Anthropological approaches to the relationship between aesthetics and ethics

Abstract

The relationship between aesthetics and ethics has long been a topic of scholarly debate. However, in anthropology this relationship has been less consistently problematised. In addition, the very terms of the relationship have occupied rather peculiar positions on the anthropological agenda, the aesthetic experiences and artistic practices of people around the world being an established topic of concern, while mundane ethical reflections and actions have only recently become a topic of sustained investigation. This special issue is explicitly concerned with this relationship, its major achievement being to demonstrate what it means to capture ethnographically how, when and why the aesthetic and the ethical intersect, overlap or become opposed. This introduction examines milestones in the consideration of aesthetics and, respectively, ethics in anthropology. Rather than providing an intellectual history, its main aim is to locate the issue’s contributions in relation to past and current anthropological debates.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• ethics
• material culture
• visual culture
• anthropology

Acknowledgements

I thank Haidy Geismar, co-organiser of the workshop ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: An Enquiry into their Relationship’, for her contribution; Christopher Pinney and Roger Sansi for agreeing to act as discussants; and Susanne Kuechler for her continuous support throughout my second stay at UCL as a Marie Curie Fellow. Many special thanks go to Alex Flynn for his contribution to the workshop. Unfortunately, for reasons of time and overlapping commitments, he could not also contribute to the issue. I thank the journal’s editors, especially George Lau, for their support and patience, and to the very helpful anonymous reviewers for their expertise and time.

Notes on contributors

Magdalena Crăciun is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, Associate Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology at University of Bucharest, and principal investigator on a two-year research project on middle-classness in Romania, funded by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation, and hosted by the National School of Political and Administrative Sciences in Bucharest. She earned her PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2010 and worked in the same department as Marie Curie Fellow between 2013 and 2015. Her most recent publications include Islam, Faith and Fashion: The Islamic Fashion Industry in Turkey (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), ‘Bobbles and values: an ethnography of de-bobbling garments in post-socialist urban Romania’ [Journal of Material Culture 20: 3–20 (2015)], Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) and ‘Rethinking fakes, authenticating selves’ [Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 846–863 (2012)].

Notes

1. With the exception of Tinius’ contribution, early versions of the articles included in this special issue were presented at a one-day workshop, ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: An Enquiry into their Relationship’, held at University College London on 6 May 2015. The workshop was organised by the author and Haidy Geismar, and brought together early-career researchers from UCL and other departments of anthropology in the UK in a conversation led by Christopher Pinney and Roger Sansi. This introduction retains the spirit of the conversation, but expands it through a more extensive engagement with relevant conceptual debates, as well as with ethnographic studies of aesthetics, ethics and the peculiar ways in which they are connected or kept apart in various contexts and settings.

2. But see, for example: Merrill 1988; Carroll 2000; Levinson 2001; Glowacka and Boos 2002; Eldridge 2005; Stecker 2005; Rancière 2006; Gaut 2007; Schellekens 2008; Costello and Willsdon 2008. The relationship has been approached from various angles, from the similitudes and differences between aesthetic and ethical values, the nature of aesthetic and ethical judgement, the ethical aspects of art and art criticism, and the aesthetic aspects of ethical life, to the autonomy of arts and the disassociation of aesthetic values from ethical merit. A simple summary of the debate about this relationship reads as follows: ‘aesthetics and ethics are either autonomous […] or one [aesthetics] is subservient to the other [ethics]’ (Glowacka and Boos 2002, 2). New concepts such as ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud 2002), and the argument that art should not present utopias but models of and for real life have also been introduced, as have contemporary artistic practices such as ‘participatory art’ (Bishop 2012), through which artists reject the autonomy of the arts and focus, once again, on social and political problems.

Additional information

Funding

The one-day workshop in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, where the early versions of the articles included in this special issue were presented, was funded through The Research Executive Agency [grant number 327169] (the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme.