Expressive Culture
(Chapter 11)
Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2008
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?
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Expressive Culture
 Expressive culture is behavior and
beliefs related to art, leisure, and play
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
 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
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Often
gender
division
exists
May be revered
or stigmatized
The Artist
Native
American male
carvers were
initiated into a
secret society
In foraging communities,
artistic activity is open to
all
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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?
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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
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Kathakali Theater (S. India)
• Blend of mythology, acting, and music
• Dramatizes great Hindu epics
• Features elaborate hand gestures,
make-up, and costume
• Audience recognizes characters from
their make-up
• Similar to European opera
– Zarrilli 1990
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A new use for
classical dancedrama in India is
in neighborhood
street theater that
includes topics
such as wife
beating and
dowry in the play
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Architecture
 Highly mobile foragers’ dwellings are the
image of the family and not wider society
 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
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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
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Taj Mahal in Agra, India
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A morning scene in the Netherlands. Dutch
people buy on average 12 bouquets of cut
flowers a year. But raising cut flowers and
transporting them is highly energy intensive.
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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
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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
 how activities relate to group identity
 how such activities link or separate
different groups
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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
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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
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Leisure Travel / Tourism
 The tourism industry is one of the world’s
largest industries
 Ethnic tourism
 Cultural tourism
 Ecotourism
 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
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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
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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
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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
 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
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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.
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Example of Gullah culture as
major tourist attraction
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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?
Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2008