Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EnAct (Enacting heritage: The aesthetic dynamics of cultural transmission)
Berichtszeitraum: 2016-03-01 bis 2018-02-28
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.
The project results, presented in various articles and conference papers, opened new research areas, which will be investigated in the future. They offer a new important contribution to a well-established literature in anthropology of art and, beyond the aesthetics domain, complement to the analysis on the place of the expressive practices in human evolution that was so far mostly restricted to a western art history perspective.
The project enjoyed national as well as international attention with positive feed backs: my two annual seminars and lectures at EHESS in Paris, and my participation at several international conferences in France and abroad. The research questions developed during the fellowship have stimulated discussion with a wider scholarly network, resulting in new collective projects and collaborations (CRASSH - Cambridge University; PCD - Freie Universität Berlin).
Finally, I co-organized the international conference “Enacting heritage: aesthetics, creation and cultural transmission” (Paris, January 2018) supported by the partnership of EHESS, Paris-Sciences-et-lettres (PSL) et Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. This event brought together scholars from different backgrounds (archaeology; social anthropology; sociology of art; art history; cultural heritage studies), to discuss a wide range of topics and contribute to the analysis of the multilevel dynamics of transmission, conservation and enactment of cultural heritage.