Intellectual debates on the legitimate place of aesthetics among the anthropological categories have been at the core of my research and publications. Through the conceptual analysis of the most diffused aesthetic theories I human sciences, I have mapped the theoretical assumptions at the heart of the traditional culturalist perspectives (anthropology of art; history of art; archaeology) and of the major current attempts to naturalize aesthetics (evolutionary aesthetics; experimental aesthetics; neuroaesthetics), focusing on the epistemological reasons that led to the situation of conflict between these two approaches. At the end of this first step, as I demonstrate in my monograph “Antropologia dell’estetico” (Milano 2017), I have obtained a conceptual map in which the models of aesthetics currently in use are the result of a high conflictual framework structured around three dichotomic axes: conceptions of aesthetics, epistemic paradigms and models of mind. To overcome this state of art, we need a broad view assuming the aesthetic as an anthropological fact rooted in cognitive, behavioural and cultural dispositions.
i) A first result of the two-years Marie Curie Fellowship is precisely this broad view: from a phenomenological point of view, the aesthetic is a modality of experience capable of generating an existential frame whereby we become part of an “aesthetic field” involving objective, appreciative, creative and performative dimensions. This specific process of “transfiguration” is made possible by the fact that, from a cognitive point of view, aesthetic relation is an intensified activity of exploration modulated and directed by attractors present in the ambient perceptual field, where objects or perceived events acquire an emotionally marked and cognitively undetermined significance.
ii) Both social sciences and naturalistic approaches struggled to accept this more extended aesthetic model that moves in the direction of bridging the gap between aesthetic attitudes and social functions and cultural meanings. The anthropological description obtained in the first step allows me to reformulate the real deep connections between aesthetic behaviours and the dynamics of cultural systems. As I demonstrate in the forthcoming article “Aesthetics in culture. Reformulating a natural connection”, the relationship between aesthetics and human cultures is a complex two-way mechanism in which aesthetic behaviours are influenced by social institutions, belief systems, and cultural frameworks, while a given cultural system is continually restructured by the semantic potentialities and symbolic connections produced by the specific aesthetic functioning of the human cognition.
iii) In the forthcoming article “On aesthetics and cultural transmission: Elements for an anthropology of aesthetics”, I argue that the understanding of this complex two-way mechanism is linked to a model of cultural transmission as an ecological and creative system wherein the bodily, affective, cognitive and environmental aspects are part of a complex developmental process. The formulation of this model has been the third main result of the project. By adopting a developmental approach to cultural transmission, the standard concept of cultural transmission as spreading “bits of culture” is bypassed in order to highlight the performative and constructive characterisation of our aesthetic interaction with the cultural environment. This reformulation has lead me to argue that in the construction of the human niche there is a primary bodily aesthetic esteem of the environment that shapes material culture and social relations beyond explicit propositional knowledge. According to this, aesthetics and cultural phenomena are tightly and reciprocally bound to one another like a very prominent element of human ecology.
