Expressive Culture
(Chapter 11)
The BIG Questions
What is expressive culture?
How is culture expressed through art?
What do play and leisure activities reveal about culture?
How is expressive culture changing in contemporary
times?
Expressive Culture
Expressive culture is behavior and beliefs related to art,
leisure, and play
Art
What is art?
Art is the application of imagination, skill, and style to matter,
movement, and sound that goes beyond purely the practical
A wide variety of substances and activities can be
considered art
Beautifully prepared meal, stories, paintings, sculptures, dance,
architecture, landscaping, tattooing, etc.
Art
All cultures have art and have a sense of what makes something
“art”
Ethno-esthetics – refers to local cultural definitions of what art is
Can get intra-cultural (within culture) variations in opinions of art
e.g. Gender
Men
of Shipibo Indians of Peruvian Amazon liking abstract art while
women find it ugly
Male shamans take hallucenigenic drugs and may relate more to the
abstract, “psychedelic” images than women
Class
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Studying Art in Society
Anthropologist who study art are interested in…
The products and characteristics of art in a society
Who makes the art and why
The role of art in society
The wider social meaning of art
Purpose of Making Art
Art can have a variety of purposes depending on the context…
May socialize children into the culture
May legitimize political leaders
May be associated with a group’s identity and sense of pride
May serve as a form social control
May serve as a catalyst for political resistance
May be a form of self-expression
May be a religious means through which individuals connect with the
supernatural realm
Purpose of Making Art
May reinforce social relationships / gender relationships
Male strip dancing
May be a form of resistance
Hip-hop, rap music
Graffiti
Protests economic oppression
Focus on the Artist
Add to the understanding of art by studying art from the artists’
perspective
Look at the social status of the artist
May be revered and wealthy or stigmatized and economically
marginal
May have gendered divisions among artists
Geisha – female Japanese art form
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May have a great deal of specialization and exclusiveness or little
specialization and inclusiveness
Foragers – artistic activity is open to all, artistic products shared by
all
State-level societies – may need a special kind of training to produce
certain types of art, artistic products may only be available to those
who can afford them
Performance Arts
Include music, dance, theater, rhetoric (speech-making),
and narrative (storytelling)
Ethnomusicology – the cross-cultural study of music
Are men and women equally encouraged to use certain instruments and
repertoires?
Is musical training available to all?
Are the performances of men and women public, private, or both? Are women
and men allowed to perform together?
Do members of the culture give equal value to the performances of men and
women?
Performance Arts
Theater is a type of enactment that seeks to entertain
through movement and words
There are often strong connections between myth, religion,
ritual, and performance
Performance arts often occur at ritual events – feasts, special
ceremonies, funerals, weddings
May serve to both entertain and keep important cultural or religious
knowledge alive
A new use for classical dance-drama in India is in
neighborhood street theater that includes topics such as wife
beating and dowry in the play
Architecture
Highly mobile foragers’ dwellings are the image of the family and not
wider society
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Only take the family to build
Pastoralists and horticulturalist have designed portable structures
like the tepee
Social status may be reflected in where the housing is located (e.g. chief in
center)
States show their power through the construction of impressive
urban monuments
Shows ability to mobilize enough labor to create them
Architecture may reflect class differences and social rank
Gardens
Gardens for use, especially food production, are differentiated from
gardens for decorative purposes
Decorative gardens are a product of state-level societies
Japanese gardens may contain no flowers
Trees, shrubs, stones, water
Traditional Muslim gardens are enclosed by
four walls
Traditionally flowers are not a prominent motif in African art, but cut flowers are
important economic products in many parts of the world
Contents of a personal garden makes a statement about its owner’s
preferences, identity, and status
Play and Leisure
Play and leisure
Have no direct, utilitarian purpose for the participant
Play
Has rules
Contains chance
Often contains tension
Leisure activities
Often lacks rules, chance, and tension
Play, Leisure, and Culture
Anthropologists think about…
why some play/leisure involves teams and others are individual
activities
social roles of people involved
“goals” of the game and how they are achieved
how much danger and violence is involved
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how activities relate to group identity
how such activities link or separate different groups
Games and Sports
Can be interpreted as reflections of social relationships and cultural
ideals
A “cultural microcosm”
American football
Model for corporate culture
Clear hierarchy with leadership vested in one person (the
quarterback)
Goal of territorial expansion by taking over areas from the
competition
Income distribution
Baseball
U.S. – individualistic plays and strategies
Japan – “team spirit, unity, the ball club always comes first."
wa – discipline and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole
Games and Sports
In many contexts sports are closely tied to religion and
spirituality
Asian martial arts
spiritual self control
Hindu male wrestlers in India
Strict routine of discipline – for perfected physical and moral health
Play, pleasure, and pain are often linked
Blood sports – competition that explicitly seeks to bring about a flow
of blood or even death
Often with animals – dog fighting, cock fighting
Leisure Travel / Tourism
The tourism industry is one of the world’s largest industries
Ethnic tourism
Cultural tourism
Ecotourism
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Often individuals travel from the West to the West or from
the West to the Rest
Westerners are doing the consuming
Tourism’s effects on indigenous people can be positive or
negative
Positives – jobs, shares of revenues
Negatives – loss of land, environmental degradation
Leisure Travel / Tourism
Often marketed as providing an “authentic” view of
“primitive” cultures
Tourists often seek to find the culture the tourist industry
defines rather than the real one
Anthropologists are concerned with the impact of tourism
on indigenous peoples
Change in Expressive Culture
Globalization brings new materials, new technology, new ideas, and
new styles to many parts of the world
Much change is influenced by Western culture through globalization
Attempts by colonialists to eradicate certain indigenous art forms
and activities
Introduction of cricket on the Trobriand Islands to substitute for
warfare and overt sexuality
Over time Trobriand Islanders melded British aspects of cricket with
more traditional Trobriand ways
Change in Expressive Culture
Indigenous people adapting artistic styles to meet tourist demands
May
keep indigenous arts alive, whereas indigenous people may be
more interested in western arts, music, and sports
Growing worldwide support for the preservation of material cultural
heritage
Sites, monuments, buildings, and moveable objects considered of
outstanding world value in terms of history, art, and science
Also growing worldwide support for intangible cultural heritage
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Living
heritage manifested in oral traditions, languages, performing
arts, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices about nature
and the universe, and craft making
The view among United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) is that the preservation of both material and
immaterial cultural assets is a human right
People-first cultural heritage preservation is especially important
– cultural preservation managed by the community
Change in Expressive Culture
But influence does not only occur in one direction
African musical styles have transformed the U.S. musical scene since the days
of slavery
Japan garden styles are popular in the U.S.
The BIG Questions Revisited
How is culture expressed through art?
What do play and leisure activities reveal about culture?
How is expressive culture changing in contemporary
times?
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