Making sense: Archaeology and aesthetics

Abstract

In both our daily life and our academic practice we attempt to make sense of the world. 'Making sense' captures the central link between objects and bodily existence explored in this volume. Material culture affects us through our senses, especially if we include our haptic sense which allows our bodies to work on and in the world in a muscular, physical manner. Our sensory apprehension of the world is not a purely physiological matter of impulses reaching the brain from the body, but rather it is something that we have to engage in actively, albeit unconsciously. Making sense, as the verb implies, is an active process. The locus of sensory activity is as much cultural as bodily, so that various cultures apprehend the world in different ways. Cultural forms educate the senses, privileging some over others and structuring the means by which we make sense of the world. Many cultural forms pick out both certain classes of objects and of experience as especially important. In the West we use words such as 'art' to designate objects of particular sensory value in our culture, but not all cultures have a category of art. Notions of art and aesthetics have long been part of archaeological discussions, but few, if any, of these discussions focus on the links between objects, embodied experience and the senses. When discussions of art and aesthetics do take place in archaeology, they often have an untheorized look to them and revolve around issues of typology, dating and the transmission of style. This is strange given the resurgence of interest in the social and cultural roles of material culture in art history and also given the thriving nature of studies of art and aesthetics within anthropology. Archaeology, which has always held material culture central, now has something of a gap in its tool-box of theories concerning the aesthetic appeal of objects to people under given cultural circumstances. In this volume we attempt to address the aesthetic appeal of objects to people in varying places and times and how social relations are created and shaped through the aesthetic properties of objects. The relations between people and objects have obviously been a long-term preoccupation of Western thought and old ways of addressing these issues are breaking down. The split between subject and object put forward by Descartes now poses us two problems if we do not believe it any more. For Descartes, people were animate, purposive, rational and able to conceive of their own goals and move towards them; objects were inanimate, had no sense of purpose or will and were the instruments of human intentions. However, we can now see, on the one hand, that human bodies are material objects with o0f) L4,6 sWorld Archaeology Vol. 33(2): 163-167 Archaeology and Aesthetics ? 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0043-8242 print/1470-1375 online DOI: 10.1080/00438240120079226