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Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 7, Issue 3/4, 1997
Aethetics in Practice

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Displaying: 1-20 of 23 documents


comparative aesthetics: cultural identhy
1. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Sonja Servomaa Introduction
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2. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Yaya Savané Contemporary Creation in Africa
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3. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Kenneth K. Inada A Theory of Oriental Aesthetics — a Prolegomenon
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4. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Jianping Gao "Aesthetic Craze" in China — Its Cause and Significance
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From 1978 to 1985 there was a craze for aesthetics in China. This was anticipated by a "great aesthetics discussion" between 1956 and 1962, but its cause lay more in its significance for Chinese society immediately after the Cultural Revolution. It played an important part in the ideological liberation movement, which transformed the minds of the Chinese; it encouraged the spread of Western ideas in China, and it broke up the ossified Zhdanovist system in Uterary and artistic theory, making the Chinese reflect on their own tradition, recognize Western culture and thus try to develop an aesthetics of both China and the world.
5. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Wu Kuang-Ming Beauty in Thinking — Aesthetic Character of Chinese Argumentation
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6. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Dušan Pajin Environmental Aesthetics and Chinese Gardens
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Analysis of Chinese landscape design offered a challenge to test the concepts of environmental aesthetics developed in the West. With comparative approach we improved our understanding of art and environment, and of different strategies (inspired by Taoist, and/or Buddhist concepts) in designing forms of Chinese gardens. In order to describe the "hidden" symbohsm of Chinese landscape design we applied various concepts and metaphors: completeness, large and small, mirror and mirroring, garden as entrance and separate reality, disclosure and concealment, and returning to the source.
7. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Ken-ichi Sasaki Aesthetic Life in Anti-Urban Culture of Japan
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8. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Eherhard Ortland The Aesthetics of Nature and the Art of Gardening in Japan
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A Japanese garden is an artistically shaped piece of the environment as well as a representation of nature. In the aesthetic experience of Japanese gardens it is possible to conceive of the relation between nature and art in a way different from anything accessible within the horizon of European aesthetics alone. In a Japanese garden the artificially shaped nature does not suffer a loss of its proper quality of naturalness, but seems to be even more natural according to the criteria underlying the aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of nature itself. These gardens demonstrate human labor as something which does not necessarily collide with natural beauty. Here, a work of art can be experienced as bemg potentially reconciled with the very idea of nature in its most beautiful state of self-realization.
9. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Makoto Ozaki Nature, Eternity, and Art: From Tanabe's Philosophical Perspective
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10. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
A.C. Sukla Aesthetics as Mass Culture in Indian Antiquity
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Aesthetics originated in ancient India (4th c. B.C.) as a descriptive account of the drama which was meant for both entertainment and education of the mass. If the drama was a mass medium, aesthetics — its account — represented the mass culture. Philosophical thinking, rigorous ethical practices and the dramatic art had a common aim — experience of the Reality as a whole. The difference was that while the first two were accessible to only a few elite or intellectuals, the third one was meant for all. The mass was experiencing the representation of Reality in the drama by a dehghtful emotional response. The sensibihty necessary for such response was technically called "like-heartedness" which was also a necessary qualification for a healthy social life.
11. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Sitansu Ray Tagore on Music Aesthetics and Aesdietics of Tagore Music: Indian in Form, Universal in Spirit
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12. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Madan M. Dikshit Aesthetic Perception and Cultural Identity of Nepal
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In this paper I intend to present a preliminary account of the development and sources of aesthetic perception and cuhural identity of the people of Nepal. The paper consists mainly of two sections. In the first section I have tried to explore our country's topographical, sociocultural, historical and religious perspectives which provided the background scenario and basis for the development of the emerged cultural and aesthetic picture. The second section tries to show how the aesthetic sense finds an expression in Nepalese cultural identity. At the very outset, I would hke to submit to this august gathering that the views expressed in this regard are based on my own personal experience and observations, and that they need to be confirmed with further studies in this field.
13. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Milan Shakya Philosophical Problems in Art and Beauty in the Context of Nepalese Paintings and Sculptures
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14. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
R.D. Rakesh The Aesthetics of Vidyapati's Lyrics
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15. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Steven Leuthold Indigenous Aesthetics: Representation and Conditions of Reception
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16. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Jari Kupiainen Art, Culture Change, and the Study of Solomon Islands Wood carving
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During the colonial contact and especially after the 2nd World War in the Solomon Islands local communities various traditions of woodcarving and other handicrafts have transformed from religious and ritual objects to commercial 'tourist arts' that have become economically important for local communities. In the course of culture change Western concepts such as art and culture have been adopted to local languages and they have replaced local terminologies and classifications in various ways. These processes may be described as 'conceptual colonialism'. The meaning shifts and emerging new conceptual categories produce homogenising effects that transform the local ways of cultural thinking towards the direction of hegemonic Western interpretations of socio-cultural phenomena. The concept of art should be treated as one major element in this linguistic power play between the local and the global.
17. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Gayle C. Jones Jumping Cultures — Is the Baggage All Packed?
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Western aesthetics attends to its art as a symbohsm-statement created by an artist with a signature-statement. Accompanying every piece is a unique set of informative signs, symbols and techniques which allow for interpretive readings from an individual expression within the Western cultural context. Does an art form from another culture, specifically the Tibetan thanka as selfless art in a selfless culture, retain its aflfectivity and integrity when attended to by Western perusal outside its cultural context? And when the thanka travels (outside its culture), does it come with all its baggage?
18. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Emily Auger Inuit Woman Artists and Western Aesthetics
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Inuit artists espouse aesthetic values which are indicative of the degree of their involvement with the western art world and of the non-artistic cultural values which they wish to convey and perpetuate in their own communities. It is in this latter expression that Inuit aesthetics may be studied as a conveyor of Inuit rather than non-Inuit culture. In this paper, the statements made by Inuit woman artists from the Keewatin district are analysed with reference to the values associated with contemporary mainstream fine art and the artists' own assertions regarding the importance of non-artistic values in the art-making process.
19. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Anthony Palmer Music as an Archetype in the 'Collective Unconscious': Implications for a World Aesthetics of Music
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The making of music has been sufficiently deep and widespread diachronically and geographically to suggest a genetic imperative. C.G. Jung's 'Collective Unconscious' and the accompanying archetypes suggest that music is a psychic necessity because it is part of the brain structure. Therefore, the present view of aesthetics may need drastic revision, particularly on views of music as pleasure, ideas of disinterest, differences between so-called high and low art, cultural identity, cultural conditioning, and art-for-art's sake.All cultures, past and present, show evidence of music making. Music qua music has been a part of human expression for at least some forty-thousand years (Chailley 1964; viii) and it could well be speculated that the making of music (the voluntary effort to use tonal-temporal patterns in consistent form that are meant to express meaning) accompanied the arrival of the first human beings. As Curt Sachs states, "However far back we tracemankind, we fail to see the springing-up of music. Even the most primitive tribes are musically beyond the first attempts" (Sachs 1943; 20).Why do humans continuahy create music and include it as an integral part of culture? What is music's driving force? Why do cultures endow music with extraordinary powers? Why do human beings, individuahy and as societies, exercise preferences for specific works and genres of music? In probing these questions, I chose one aspect of Jungian psychology, that of the Collective Unconscious with its accompanying archetypes, as the basis upon which to speculate a world aesthetics of music. Once we dispense with the mechanistic and designer idea of human origins (Omstein 1991; Ch. 2), we have only the investigations of the human psyche to mine for data that could explain the myriad forms of artistic activity found the world over. An examination of human beings, I believe, must lead one ultimately to the study of human behavior and motivations, in short, to the psychology of human ethos (see, e.g., Campbell 1949 & 1976). This study wih take the following course: first, a discussion of consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, plus a discussion of archetypes; then, a description of musical archetypal substance; and finally, what I beheve is implied to form a world aesthetics of music.By comparison to Jung, Freud gives us little in the way of understanding artistic substance because for him, all artistic subject matter stems purely from the personal experiences of the artist. In comparing Freud and Jung, Stephen Larsen states that "Where Freud was deterministic, Jung was teleological; where Freud was historical, Jung was mythological" (Larsen 1992; 19). Jung drew on a much wider cross-cultural experiential and intellectual base than Freud (Philipson 1963; Part II, Sect. 1). His interests in so-cahed primitive peoples led him to Tunis, the Saharan Desert, sub-Saharan Africa, and New Mexico in the United States to visit the Pueblo Indians; visits to India and Ceylon and studies of Chinese culture all contributed to his vast knowledge of human experience. Jung constructed the cohective unconscious as a major part of the psyche with the deepest sense of tradition and myth from around the world. He was criticized because of his interests in alchemy, astrology, divination, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, spiritualism, mediums and seances, fortunetelling, flying saucers, religious symbolism, visions, and dreams. But he approached these subjects as a scientist, investigating the human psyche and what these subjects revealed about mental process, particularly what might be learned about the collective unconsciousness (Hall and Nordby 1973; 25 & Cohen 1975; Ch. 4). Jung's ideation, in my view, is sufficiently comprehensive to support the probe of a world aesthetics of music.
20. Dialogue and Universalism: Volume > 7 > Issue: 3/4
Nadia Mankovskaya The Russian Simulacrum: An Aesthetic Theory and Practice
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This comparative analysis of multiple variants of the aesthetics of simulacrum as equal and autonomous participants in the postmodern polylogue presents a principle of creation of a 'third reality', which unites foreign and Russian elements. Making an artifact out of an artifact leads to a theory of artistic relativism. This type of simulacra give artistic cross-cultural results with an additional aesthetic effect representing fragments of a postmodern mosaic culture.