The Steps of Society

For this week's free write, I'll be thinking out loud about the ideas expressed in the Anthropology of Art, Chapter 2: Art and Social Life. In this chapter it discussed the rejected idea of comprehensive progress files complexity of political relations. Sahlins concept of the domestic mode of production, and puts forward the fact that the majority gatherer societies expend less energy on subsidence behavior than the average “modernized” society, with the lower levels of society I expected to produce the subsidence for the top, such as the example of French farming before World War II where 20% of the population produces subsidence for the rest.

 How does this relate to the arts?

Arts “realize and sustain their current political systems by consciously-operated procedures”. This regardless of whether level the society is thought to be at. However the relationship between how the art supports the political structures of that society changes. To help express the relationship that I gathered from reading this chapter is the diagram above. In a hunter-gatherer societies, arts embedded in average workers ritual activities, with the political head taking important role in that ritual. Arts are closely tied in to religion, and the population socially aware that they support the political standing of the participants. The society's economic ability to allow its society to participate in art, and it is expected that the majority of the population participate in ritualistic arts.

In our modern idea of nation-state’s, the arts are separated from ritual and religion and become arts with a capital A. These Arts are only for those the economic ability to patronize them. The arts are not a grounding piece the majority of society, but the ability to interact with acts goes to show the privileged status of the participant. Painting, drawing, dancing- in order to be considered Art had to be produced by one who had the time to develop that behavior. Arts are for the upper class, not the average population. It is from this upper class that the politician of modernized nation-states are expected to come from. An appreciation of arts in politician supports the idea that they have the education a.k.a. proper breeding, that are necessary for one to be in power. The historical idea arts being an upper-class activity have even been used to reverse in American politics, such as the political campaign of Teddy Roosevelt in which he allied himself with the average man, downplaying his exposure to the arts and highlighting his husbandry, a subsidence activity.