These ideas beg two important questions: What criteria, if any, can we use to distinguish between an instance of signaling and an instance of making special?? What criteria, if any, ca
These ideas beg two important questions: What criteria, if any, can we use to distinguish between an instance of signaling and an instance of making special?? What criteria, if any, can we use to distinguish between an instance of sensory exploitation and an instance of art?? anthropology discussion question
These ideas beg two important questions: What criteria, if any, can we use to distinguish between an instance of signaling and an instance of making special?? What criteria, if any, can we use to distinguish between an instance of sensory exploitation and an instance of art?? For your first response, choose one of the ordinary? (utilitarian) objects in the photos below and explain why it is or is not an instance of art. Support your answer with ideas, concepts, and findings from the assigned readings. If you would like to include another object in your response for purposes of illustration or comparison, that?s fine so long as you ok it with me first and attach a photo of the object to your response. Your post should be roughly two paragraphs in length and should be thoughtful, substantive, and well-structured.
Requirements:
CHIMERA, SPANDREL, OR ADAPTATION Conceptualizing Art in Human 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 aesthet- ics as adaptive, and it presents a speculative account of a human behav- ior of art. KEY WORDS: Art; Aesthetics; Human universals; Evolution of human behavior. At the beginning of the decade, Charles Lumsden (1991) predicted that aesthetics would have a place in the sociobiology of the 1990s similar to that which ethics occupied in the 1980s. As if bearing out Lumsden’s prediction, annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) meet- ings in the 1990s have included sessions and symposia on the arts or aesthetics, and the European Sociobiology Society made 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 1995 by Walter de Gruyter, Inc. New York Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 99-117 1045-6767/95/$1.00 + .10 99
100 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 As one who from the humanities side of the discourse has been con- cerned for some twenty years with understanding art as an adaptive (that is, evolved) human behavior, 1 welcome my scientific counterparts’ increased interest in aesthetics. At the same time, I note that this inter- est as expressed so far tends (with a few notable exceptions) to address only part of humankind’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 Heerwagen 1992; Thornhill and Gangestad 1993) or on thematics or “biopoetics” (elucidating biolog- ically salient subject matter in stories or pictures: see Cooke 1994), with- out attending to what I claim encompasses these–and remains to be acknowledged and described: a widely observable behavioral predispo- sition to “artify.” (Lack of a suitable verb in English that describes what people do when they make art or treat something artfully perhaps con- tributes to our blindness at recognizing the phenomenon.) To date, relatively few evolutionary biologists have concerned them- selves with art as an evolved human propensity. A survey of 24 repre- sentative popular and academic books on human 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 addressed art as a characteristic of human species nature, attempting to posit its selective value. One-third of the books did not mention art or the arts at all, and the remaining third used the word “art” only in passing (e.g., listed with such traits as play and entertainment, or with reference to cultural arti- facts such as Upper Paleolithic cave painting as evidence of symbolizing ability). This lack of attention suggests that for one reason or another art has been considered an unrewarding subject for evolutionary scrutiny. I can suggest at least three difficulties of conceptualizing art that contribute to its relative neglect by 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 imag- inary beast, made up piecemeal and ad hoc from components of a num- ber of different entities and having no stable or demonstrable existence of its own.
Chimera, Spandrel, or Adaptation 101 b) What does it do? As individual arts in all their variety appear to be cul- tural 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) How 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 sponta- neously doing it. There seems no convincing reason to investigate or alter its present chimerical or spandrel-like status. It is then not surprising that even the few scholars who have treated art (or an art) as an evolutionary phenomenon have done so in idio- syncratic and fragmentary ways, much like the proverbial blind men investigating an elephant. My reading over the past twenty years of sci- entific and quasi-scientific writings about the arts in human evolution reveals what amounts to a conceptual ragbag. There are interesting ideas but, apart from myself (Dissanayake 1988, 1992), no one has pro- posed an overarching ethological perspective within which to place them. Therefore, if interest is growing, it seems wise at the outset to try to determine in which way or ways art (including but not confined to aesthetic preferences and salient subject matter) is a subject worth evo- lutionary attention, articulating and analyzing fundamental concepts and issues. My own position is that there are good reasons to consider art evolu- tionarily (see Section II). I believe and have tried to show (Dissanayake 1988, 1992) that art (adequately defined) can plausibly be considered an adaptation. In the present paper I will indicate what seem to me to be inadequacies or misperceptions in earlier bioevolutionary contributions to the subject of art (Section 1) and suggest why and how art might be viewed as an adaptation (Section II). I will also set out briefly, as illus- tration of the latter, my own hypothesis that is developed more fully in Homo Aestheticus (1992) (Section iII). Whether or not the latter survives subsequent scrutiny, Sections I and II are meant to establish that bioaes- thetics as presently conceived is only part of a larger subject area and that a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and evolution should include and elucidate a behavior of art as a universal and indis- pensable part of human nature.
102 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 I. LIMITATIONS OF EARLIER EVOLUTIONARY 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 concep- tualize its function, or both, thereby limiting their scope of theoretical applicability. Errors of Definition 1. Careless use of the word “art” in undefined, imprecise, or too nar- row senses. Many writers use the word “art” to refer to one art, usually visual art, or even painting, or to decoration and ornamentation. Simi- larly, “art” may be used to refer to so-called aesthetic preferences based on sensory appeal–e.g., the fact that humans show preferences for cer- tain 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 cate- gory? 2. Conflation of art with, or insufficiently distinguishing it from, other activities. Among the other behaviors with which art is often asso- ciated (or equated) are play, display, amusement and pleasure, creativ- ity and innovation, symbolmaking, transformation, the joy of recogni- tion 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 activi- ties are considered to be themselves art or the putative origin of art. In any event, such merging of meanings does not explain what being “art- ful” 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, psy- choanalysis, and shamanism. What, if anything, makes artistic explo-
Chimera, Spandrel, or Adaptation 103 ration different from these? If nothing, then don’t call it art; if some- thing, 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 why 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 con- cerns, 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 prac- tice for social interactions and competitions” (Alexander 1989:459). The mythopoetic drive (Wilson 1978) alludes to the human search for under- standing, 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 why 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 souf- fl6s 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 emotion- ally salient elements, e.g., preferences for certain colors, sounds, or pat- terns, landscapes, facial proportions, and features like repetition, sym- metry, 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.
104 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 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 ana- logues 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 why it should have been selected for. 5. Presuming that art’s function is the same as a function proposed for a single 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 adap- tive 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 typ- ically 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. Presuming that because some arts serve individual competitive interests, this is their (or art’s) sole function. Most art-like behaviors in the animal world ultimately result in sexual selection. The ornamenta- tions of self, nuptial chamber, vocalizations, and movements by pea- cocks, bowerbirds, songbirds, and sandhill cranes, respectively, are strik- ingly like human arts in their beauty, elaboration, and extravagance, so it has been all too easy to generalize and assume that human art also simply serves individual reproductive interests. 1 We have only to look to the present-day adulation of rock stars to appreciate how the vaunting
Chimera, Spandrel, or Adaptation 105 of beauty, skill, and prowess–in body ornamentation, dance, music- making, 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 indi- vidual manifestations, originated and evolved (was selected) for a broader purpose. Thus while I do not wholly dispute the commonly held view (pro- posed 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 impor- tant 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 impor- tant 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 develop- ment 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 jus- tifiable 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
106 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 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 miss- ing 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 soci- eties 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 use- ful activities. 3. Pleasure. In all societies, the arts are commonly a source of immense pleasure, like other intensely valued essentials of human exis- tence 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 and/or 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.
Chimera, Spandrel, or Adaptation 107 Although these three features of art activity in human 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 evo- lutionists have tended to do) by assuming that art is simply a neutral or even deleterious byproduct of other activities, or a curious chimera com- posed of a number of traits evolved in other contexts but having in itself no real identity, or, like an architectural spandrel, no identifiable adap- tive function. Conceptualizing 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 com- monly 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 sys- tem 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 \[when alone, when fright- ened\] whose proximate reason is to reduce separation and allay anxiety and whose ultimate reason is to increase maternal care and thus sur- vivorship of the infant.) 2. A behavior of art illustrates Tooby and Cosmides’s (1990) admoni- tion to distinguish between an underlying adaptation and its expression or manifestations, which may vary–i.e., art (as described in the follow- ing 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.
108 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 III. ART AS MAKING 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 com- mon denominator of art of all times and places. While not wholly unam- biguous, the best term I have found to describe this proclivity is making special. Making special refers to the fact that humans, unlike other ani- mals, 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. Alterna- tively, 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 dif- fers 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 abil- ity to recognize an extraordinary as opposed to an ordinary dimension of expe- rience. 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 bottle- top, its behavior might be called “curiosity” or “neophilia’; when an early sapiens picked up an unusual or “beautiful” stone or shell and car- ried it home (see Harrold 1989; Hayden 1993; Oakley 1971), the motiva- tion 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 uncer- tainty or immediate need, rather than simply following instinctive pro- grams of fight, flight, or freeze. Lopreato (1984:299), like Malinowski (1948:60), has remarked on the human “imperative to act” under the
Chimera, Spandrel, or Adaptation 109 influence of strong emotion. And with this human 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 human societies. Ritual ceremonies themselves are extraordinary, outside the daily rou- tine. Although they are cultural behaviors that differ from one society to another, they occur in strikingly similar circumstances, times of uncer- tainty, 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 sur- roundings, 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
110 Human Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1995 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 mate- rial or social uncertainty and, at the same time, allayed anxiety and rein- forced group cohesiveness 7 Anxiety or psychological uncertainty has been tailored to fit real expe- riential 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, extra- ordinary measures directed toward uncertainties even when their dan- ger 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, vocal- izing or moving rhythmically) additionally “freights” them with signif- icance. 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 pre- cepts 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 one- heartedness 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 contro
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