Linguistic Anthropology of Aesthetics - Help requested.

[SANDRA SALAZAR]

Dear Ryan-

I am a bilingual communication professional who regularly follows this list-serv. I've always stayed on the sidelines and love to follow each thread in admiration of the Linguistic Anthropologists here. 

I find your subject-matter fascinating, especially because of the provocative questions you pose. 

Here's one similar subject I've always wanted to read about:

In the English language, I've often seen aesthetic categories (adjectives) used for visual and performing arts that I though were reserved for food. For example, "delicious," "exquisite," "scrumptious," etc. are often applied to graphic arts or even textiles. I've also seen musical categories for flavor, such as in the use of "notes" and "tones," to describe wine.

Are these cross-sensory references similar in other cultures/languages or they are just part of a marketing lingo of the English language?

Aside of my own questions, I wanted to suggest another source for your research: professional translators and translations. This profession takes it seriously when addressing cultural concepts that need to be expressed to a different culture. Serious text translators go to the root and also the current context(s) of individual words and phrases. They are also meticulous about the consistency in usage of one category vs. another. Members of the American Translators Association (ATA http://www.atanet.org/index.php ) could probably assist.

I'd love to see your research completed and published. Please keep the group posted. 

Sandra Aponte Salazar
Houston | Guatemala
dosdsanjuan at mac.com

On Nov 21, 2013, at 1:35 PM, Ryan Doran wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I'm a philosopher (so please do excuse any naivety or plain ignorance in what follows) working in philosophical aesthetics. I am interested in finding research on the linguistic anthropology of aesthetics. Specifically, I am interested in questions including but not limited to:
> -	Do cultures differ in the words they use to describe their aesthetic encounters and objects (the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the elegant, the wonderful etc.)? And if so, how do they differ?
> -	Do all cultures have a concept for beauty? Are the classes of referents the same cross-culturally (faces, bodies, objects, nature, for example)? Do other cultures make a lexical distinction between mere attractiveness and beauty?
> -	What is the relationship between aesthetic terms in different languages? Is ugliness, for example, the logical opposite of beauty in all languages that have these concepts?
> -	In those cultures which do have a concept for beauty, is the use of the term limited to the appearance of objects, or does it extend to the moral and spiritual domains (and, perhaps, other domains)? Does the same go for other aesthetic terms?
> -	Do any cultures have a word to describe the feeling of beauty, or is the term beauty limited to ascribing a property to objects (as it seems to be in English)?
> -	Does the concept of beauty have, what philosophers call, both a “thick” and “thin” usage in all cultures: where “thin” is taken to mean merely evaluative (“I like it”), and “thick” is taken to mean that the concept has some content (“harmony”, “order”, “uniformity amid variety”, or some other property of the object)?
> It is my (perhaps mistaken) hope that an understanding of the similarities and differences in aesthetic language and concepts in different cultures might shed light on certain psychological and philosophical questions concerning aesthetics.
> 
> Would anyone on the list kindly be able to direct me towards any relevant papers, research projects and/or anthropologists working on and around questions such as those listed above?
> 
> I have looked through all issues of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Anthropological Linguistics, Res: Anthropology & Aesthetics, and have read the seminal texts on the anthropology of art and aesthetics (the volumes by Layton and Coote & Shelton, for example), but have been able to find almost nothing on and around the above questions.
> 
> Any help with this would be very much appreciated. I wouldn’t want to fill up the list when this might not be of general interest, so please feel free to contact me off list at pip11rpd “at” sheffield.ac.uk. And please, again, forgive my naivety about anthropological and linguistic matters in advance!
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Ryan Doran