Pensare l'antropologia estetica al di là dell'opposizione fra natura e cultura

The aim of this paper is to consider some of the questions posed by anthropology of art in the light of the recent developments of ethology. Anthropology in its history has oscillated between the assertion of the universality of art, and that of its relative nature. Looking at these issues from the outside of the anthropological knowledge, allow us to discern better the historical a priori which constitutes its background: the emergence of culture as a distinctive feature of human as opposed to animal and nature. The contemporary ethology, moving beyond the reductionist determinism of the Seventies and Eighties sociobiology , shows us how animal societies create culture, how to carry out ethnographies of animal cultures and, conversely, how it is desirable to conduct an ethological research on human societies. In this way the anthropocentric assumption that underlies cultural anthropology is challenged, as is the co-extensive character of "humanity" and "culture", which had as its corollary the reduction of the animal to a "nature" culturally defined on the model of the "machine". Rethinking anthropology of art, or rather, aesthetic anthropology (for which art is only one aspect), beyond the opposition between nature and culture, means to look at human beings in their biocultural interactions with other animals, to capture proximity and differences, without postulating any wide separation, and trying to avoid the double risk of the anthropocentrism that emphasizes the otherness of the animals, and that of the anthrophormism that assimilates them to us.