Back in the misty days of 2001, Caleb Crain, writing in the late and lamented Lingua Franca, introduced the amateur aesthetic anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake to wider audience - including me. I ran right out, got myself a copy of Ms Dissanayake's What is Art For?, and found myself caught up in a fascinating intellectual journey.

Mr Crain's article is now on the web ( Part I and Part II ). Read it and then do as I did: run, don't walk, and read at least one of Ms Dissanayake's books.

" Suppose there were a person who saw, before almost anyone else, that the most important concept in modern biology could be applied to the arts. Suppose, however, that this person studied biology only as an undergraduate, never took a class in anthropology, and never received a Ph.D. Suppose, in fact, that she were a homemaker for a dozen years and then spent fifteen years in the Third World, where it was difficult for her to gain access to the research libraries and social networks that most professors take for granted. Nevertheless, over the past two decades—with no more institutional support than a few years of adjunct teaching, several grants, and a couple of visiting professorships—she has managed to publish three books setting forth her ideas. And today a new field of study has sprung up where she pioneered. Suppose, in addition, that some people think that a scholarly framework based on her insights will displace much of current aesthetic theory—that future generations will understand literature and the arts as she does, reconciling the humanities to the science of human nature. ... Dissanayake posed [a] question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art as a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues, and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children’s play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question. "

(via 2blowhards)