Is Aesthetics a Cross-cultural Category?
Anthropological interest in aesthetics has burgeoned since the 1970s, though certainly it was present before that. The emphasis in the past thirty years, especially in the United States, is perhaps related to what I see as a retreat away from the study of power, inequality, and social organization and into culture and symbolic organization as primary concerns. Those divergent and significant emphases were explicated in 1993 in debates that included a discussion of aesthetics as a cross-cultural category.[20] Howard Morphy argued that aesthetics is a cross-cultural category because aesthetics concerns sensory capacities of which human beings in every society are capable. That is, we can properly use aesthetics in cross-cultural analysis, but always “the aesthetics of objects should be analysed in the context of the society that produces them.”[21] Joanna Overing argued the opposite, saying that aesthetics is not applicable to non-Western societies because it is a particularly Western co
