EnAct · Enacting heritage: The aesthetic dynamics of cultural transmission
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-03-01 → 2018-02-28
- EU contribution
- €185,076
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Enacting heritage: The aesthetic dynamics of cultural transmission
What role does the aesthetic behaviours play in the cultural processes? How does aesthetic attention organize, filter and transform the materials of the tradition? Which kind of transmission model is better suited to explain the creative and transformative dimensions of the cultural phenomena? By addressing these key questions, my research on “Enacting heritage: The aesthetic dynamics of cultural transmission” contributes to the fields of aesthetics, anthropology of art, and cultural transmission studies and addresses three main objectives: 1. To propose an anthropological and non-reductionist naturalistic theory of the aesthetic dimension of the cultures. 2. To underline a model of cultural transmission whereby the bodily, affective, and cognitive aspects are involved. 3. To enhance the understandings of the aesthetic activation of material culture (artefacts, images, and art works) as cognitive mechanisms supporting cultural transmission.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Aesthetic behaviours and expressive activities carry out a crucial role in human cultural evolution. Aesthetic cognition is important for intersubjective attunement already in early childhood, and attends to cultural emergence and transmission of ideas, practices and norms. However, anthropological scholars haven't ever investigated the cognitive dynamics whereby aesthetic behaviours shape the symbolic processes of constitution and re-enactment of cultural heritage. The proposed research project seeks to address this lacuna by dealing with key issues relating to the role of aesthetic behaviours in cultural transmission. The study focuses on how aesthetic and expressive elements are mobilized in the course of social interaction creatively transforming and communicating knowledge.The originality of the proposed approach lies in the interdisciplinary methodology that has not been used in previous studies of the subject matter. For the first time, a naturalistic and cross-cultural model of aesthetic behaviour will be applied to the context of cultural evolution. Existing naturalistic studies of aesthetics are characterized by a reductionist approach, whereas research on cultural transmission suffers due to the divide between cultural and evolutionary perspectives. This project aims to overcome the traditional opposition of “evolutionary psychology versus ethnography” through an interdisciplinary study of the multimodal, expressive, symbolic, and non-verbal practices whereby human beings collectively perform and share knowledge.The principal result of the project will be the first systematic and comparative analysis of aesthetic behaviours as operative components of cultural transmission. This result will be of interest to a broad scientific audience and will enhance several branches of European research and education, including aesthetics, cultural evolution, anthropology of art, and cultural heritage, by combining research methods derived from different disciplines.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union