Ellen Dissanayake

A HYPOTHESIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF ART FROM PLAY

Observers of human behaviour have noticed similarities between art and play, e.g. both involve imagination, surprise, non-predictability and self-reward, and are considered biologically non-functional. Studies of these similarities led earlier philosophers and psychologists to construct hypotheses that attempted to explain art as arising from play during an individual’s life span (that is to say, ontogenetically). Recent students of the subject agree, however, that these ‘play theories’ of art are inadequate to deal fully with the varieties of artistic activity. The author examines similarities between art (including both artistic creation and aesthetic experience) and play, and offers a hypothesis that concerns the origins of artistic activity using ethological concepts. The relationship between play and art is considered phylogenetically, i.e. art is said to have originated as a kind of play, gradually over millenia acquiring its own independence and individuality. In order for an evolutionary characteristic to be selected for, it must have adaptive value for the species and the author’s reason for believing that art has this property is that it enhances both man’s sociality and his self-assertion. She concludes with her conviction that art is a fundamental and necessary feature of human life.

AN ETHOLOGICAL VIEW OF RITUAL AND ART IN HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

Awareness that in pre-industrial societies art and ritual are intimately associated leads the author to consider a number of provocative similarities among ritualized behaviour in humans and other animals, human ritual ceremonial behaviour; and art. In these, emotionally-motivated behaviour, for example, is formalized and social bonds are strengthened and expressed. The author suggests that in human evolutionary history, ritual and art were originally interdependent. Sensuous aesthetic elements derived from functional behavioural, perceptual and physiological contexts (for example, rhythm, balance, ordering and shaping in time, improvising and metaphorical rendering) when combined with ritual ceremonial behaviour would have assisted the memorization and recitation of myth, group history and ceremonial sequences while simultaneously giving physical and psychological pleasure. From such elements (originally in the service of socially facilitative ritual behaviour) more specific and independent aesthetic features could be developed and refined, for their own sake, leading to autonomous artistic activity.

Does Art have Selective Value

In the absence of satisfactory accounts by evolutionary biologists to explain the ubiquity and persistence of art in all human societies, a number of reasons offered by other writers for the existence and effects of art are critically examined for their evolutionary plausibility. These are found to be inadequate because they are only partial and because their “selective value” is more parsimoniously attributed to other behaviors and attributes which art resembles (e.g., play, ritual, fantasy, ordering, and so forth). The necessity for invoking a concept “art” at all is questioned. Instead it is posited that a universal human behavior, “making special,” from which art in the modern sense is derived had evolutionary value because it reinforced the adoption of other selectively-valuable behaviors. Aesthetic ingredients and responses can be called enabling mechanisms to this end. A concluding section discusses peculiarities of advanced technological society that contribute to modern confusion about art and its place — necessary or unnecessary — in human life.

Chimera, spandrel, or adaptation : Conceptualizing art in human evolution.

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 human behavior of art.

Roots and Route of the Artification Hypothesis

Over four decades, my ideas about the arts in human evolution have themselves evolved, from an original notion of art as a human behaviour of “making special” to a full-fledged hypothesis of artification. A summary of the gradual developmental path (or route) of the hypothesis, based on ethological principles and concepts, is given, and an argument presented in which artification is described as an exaptation whose roots lie in adaptive features of ancestral mother–infant interaction that contributed to infant survival and maternal reproductive success. I show how the interaction displays features of a ritualised behavior whose operations (formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration) can be regarded as characteristic elements of human ritual ceremonies as well as of art (including song, dance, performance, literary language, altered surroundings, and other examples of making ordinary sounds, movement, language, environments, objects, and bodies extraordinary). Participation in these behaviours in ritual practices served adaptive ends in early Homo by coordinating brain and body states, and thereby emotionally bonding members of a group in common cause as well as reducing existential anxiety in individuals. A final section situates artification within contemporary philosophical and popular ideas of art, claiming that artifying is not a synonym for or definition of art but foundational to any evolutionary discussion of artistic/aesthetic behaviour.

What Is Art for

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called art, and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist notions that disregard other cultures and ignore the human species four-million-year evolutionary history. This book offers a new and unprecedentedly comprehensive theory of the evolutionary significance of art. Art, meaning not only visual art, but music, poetic language, dance, and performance, is for the first time regarded from a biobehavioral or ethical viewpoint. It is shown to be a biological necessity in human existence and fundamental characteristic of the human species. In this provocative study, Ellen Dissanayake examines art along with play and ritual as human behaviors that make special, and proposes that making special is an inherited tendency as intrinsic to the human species as speech and toolmaking. She claims that the arts evolved as means of making socially important activities memorable and pleasurable, and thus have been essential to human survival. Avoiding simplism and reductionism, this original synthetic approach permits a fresh look at old questions about the origins, nature, purpose, and value of art. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and integrates a number of divers fields: human ethology; evolutionary biology; the psychology and philosophy of art; physical and cultural anthropology; primitive and prehistoric art; Western cultural history; and childrens art. The final chapter, From Tradition to Aestheticism, explores some of the ways in which modern Western society has diverged from other societies--particularly the type of society in which human beings evolved--and considers the effects of the aberrance on our art and our attitudes toward art. This book is addressed to readers who have a concerned interest in the arts or in human nature and the state of modern society.

Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development

Along with Adler and Jung, Otto Rank was one of the intellectual giants in the inner circle around Sigmund Freud. Art and Artist, his major statement on the relationship of art to the individual and society, pursues in a broader cultural context Freuds ideas on art and neurosis and has had an important influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers, beginning with Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Art and Artist explores the human urge to create in all its complex aspects, in terms not only of individual works of art but of religion, mythology, and social institutions as well. Based firmly on Ranks knowledge of psychology and psychoanalysis, it ranges widely through anthropology and cultural history, reaching beyond psychology to a broad understanding of human nature.