reason to investigate or alter its present chimerical or spandrel-like status. It is then not surprising that e v e n the few scholars w h o h a v e treated art (or an art) as an e v o l u t i o n a r y p h e n o m e n o n h a v e d o n e so in idiosyncratic and f r a g m e n t a r y ways, m u c h like the p r o v e r b i a l blind m e n investigating an elephant. M y reading o v e r the past t w e n t y years of scientific and quasi-scientific writings a b o u t the arts in h u m a n e v o l u t i o n reveals w h a t a m o u n t s to a c o n c e p t u a l ragbag. There are interesting ideas but, apart from m y s e l f (Dissanayake 1988, 1992), no one has proposed an overarching ethological perspective within which to place them. Therefore, if interest is growing, it seems wise at the outset to try to d e t e r m i n e in w h i c h w a y or w a y s art (including b u t not c o n f i n e d to aesthetic preferences and salient subject matter) is a subject w o r t h evolutionary attention, articulating a n d a n a l y z i n g f u n d a m e n t a l concepts and issues. M y o w n position is that there are g o o d reasons to consider art evolutionarily (see Section II). I believe and have tried to s h o w (Dissanayake 1988, 1992) that art (adequately defined) can plausibly be c o n s i d e r e d an adaptation. In the present p a p e r I will indicate w h a t seem to m e to be inadequacies or misperceptions in earlier b i o e v o l u t i o n a r y contributions to the subject of art (Section 1) and suggest w h y and h o w art m i g h t be v i e w e d as an adaptation (Section II). I will also set out briefly, as illustration of the latter, my o w n h y p o t h e s i s that is d e v e l o p e d m o r e fully in Homo Aestheticus (1992) (Section iII). W h e t h e r or not the latter survives subsequent scrutiny, Sections I and II are m e a n t to establish that bioaesthetics as presently conceived is only part of a larger subject area and that a c o m p r e h e n s i v e u n d e r s t a n d i n g of h u m a n b e h a v i o r a n d e v o l u t i o n should include and elucidate a b e h a v i o r of art as a universal and indispensable part of h u m a n nature.
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I. LIMITATIONS OF EARLIER E V O L U T I O N A R Y VIEWS OF ART
Previous speculation by scholars about the origin and function of art unwittingly contributes to the supposition that it is either a chimera or a spandrel--i.e., they inadequately define art or unsatisfactorily conceptualize its function, or both, thereby limiting their scope of theoretical applicability. Errors of D e f i n i t i o n
1. Careless use of the word "art" in undefined, imprecise, or too narrow senses. Many writers use the word "art" to refer to one art, usually visual art, or even painting, or to decoration and ornamentation. Similarly, "art" may be used to refer to so-called aesthetic preferences based on sensory appeal--e.g., the fact that humans show preferences for certain colors, proportions, shapes, tones, or musical intervals, or that they are attracted to certain types of facial features or landscapes. While such phenomena may be addressed within a broader general theory of art, they do not constitute a theory in themselves (just as describing human sexual organs, responses, or preferences may imply but does not in itself constitute a theory of human sexuality). Without having a theory of art, assigning individual arts or aesthetic phenomena casually to a category of art is simply confusing. Why not just call them by their individual names (e.g., body decoration, cave painting, poetry, dancing) or describe the preference without presupposing or invoking a superordinate category? 2. Conflation of art with, or i n s u f f i c i e n t l y d i s t i n g u i s h i n g it from, other activities. Among the other behaviors with which art is often associated (or equated) are play, display, amusement and pleasure, creativity and innovation, symbolmaking, transformation, the joy of recognition and discovery, the satisfaction of a need for order and unity, the resolution of tension, the emotion of wonder, the urge to explain, and the instinct for workmanship. It is often not clear whether these activities are considered to be themselves art or the putative origin of art. In any event, such merging of meanings does not explain what being "artful" contributes to play, display, symbolmaking, etc., as distinguished from ordinary play, display, symbolmaking, etc.--that is, what art is is still not addressed. Wilson (1984:25), for example, says that art "explores the unknown reaches of the mind." But so do cognitive science, psychoanalysis, and shamanism. What, if anything, makes artistic explo-
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ration different from these? If nothing, then don't call it art; if something, then say what is meant. 3. Assuming that art refers to the content or subject matter of art. Recent sessions on aesthetics at HBES meetings have analyzed the underlying sociobiological relevance of plots and themes in fairy tales, science fiction, and other forms of narrative. While indisputably casting welcome light on w h y literature, paintings, operas, ballets, and so forth are often about humanly compelling subjects, the approach does not always seem aware that Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata is arguably different, not just better, than a police report or newspaper account of exactly the same story, or that biologically insignificant content may also be treated artfully. In other words, even though art-makers may frequently address their attentions to material that reveals their biologically relevant concerns, these concerns or themes are not in themselves art but only the occasion for art. The error of confusing subject matter with treatment characterizes the relatively well known bioevolutionary suggestions that art is a form of "surrogate scenario-building" or is a "mythopoetic" drive. Scenarios are "plans, proposals, or contingencies" that give "social-intellectual practice for social interactions and competitions" (Alexander 1989:459). The mythopoetic drive (Wilson 1978) alludes to the human search for understanding, explanation, innovation, and original discovery by means of myths and images. I do not deny that humans build scenarios and seek to discover and explain, just as they tell stories and relate myths, but the yet unanswered question is w h y they sometimes build scenarios or treat stories, myths, and images artfully, and in what that artfulness consists. Scenarios, myths, and images are like milk and eggs--they nourish, and hence are biologically important. But it is art that turns them into souffl6s and cr~me brul~es. Why? and How? Errors of Proposed Function 4. Presuming that art's function is the same as the function(s) of its elements. As mentioned in the first error of definition given above, art
is often presumed to lie in fundamental sensory, cognitive, or emotionally salient elements, e.g., preferences for certain colors, sounds, or patterns, landscapes, facial proportions, and features like repetition, symmetry, exaggeration, and metaphorical or direct associations, etc. Bioaesthetics in this sense is empirical and quantifiable, a scientifically appealing starting point to look for the origin and function of aesthetics or art.
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Attending to such elements, it is proposed, may exercise and sharpen our perceptual or cognitive abilities, making us more alert and aware of our surroundings. Additionally, it is not surprising that visual analogues of health, youth, and vitality such as smoothness, glossiness, warm or true colors, cleanness, fineness, or lack of blemish, and vigor, precision, and comeliness of movement, are inherently pleasing to humans. Being demonstrably attractive they can be used for social or sexual advantage. While such selective benefits are not to be disputed, it is important to be aware that in themselves such elements or features are only proto-aesthetic. In art, they are presented in an aesthetic context; i.e., it is in what is done with the elements that the art lies. The mere fact that there is a spandrel-like spin-off from the components doesn't tell us very much about art. In addition, as in error 2 above, because these elements may exist in nonaesthetic contexts too, one can ask what it is that being aesthetic or artful adds to them and w h y it should have been selected for. 5. P r e s u m i n g that art's f u n c t i o n is the s a m e as a f u n c t i o n p r o p o s e d for a s i n g l e art. It is not difficult to posit plausible selective value for some instances of individual arts: e.g., dance and body decoration allow individual display of qualities such as beauty, strength, endurance, or grace; music aids cooperative work; poetic language persuades others. We can see these activities performing such functions all around us, and elsewhere. However, apart from the unsoundness of generalizing adaptive value from a particular instance, thereby overlooking other possible advantages, it is also good to be aware that when we examine arts in premodern societies they are often not so distinct as with us. Music typically involves both words (poetry), movements (dancing, clapping, or otherwise marking time), and vocalizing; poetry is generally sung or intoned and moved to. Visual display is part of a multimedia event and not separable from it. This interpenetration of the arts suggests that it would be more accurate and useful in an evolutionary view of art to think of it in a broader sense, both definitionally and functionally, than individual arts. 6. P r e s u m i n g that b e c a u s e s o m e arts s e r v e i n d i v i d u a l c o m p e t i t i v e interests, this is their (or art's) s o l e f u n c t i o n . Most art-like behaviors in the animal world ultimately result in sexual selection. The ornamentations of self, nuptial chamber, vocalizations, and movements by peacocks, bowerbirds, songbirds, and sandhill cranes, respectively, are strikingly like human arts in their beauty, elaboration, and extravagance, so it has been all too easy to generalize and assume that h u m a n art also simply serves individual reproductive interests. 1We have only to look to the present-day adulation of rock stars to appreciate how the vaunting
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of beauty, skill, and prowess--in body ornamentation, dance, musicmaking, and visual display of resources--promotes sexual success. It should be noted, however, that while the arts no doubt are used and can be used for competitive display, so can almost any human activity-growing one's hair or beard, downing pints of beer, or shot-putting in the Olympics. Yet one need not automatically assume that hair-growth, swallowing, or throwing evolved for the purpose of such competition. In a similar manner, I believe that art, in a broader sense than its individual manifestations, originated and evolved (was selected) for a broader purpose. Thus while I do not wholly dispute the commonly held view (proposed by, among others, Alland 1977; Coe 1992; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a, 1989b; Geist 1978; Tiger and Fox 1971; Young 1971) that art's selective value primarily lies in communication, specifically in enhancing important messages (Coe 1992) (which, as described above, sociobiologists would further locate in drawing or guiding attention to features that advertise or promote fitness and reproductive success by the display of status, wealth, strength, or beauty--i.e., one's control of resources and sexual desirability), I do argue that this is not the sole or most important selective benefit of art in human evolution. That is, I claim that in addition to message-enhancement of this general animal type, we can posit a selective advantage for art that resides in and reflects specifically human species characteristics. In Section III, I will suggest that the source for artistic behavior in humans should be sought not in analogies with visual beauty or activities of decorating, beautifying, elaborating, or dancing by other animals, but in the motivations for and development of ceremonial rituals by early humans.
II. ART AS AN ADAPTATION I find good reasons to claim that art is an adaptive human behavior. The fact that other societies do not have a concept "art" need not divert us: they may not have terms for "classification" or "kinship" either, yet anthropologists regularly construct evidence of such an ability and of such systems. Moreover, other societies do generally have words (with varying degrees of overlap with ours) for carving, painting, singing, dancing, fancy speech, tattooing, performing, etc. It seems therefore justifiable to begin by positing a superordinate behavioral category, art, that is composed of the activities that we in western society generally think of as the arts, and not become distracted at the outset by splitting hairs about how Yoruba carving or dancing differs from Abelam carving or
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dancing, or that some societies are relatively richer and others poorer in their arts or artmaking activities.
Indications of Art's Possible Evolutionary Salience 1. Universality. 2 Once we think of art in this broader way, it is clear that all known human societies, past and present, practice it. To those who object that no one has counted, I reply that no one has counted all that have kinship systems or the incest taboo either, yet one has not heard of an exception. The burden of proof would seem to rest on the doubters to find a society that lacks all evidence of arts. Even could one be found, it would not gainsay the overwhelming prevalence of art activity by human individuals in human societies. Similarly one could object that not all individuals practice the arts. This objection similarly loses force if it is pointed out that generally in premodern societies all members do dance, sing, speak poetically, and adorn themselves and their possessions. If they do not in advanced western or westernized societies, it is less because the tendency is missing than that it is not called forth in appropriate circumstances. People who live in deserts do not swim, but this does not mean the ability is lacking--it is dormant or atrophied. What is more, art activities (e.g., drawing, dancing, singing, dressing up, as well as propensities to shape or pattern and elaborate these) are incipient and easily encouraged in young children. Geometric shapes (which do not occur in nature and are to be found widely in human decorative art) emerge spontaneously in their drawing-play (Alland 1983; Kellogg 1970). 2. Energy, Time, and Resource Investment. In most premodern societies great amounts of energy, time, and material resources are devoted to the arts, much more than one would expect for a peripheral and unimportant endeavor, and often to the neglect of more apparently useful activities. 3. Pleasure. In all societies, the arts are commonly a source of immense pleasure, like other intensely valued essentials of human existence sex, eating, resting, or talking and being with familiars in secure surroundings. While it can also be the case that individual instances of arts may be boring, confusing, even unpleasant or painful, the context in which arts are crafted is usually of extraordinary sensory appeal a n d / o r emotional excitement so that people are drawn to participate or watch. Even when performers (in some contexts) or audiences (in other contexts) are not experiencing pleasure, their opposite numbers usually are.
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Although these three features of art activity in h u m a n societies may not be ipso facto proof that a behavior of art is an adaptation, they strongly suggest that one is not inherently mistaken to try to understand it as such. At least it seems no more mistaken than to start out (as evolutionists have tended to do) by assuming that art is simply a neutral or even deleterious byproduct of other activities, or a curious chimera composed of a number of traits evolved in other contexts but having in itself no real identity, or, like an architectural spandrel, no identifiable adaptive function. C o n c e p t u a l i z i n g Art as a Behavior
If universality, energy and resource investment, and pleasure are not proof of adaptation status, they at least suggest that art (considered, at the outset, as a superordinate category comprising the activities commonly regarded as arts) should be of interest to and explainable within evolutionary theory. While it would be difficult to substantiate that art is an adaptation in the same sense as, say, sex, aggression, or language, I would like to suggest that it is at the very least a strongly predisposed behavioral tendency when conceptualized as follows: 1. Art, like other behaviors, is a psychobiological motivational system that impels or predisposes the organism to behave in a certain way or ways in certain circumstances for identifiable proximate and ultimate reasons. (Applying this general formulation to, say, infant attachment behavior, one would describe it as a psychobiological motivational system that impels or predisposes the infant to behave in a certain way [i.e., to cry, smile, cling, raise its arms to be picked up, move toward, lean against, and so forth] in certain circumstances [when alone, when frightened] whose proximate reason is to reduce separation and allay anxiety and whose ultimate reason is to increase maternal care and thus survivorship of the infant.) 2. A behavior of art illustrates Tooby and Cosmides's (1990) admonition to distinguish between an underlying adaptation and its expression or manifestations, which may vary--i.e., art (as described in the following section, or in some other evolutionarily plausible way) and the arts. In the example used above, attachment is the overarching motivational system or adaptation and its manifestations are the individual behaviors of crying, clinging, etc. Note that the manifestations may vary and may occur in other contexts; if named individually without reference to their adaptive overarching psychobiological motivational system, they could seem a chimera-like cobbling together of already existent behaviors.
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III. ART A S M A K I N G SPECIAL
My studies of the arts in cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective have led me to identify what I claim is a distinctive human behavior (or behavioral tendency) that remains undescribed or inadequately acknowledged in the literature and that can serve as a meaningful common denominator of art of all times and places. While not wholly unambiguous, the best term I have found to describe this proclivity is making special. Making special refers to the fact that humans, unlike other animals, may intentionally shape, embellish, and otherwise fashion or regard aspects of their world to make them more than ordinary. ~It is this behavioral tendency, rather than "art," that I propose as a candidate for being recognized as an adaptation,' although I continue to use the word "art" as a synonym because of its common currency. At the outset, it might appear that making special, whatever its other merits or demerits, can be reduced to another behavior (say innovation or transformation) and thereby commits definitional error 2. Alternatively, the term may seem so broad as to be meaningless insofar as it is not clear where a line can be drawn between marking to call attention to something for informational purposes and elaborating or enhancing a thing to give it intrinsic aesthetic specialness--i.e., to call attention to its participation in a special (psychological or emotional) "realm" that differs from the everyday. The term obviously demands more explication than is evident in simply asserting it, although equally obviously, it is not possible to describe it fully in a brief article (however, see the remainder of this section as well as Dissanayake 1992, Chapters 3 and 4). I propose that the tendency to make special emerged evolutionarily from two other human psychological or psychobiological capacities, yet is not reducible to either. The first, shared with other animals, is the ability to recognize an extraordinary as opposed to an ordinary dimension of experience. An unexpected sound or movement is worth the attention of any animal, indicating a possibly extraordinary circumstance requiring response. Moreover, when a jackdaw or packrat picks up a shiny bottletop, its behavior might be called "curiosity" or "neophilia'; when an early sapiens picked up an unusual or "beautiful" stone or shell and carried it home (see Harrold 1989; H a y d e n 1993; Oakley 1971), the motivation may not (or may) have been different. The second capacity, however, is more arguably human. By utilizing increased cognitive powers of memory and foresight, of predicting and planning, evolving humans began to act deliberately in response to uncertainty or immediate need, rather than simply following instinctive programs of fight, flight, or freeze. Lopreato (1984:299), like Malinowski (1948:60), has remarked on the h u m a n "imperative to act" under the
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influence of strong emotion. And with this h u m a n imperative to act, the ability described above, recognizing that some things are special, at some point resulted in deliberately making them special--in themselves or in ceremonial rites. Although it has been most common for evolutionists, like Darwin (1885:617), to find analogies for human art and beauty in animal sexual or territorial ritualized displays, it seems more pertinent to look for the peculiarly human characteristics of art in the circumstances that gave rise to ritual ceremonies, which unlike ritualized displays, are peculiar to humans, yet like them are found in all h u m a n societies. Ritual ceremonies themselves are extraordinary, outside the daily routine. Although they are cultural behaviors that differ from one society to another, they occur in strikingly similar circumstances, times of uncertainty, transitions between one material or social state and another (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 1960). They are engaged in or performed specifically to bring about desired results2 However else they may be described, ceremonies are also notably occasions for and collections of what we call arts: songs, dances, poetic language, visual display. Each of these arts can be viewed as ordinary behavior made special (or extraordinary): e.g., in dance, ordinary bodily movements of everyday life are exaggerated, patterned, embellished, repeated--made special; in poetry, the usual syntactic and semantic aspects of everyday spoken language are patterned (by means of rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance), inverted, exaggerated (using special vocabulary and unusual metaphorical analogies) and repeated-made special; in song, the prosodic (intonational and expressive) aspects of everyday language (the ups and downs of pitch, pauses or rests, stresses or accents, louds and softs, fasts and slows) are exaggerated (sustained), patterned, repeated, varied, and so forth--made special; in visual display, ordinary objects like the natural body, the natural surroundings, and common artifacts are made special by cultural shaping and elaboration that make them more than ordinary. 6
Making Special as Adaptive From what antecedents could a behavior of making special arise? As has been well described in general ethological theory (e.g., Lancy 1980; Tinbergen 1952), the germ of a nonordinary or special dimension exists in both play and in ritualized behaviors, and in the neophilia shown by many animals. Early humans presumably played, engaged in ritualized behaviors and were attracted by novelty. But why should they ever have begun deliberately to make something
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special, and more important, how did this behavioral tendency give competitive advantage to those who possessed it? I suggest because it provided individual and group focus to possible or real sources of material or social uncertainty and, at the same time, allayed anxiety and reinforced group cohesiveness 7 Anxiety or psychological uncertainty has been tailored to fit real experiential uncertainty. Like other emotions, it is adaptive, indicating where we probably need to take action and motivating us to do so. In addition to ordinary measures for dealing with environmental perturbations, predators, illness, scarcity, intergroup conflict and so forth, extraordinary measures directed toward uncertainties even when their danger was illusory--would have (I propose) provided individual and group benefits, as follows: First, simply acknowledging the importance of possibly significant ("fraught") sources of uncertainty is more advantageous than not doing so. Reinforcing this "ordinary" importance by shaping and elaborating the means of dealing with it (e.g., marking tools and implements, vocalizing or moving rhythmically) additionally "freights" them with significance. Second, shaped, controlled, nonordinary behavior helps to relieve anxiety. Not only does rhythmic or patterned movement or vocalization in the self or group provide, by analogy, an illusion of control of the external situation, such behavior, in that it provides a measured and controlled "something-to-do" with respect to uncertainty, would tend to be more soothing and unifying than spontaneous or ordinary random, uncoordinated, individual activity. Third, by periodically reasserting and invoking special behavior that recalls earlier occasions of uncertainty, artificial anxiety is created and handled by orienting it toward what at some point will need to be done. Even when not actually necessary or immediately effective, ritual precepts and action reinforce important knowledge and social structure in the group as well as provide to individuals the belief or psychological certainty that their worldview is right and powerful." Fourth, by reinforcing individuals' beliefs in group efficacy and group verities, the special behavior in ceremonies contributes to group oneheartedness and cooperation. The structures of ceremonies (i.e., events composed of arts) themselves exemplify cooperation by coordinating individuals in the formal patterns required by singing or moving together e.g., matching movements and tones, using call and response, participating according to hierarchy in both space and time, interlocking levels of performers, and promoting the support of one individual or group by another. Deliberately crafted and controlled behavior in human ritual cere-
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mony is intellectual, and thus different from superficially similar ritualized displays that result when, for example, testosterone-flooded male animals are stimulated by the presence of attractive females and virile rivals. Human ritual behavior can be molded and changed, further exaggerated, adapted to new circumstances. That is, human making special arises from and reflects human psychobiology. It is important to note that not all things are made special by humans, and those that are chosen are usually made special for a reason. Until very recently, the arts have been primarily in the service of abiding human concerns. Hence tools for subsistence (spearthrowers, canoes, divining instruments, firesticks) and weapons are frequently made special (by decoration or ceremonial consecration) to ensure that they work better. (In this sense, art as making special is itself a kind of technology.) I suggest that weapons and tools that are treated with special care and concern are likely to be used more carefully and effectively. Thus, in my view, the principal evolutionary context for the origin and development of arts (i.e., manifestations of the adaptive behavioral complex of making special) was in activities concerned with survival-the making and use of important tools or weapons and the ceremonies intended to effect and ensure good outcomes to uncertainties. Selective advantage would accrue to those individuals with more considered use and valuation of important implements as well as to individuals who, first, paid especial attention to possible sources of anxiety and, moreover, joined with their fellows in arts-saturated ceremonies that compellingly and memorably articulated and reinforced communal purpose. Artistic activities are thus demonstrably as important to individual and social life as more apparently practical ones of food acquisition, toolmaking, or attracting mates. Often, if not always, individuals and groups consider these practical activities to require being made special in order that they will be successful. It is not surprising that participants in arts-saturated ceremonies often believe them to be integral to the moral order. Indeed, it would seem that they are, for if lost, or replaced by western video-watching, dancing to rock music, and so forth (as has been so prevalent in contemporary unmodernized societies), the entire society breaks down. A society's ceremonies (i.e., its arts) encapsulate the meanings that animate and perpetuate it.
Comprehensiveness of Theory The hypothesis of making special, as outlined here, avoids the conceptual errors enumerated in Section I (and addressed by corresponding numbers below):
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(1) The word art is not used carelessly or chimerically, but replaced by making special, a centripetal concept that pulls together other art-related activities (arts). I propose that it is making special that is adaptive, not "art" (with that term's ambiguity). The activities to be explained are embedded in a broader theory. (2) While all art is an instance of making special, not all making special is art. This fact would seem to commit error 2. However, the only other human behaviors that make special (in the sense of participating in or evoking a "realm" that is extraordinary) are play and ritual. Play has frequently been confused with art in aesthetic theories (e.g., Schiller 1967; Spencer 1880-1882; Freud 1959). Ritualized behaviors (like greetings and partings) in humans are largely cultural creations although, like ritual ceremonies, they occur in similar circumstances cross-culturally and, like art, w o u l d appear to be related to psychobiological predispositions to regulate and control. Determining whether a particular activity is ritual, play, or art is an academic question: indeed, play and ritual themselves may be hard to distinguish, as in sports events and other entertainment. They are heuristic labels we assign to activities that are not reducible to one another, though they share characteristics. It seems wise to acknowledge the overlaps and note that all three activities of making special or extraordinary are of importance to humans. (3) The hypothesis recognizes that important human concerns were the most likely subjects for being made special, particularly in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), but recognizes that in practice anything at all can be so treated. The question of content (thematics or biopoetics) becomes an area of interest but is not confused metonymically with the behavior. (4) The hypothesis includes protoaesthetic elements, but recognizes that in art, they are taken out of their ordinary context (where they may indicate such good things as vitality, mastery, beauty, strikingness, etc.) and made special or used to make something special, i.e., extraordinary. (See also note 6) (5) Overgeneralizing the function of one art to all arts is avoided. Additionally, the multimedia nature of much art performance is comprehensible within the hypothesis. (6) While it is recognized that direct competitive interests are served by making special (e.g., individual display of reproductively salient resources; more careful and thus more successful individual handling of tools and weapons; focusing and allaying individual anxiety), its adaptive value appears to lie as much or more in channeling group anxiety to collective ends and thereby enhancing cooperative behavior.
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CONCLUSION While speculative reconstructions of h u m a n b e h a v i o r in the EEA c a n n o t be verified empirically, it s e e m s legitimate to s u r m i s e that m a k i n g special, as described in the p r e s e n t paper, is neither a m u t a b l e c h i m e r a n o r a n irrelevant s p a n d r e l b u t an a d a p t i v e , e v o l v e d p r o p e n s i t y in h u m a n nature. It is as if the evolution of o u r species h a s p e r f o r m e d the experim e n t for us of testing w h e t h e r societies (and b y extension the i n d i v i d u als in t h e m ) can s u r v i v e a n d p e r p e t u a t e t h e m s e l v e s w i t h o u t the arts, i.e., m a k i n g special their m o s t i m p o r t a n t life interests. N o n e exist. If b e h a v ioral biologists in m o d e m society d o not recognize this characteristic feature of h u m a n nature, w h i c h D a r w i n himself noticed a n d r e m a r k e d u p o n (see notes 2 a n d 3), w e p e r h a p s reveal a significant deficit in the culture that has m o l d e d o u r p o w e r s of attention. I very much appreciate helpful comments on an earlier stage of this paper by Kathryn Coe, Brian I-Iansen, and Joel Schiff. Two anonymous reviewers, and the editor, also made very useful substantive and stylistic suggestions.
Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar who has straddled the abyss between biology and art for more than twenty years. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.
NOTES 1. This position, suggested by Darwin in 1885, has been echoed in recent times by Diamond 1991; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989a, 1989b; Low 1979; and others, and implied by Geist 1978; Harris 1989; and Wilson 1978 when they liken art to display (which may directly serve sexual selection or be used to intimidate rivals). 2. Though universal possession of a characteristic is in itself not a criterion for adaptiveness (e.g., the vermiform appendix), the widespread ("universal") occurrence of similar behavioral predilections in a species would appear to suggest that they arise from an evolved species nature rather than having been diffused from an ancestral cultural tradition or independently invented. In this sense, examples of widely expressed behaviors (like the arts) can be regarded at least as candidates for being considered evolved (adaptive)--particularly when combined with indications 2 and 3, in text. Although he did not use the concept of adaptation with reference to the arts, Charles Darwin mentioned as his first illustration of a common human nature ("the close similarity between the men of all races in tastes, dispositions, and habits"), "the pleasure which they all take in dancing, rude music, acting, painting, tattooing, and otherwise decorating themselves" (Darwin 1885:178). Later he presented many examples of the human "passion for ornament" (1885:573-575), particularly self-adornment, concluding that "It is extremely
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improbable that these practices, followed by so m a n y distinct nations, should be due to tradition from any c o m m o n source. They indicate the close similarity of the m i n d of man, to whatever race he m a y belong, just as do the almost universal habits of dancing, masquerading, and making rude pictures" (1885:577). 3. Darwin may be said to have recognized this tendency, at least in part, when he agreed with H u m b o l d t "that man admires and often tries to exaggerate whatever characters nature may have given h i m " (1885:582). He also noted the widespread h u m a n practice of piling up stones on lofty summits as a record of some "remarkable" event or for b u r y i n g the d e a d (1885:179). 4. My studies (Dissanayake 1974, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1988, 1992) were undertaken originally in order to try out a fresh perspective on a concept (art) which within the philosophy of art discourse seemed moribund. From the mid1950s aestheticians took the position that art by its nature was not a m e n a b l e to general definition. More recently, multicultural awareness has e m p h a s i z e d the narrowness and inadequacy of the historically recent and still prevalent western high culture or " m u s e u m " view of art as elite, refined, useless, and rare. H o w ever, even w h e n the popular arts or the arts of nonwestern peoples are included as art, a satisfactory definition or u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the entity as it is c o m m o n l y conceived of by philosophers and art theorists remains elusive. A n ethological approach that considers art as a behavior--rather than as objects (works) or qualities of works (often an indefinable essence like " h a r m o n y " or "significant f o r m " ) - - s e e m s w o r t h trying. Subsequent interest in m y w o r k by art educators, art therapists, and craftspersons (i.e., people who deal with the arts in the real world of ordinary children, patients, a n d carefully crafted more-or-less-useful obiects ) suggests that my scheme has a cogency a n d relevance to them that m o r e esoteric or relativistic aesthetic theories lack. I still await considered positive or negative attention from biologists and anthropologists. 5. It is of course well known that rituals do not always bring about desired results. Whether or not they work in specific circumstances (proximately) is not at issue in an evolutionary argument that seeks to u n d e r s t a n d ultimate results, though one can p o n d e r the psychological mechanisms of self-deception that enable h u m a n s to engage in behavior that does not w o r k or to explain a w a y its failures. 6. One can speak of the arts as aesthetic m a k i n g special insofar as they use proto-aesthetic elements (see I-1 and 1-4 above)--sensory, emotional, and cobnairive features that are (for various p r e s u m a b l y a d v a n t a g e o u s reasons) pleasing and salient. However, it should be e m p h a s i z e d that in "artification" or a behavior of art, these naturally appealing elements themselves are m a d e a d d i t i o n a l l y special--combined, shaped, and elaborated over and above their intrinsic pleasingness. 7. While current evolutionary orthodoxy tends to claim that i n d i v i d u a l reproductive benefits alone drive the evolution of adaptations, it seems arguable that in a highly social species like humans, selection for cooperative mechanisms that give a social group advantages over uncooperative groups w o u l d also contribute to the individual reproductive success of its members. The arts do a p p e a r to serve and foster affiliation as much as (or more than) competition, which m a y at least partly account for their relative neglect b y c o n t e m p o r a r y evolutionists. 8. The fundamental evolutionary importance for h u m a n s and other animals of reducing psychological uncertainty is well described b y Kalma (1986); Kobasa (1979) concludes that healthy and hardy people have a greater sense of control of
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events in their lives, tend to be committed to others and to themselves, and tend to possess a belief system that includes a sense of the meaningfulness of life.
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