Aesthetic Symbolism

“Thus individual and society, in a never ending interplay of symbolic gestures, build up the pyramided structure called civilization. In this structure very few bricks touch the ground.”

Systems of aesthetic symbols, those found in literature, music, or painting, are an important facet of culture. Although anthropologists have warned the layman that such symbols are not to be equated with culture, that culture involves a great range of activities and artifacts of every variety, from a symphony to a swaddling cloth, we should emphasize that the concept of culture does not exclude the arts. When Kroeber (1) set out to study the patternings of culture growth, he took as part of his data the record of aesthetic patterns, feeling that these were in the nature of test cases for his exploration of configurations in human activity. He focused on the arts as patterns, deliberately putting aside questions of genius and individual personality dynamics. It seems there could be few better demonstrations of the peculiar importance of aesthetic symbols to social scientific theory than the fact of the dean of American anthropologists having selected them for analysis. His selection is illuminating for two reasons. First, he desired to study relatively clear-cut cultural phenomena which could be reasonably viewed apart from individual agents or particular concatenations of historical events; aesthetic patterns possess a certain autonomy which met this requirement, and which is vital to a comprehension of their position as socially