Ellen Dissanayake. Natural History. Volume 109, Issue 10, December 2000.
What lies behind the human urge to elaborate, to embellish, to make the ordinary extraordinary?
One of my most unforgettable experiences was being handed a stone tool made by an archaic Homo sapiens and being told by the distinguished paleontologist Kenneth Oakley that it was probably about 250,000 years old. I held it in my palm with what surely resembled the feeling of a religious devotee who has been allowed to touch a holy relic—a sense of privilege, humility, and wonder.
Almost exactly the shape and size of the inside of my open hand and made from a piece of army-jeep brownish green flint, the tool was what is called a hand ax. Long before the invention of agriculture, someone not so different from me had taken up a large cobble, assessed it, and fashioned this very tool. Of course, he (or she?) could not have imagined the room or city or time in which someone like me would one day come to hold this item and wonder about the life and being of the person who had made and used it. That asymmetry was one of countless others between us. And yet, holding the hand ax like a talisman, I felt a connection to its maker that I can still retrieve (even if, just as with the person who touches a relic, whether of a saint or a famous athlete, the feeling has as much to do with me as with the material object or its owner).
In any event, I was interested to read, much later, an account that the naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote of his thoughts and emotions while he, too, held a flint tool shaped by human hands. Admiring its purposefulness, he noticed something he found even more remarkable:
As I clasped and unclasped the stone, running my fingers down its edges, I began to perceive the ghostly emanations from a long-vanished mind, the kind of mind which, once having shaped an object of any sort, leaves an individual trace behind it which speaks to others across the barriers of time and language. It was not the practical experimental aspect of this mind that startled me, but rather that the fellow had wasted time.
In an incalculably brutish and dangerous world he had both shaped an instrument of practical application and then, with a virtuoso’s elegance, proceeded to embellish his product. He had not been content to produce a plain, utilitarian implement… This archaic creature had lingered over his handiwork.
Eiseley’s embellished hand ax was not a singular example. Oakley had shown me photographs of two Paleolithic hand axes that had been deliberately fashioned so that a marine fossil embedded in the stone appeared in a central position, almost like an insignia. Years later I saw a similarly worked tool—a scraper—in a museum in France.
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss titled a famous volume The Raw and the Cooked to describe the universal human imperative to transform “nature” into usable “culture.” Such transformations characterize humans everywhere—from present-day subsistence farmers, such as the Yekuana Indians from the upper Orinoco River in Venezuela, converting raw, poisonous cassava tubers into a processed and cooked staple food, to early toolmakers working flints into implements or modern technocrats turning silicon into microchips.
Herbert Cole, an American anthropologist, has given the Levi-Strauss phrase additional explanatory bite by referring to the raw, the cooked, and the gourmet, thereby calling attention to the unusual fact about our species that Eiseley recognized in the embellished hand ax: for humans, transforming nature into culture may not always be enough. For the Yekuana, studied by Tufts University anthropologist David Guss, it is insufficient simply to plant, to reap, to set out in a canoe, to treat a wound or illness, to kill an animal, to begin to menstruate, to marry, or to die. As in many other traditional societies, these are all occasions for elaboration in both word and action.
Evolutionary biologists often overlook this penchant of humans to “linger over their handiwork,” to “embellish” or elaborate, to make the ordinary implement (or material, movement, sound, utterance, motif, story, or idea) extraordinary. They assume it is a cultural overlay, a superfluous side effect of some ability (such as curiosity) that evolved for an adaptive purpose, or simply the product of a lone individual with time on his or her hands. To the unsentimental gaze of a scientist looking for the “selective value” of an activity, elaborating is truly perplexing, for it is an axiom of evolutionary theory that successful creatures expend their resources on survival-related ends: finding food, protecting themselves from harm, putting provisions aside for a rainy day, seeking mates and mating, caring for offspring, and, after all these are attended to, conserving their energy. Tool-making clearly contributes to survival. Continuing to work on a hand ax after it is “finished,” however, would appear to interfere with fitness, not to enhance it.
Yet there we are, in every society—people adorning themselves, their artifacts, and their surroundings; making music, dancing, dramatizing, and poeticizing; and often spending vast quantities of time, energy, and material resources doing so. When evolutionary explanations for such extravagant behaviors as performing dances and making art are given, they often center on the suggestion that displays of creativity, physical skill, strength, and stamina improve reproductive success, especially that of males. By singing, by dancing, by speaking well, by skillful building, goes this idea, males draw attention to the superior qualities that set them apart from less talented or tireless males, thereby impressing and attracting mating-minded ladies. The animal world has visual, architectural, musical, and terpsichorean analogues to our own species’ male theatrics: the peacock’s splendiferous tail, the bowerbird’s chambre d’amour, the thrush’s territorial warbles, and the great bustard’s acrobatic dances all either repel rivals or seduce females, or both.
As for the human realm, while we all know about the proverbial allure of the sweet talker, the sexy dancer, the master builder, and the king whose power is evident in the palaces and monuments he is able to command, sheer male competition seems to be only part of the explanation for elaborating. While some activities are the province of males or prominently feature the talents and stamina of individual men, I do not think male competition alone can adequately account, for example, for the cave paintings or megaliths of prehistoric Europe; the temple of Kailasa at Ellora in south-central India; the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, built over centuries by whole communities; or such practices as mbari, in which the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria spend a year or more constructing a ceremonial house of anthill mud, adorning it with dozens of life-size sculpted and painted mud figures, and then, after a week of ceremonial dancing and feasting, leave it to disintegrate. Nor does male competition explain the custom, prevalent in many cultures, for all the participants in a group to make art the same way, as in the Walbiri men of central Australia incising identical designs on bullroarers to represent the ceremonial grounds and paraphernalia of Dreamtime heroes.
Also (and importantly, I think), male competition cannot account for the arts of females, which may—as in the case of the ubiquitous bilum, or looped string bag, of Papua New Guinea—be less spectacular and arduous than the arts of males but are as evident throughout human history. Nor can it account for the arts of men and women older than prime reproductive age who may in fact be the master elaborators in their society (Yekuana males, for example, devote their later years to making baskets as a disciplined means of understanding and expressing complex cultural symbols)—or for the obvious fact that the arts, even when they also serve competitive interests, are frequently co-created and performed by more than one individual. This last is especially true for pre-modern societies, in which the arts transmit valued systems and stories and serve to unite individuals in social groups.
So what does lie behind the apparently universal human urge to elaborate, an urge that to a modern, bottom-line thinker might seem unnecessary and to an evolutionary biologist might seem even dangerously impractical and frivolous? One clue emerges when we realize that far from being frivolous, all this extraordinary care and attention are expended in the arena of biologically important concerns—finding food, assuring prosperity and safety, curing illness, preventing harm—and serve to relieve anxiety about the attainment and preservation of life’s necessities. These special efforts of body and mind express people’s emotional investment in assuring good outcomes for important ventures and generally address the uncertainty inherent in the human condition. Most often, these efforts take the form of what we call ritual or ceremony, and this is where we find the bulk of the arts in premodern societies.
Indeed, “ceremony” is a one-word term for what is really an assembly of elaborations (words, voices, actions, bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia), a collection of arts (chant, song, poetic language, dance, mime, and drama, along with considered and even spectacular visual display). Such extravagant displays of beauty and skill, as well as other evidence of the expenditure of time, thought, and effort—sometimes including fanatical demonstrations of endurance—demonstrate a people’s belief that nonhuman powers will thereby be attracted and their assistance procured.
In its excessiveness, such behavior may seem maladaptive, given the modern, capitalistic attitude that espouses minimum effort for maximum return on investment. But I suggest that this was not the case as humans were evolving. Despite the negative cost-benefit calculations of many evolutionists (or recent U.S. congressional representatives arguing against spending public money on the arts), I maintain that what we today call the arts, the shaping and elaborating of behavior and of the material world, has been necessary to the maintenance and continuity of human societies.
The artful (special, exaggerated, compelling) features of rituals not only draw attention to important concerns. By reinforcing a group’s like-mindedness and one-heartedness, they also help persuade people to devote themselves to ideals that transcend narrow individual self-interest: loyalty, generosity, hard work, unselfishness, patriotism, and even the sacrifice of one’s life. At the same time that the Gelede masquerade of the Yoruba in Nigeria entertains the general public with dazzling costume and dance, for example, its fundamental message of honoring female power sensitizes onlookers to the virtues of social stability and good citizenship.
Even if an ancestral ceremony failed to achieve its ostensible, immediate purpose of success in hunting, warfare, or healing, it benefited the participants, since the debilitating physiological effects of stress are known to be reduced when individuals have some sense of control over uncertain circumstances. “Doing something” to address uncertainty, as in a ritual enacted with the reinforcement and collaboration of one’s fellows, is arguably more adaptive than not doing anything or acting alone. Archaeologists studying such diverse vanished human groups as the Mimbres and the Dorset of North America and the prehistoric inhabitants of Europe and of Arnhem Land in Australia have noted an increase in indications of ritual activity (Paleolithic cave art production in Europe, art on rock shelter walls and ceilings in Australia) at times of environmental stress, such as when the climate changed or an invasion by outsiders threatened a group’s control over resources.
Ceremonies and the collection of arts they comprise may have been important and adaptive for early humans. But where did this urge to elaborate first come from? My own view may surprise some people. I trace the origin of the arts to a source almost the opposite of male competition and display—that is, to the early communicative interchanges between mothers and infants.
Human infants come into the world ready to engage with others. During their first year, before being able to do much of anything else, they are exquisitely sensitive to certain kinds of sounds, facial expressions, and head and body movements that others present to them through the common behavior often dismissively referred to as baby talk. In all cultures, people of both sexes behave differently with infants than with adults or even older children. An adult who catches the eye of a cute baby in a supermarket checkout line or airport waiting area typically goes through a striking sequence of head movements and facial expressions. The head tilts sharply backward as the eyes widen and the mouth opens. Then the head drops and nods as the tongue clicks. This solicitation is repeated until the baby smiles, which brings about an answering broad and sustained smile accompanied by raised eyebrows and a high-pitched, exaggeratedly undulant vocalization—perhaps something like “HIIiiii.” These expressions, sounds, and movements, as well as the associated rhythmic touching, stroking, and patting, are all exaggerations and elaborations of the ordinary expressions of connection and readiness for contact that we use when we are with other adults. (Think of the quick eyebrow flash with which we acknowledge an associate who enters a meeting late or the smile we produce when introduced to a new neighbor.)
Rather than our teaching infants to prefer these peculiar antics, babies train us to produce them by responding to baby talk (though not to ordinary adult conversation) with unmistakable and irresistible signs of pleasure and delight. Painstaking frame-by-frame analysis of videotaped interactions between mothers and babies as young as eight weeks of age show the pair to be in remarkable synchrony, responding to each other in subtle yet precise ways. The mother varies her pace and rhythm in order to fit in with the baby’s emotional state and—as necessary—gradually move it toward greater calm or excitement. The baby, in turn, responds to the mother’s signals with kicks, hand and arm movements, facial expressions, head movements, and vocalizations of its own—often appearing to be participating in a mutually negotiated rhythmic “beat.” The pair engage and disengage, synchronize and alternate, practicing their “attunement” over the first five or six months of the infant’s life. Such interactions are not just pleasurable but are also known to contribute to babies’ linguistic, intellectual, and social development and to benefit their neurophysiological, immunological, and endocrine systems.
The sense of intimate engagement, or mutuality, that arises out of mother-infant interactions predisposes us to develop the feeling of belonging to a social group. This occurs naturally in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, in which a child moves from physical as well as emotional attachment to its mother to gradually increasing social embeddedness within a group of children of different ages who then grow up together, sharing the same experiences, knowing the same people, and eventually reinforcing their bonds more formally in art-saturated rituals.
Significantly, the components of these crucial earliest interactions between mother and infant are fundamentally aesthetic. In baby talk, mothers simplify and formalize their behavior. With face, voice, head, and body they repeat, exaggerate in time and space, use dynamic variation (changing between faster and slower, louder and softer, larger and smaller), embellish or elaborate themes, and create and satisfy expectations—all in collaboration with the infant’s sounds and movements. Like mothers, artists working in all media use these same aesthetic features to gain attention and to provoke and manipulate emotional responses.
I suggest that when ancestral humans began to create ceremonies, they drew upon their evolved sensitivities to the emotionally evocative and compelling features of mother-infant interaction and elaborated them further, into what we now call the arts. These became efficient means of arousing interest, compelling attention, synchronizing bodily rhythms and movements, conveying culturally important messages memorably and with conviction, and ultimately indoctrinating and reinforcing “right” attitudes and behavior within the group.
Through being especially riveting, beautiful, rare, painstaking, and astonishing, a people’s arts are emblems to themselves of how much they care about the sacred beliefs that bind and preserve them. As the duet of mutuality synchronizes a mother-infant pair, so does ceremonial participation instill general coordination, cooperation, and feelings of affiliation among members of a group, further enhancing the well-being of individuals. One can justifiably claim that the traits that enable mutuality are as fundamental to human nature as are self-interest and competition.
In subsistence societies, everyone participates in the arts; in most of the world today, the arts are produced by specialists—artists—most often working on their own. Nevertheless, our arts do retain traces of their origins. Although we may tend to purchase art rather than make or perform it ourselves, we still take special pains on occasions that are important to us, such as a party, a holiday, a wedding, or a big date. In addition, we adorn our bodies and surroundings—homes, office spaces, and even cars—so that they will not be “ordinary.”
The objects from other times and places that fill our museums and are customarily called art—sculptures, paintings, fine textiles—largely served religion and empire and were, like the ritual performances enacted in subsistence societies, judged by aesthetic standards of uncommon (that is, extraordinary) beauty, perfection, grandeur, sacredness, and seriousness. Today the reverse of such standards often seems to hold. The ancient urge to take time and care in excess of practical requirements is still there, but some contemporary artists make art that is excessively banal or trivial, excessively esoteric or cryptic, excessively vulgar, or even excessively and intentionally boring or meaningless.
As does contemporary society itself, contemporary popular arts tend to serve not God but Mammon, and thus the collective excesses on which time, thought, and effort are expended and with which modern societies are most engaged are the elaborations and spectacles of rock concerts, blockbuster films, television extravaganzas, and athletic contests. And advertisements, together with the events or products they enhance, have become the ceremonies on which our extraordinary communal—creative and financial—efforts are lavished.
Do these examples of today’s art seem unrelated to an embellished hand ax, a painted rock wall, or a spirited ceremony in celebration of a successful yam harvest? Each produces its emotional effects by transforming what is ordinary and expected into something extraordinary and astonishing, and each is still, at root, a response to age-old vital interests and concerns. And if I am right, all art, whether new or old and whether it promotes competition or conjoinment, emerges from the same aesthetic components that give rise to the oldest bond of all: that of a mother and her baby.