Abstract Summary
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” or so said Keats. Historians of science are very adept at understanding the complexities involved in translating natural phenomena into fact, and fact into truth. Less critical attention, however, has been paid to beauty and how it has shaped expectations of what the truth looks like. How have aesthetic judgments of beauty, shaped by the senses, contributed to the construction of knowledge in the human sciences? In this talk, I explore anthropological efforts to understand art-making in the late nineteenth century. In particular, I examine biological attempts to explain the evolution of ornament, conducted by an array of zoologists and anthropologists between 1870 and 1900, which applied the analytic tools of embryology and morphology to the products of human craft. As a result, simple geometric patterns like the zigzag were understood to be the most primitive. These analyses were based on western aesthetic judgments of beauty, and characterized the art of non-western peoples as degenerate and unsophisticated. Through this study, I show how scientists relied on their own aesthetic sense while denying taste to the people they studied. Applying a biological frame to the problems of culture assumed that non-western peoples were only capable of replication, thereby denying artistic sensibility and creativity to Indigenous makers. In doing so, anthropology translated taste into scientific knowledge of human difference. Truth could indeed be built upon beauty, but only the right kind of beauty.
