We take as a premise that aesthetic judgment is a universal form of judgment, as universal as ethical, moral, or pragmatic judgments. We also take as a premise that aesthetic judgments are made constantly and are by no means confined to what we call Art. With these two premises in mind we will consider various Western theories of aesthetics and then proceed to see how they might apply to the aesthetics of every day life in the West and elsewhere. The art of spitting as with a baseball pitcher or as an emphatic in Turkana discourse will be given the same treatment as Olympia and the Changing of the Night Watch. This course is run as a seminar and students will give presentations on selected topics.

The literature on aethetics and art is huge. In looking over various course syllabi given here an elsewhere I find that most consist of reading packets made up of selected articles drawn from a variety of disciplines. We will not do that. I want to go through one book ... it is available and inexpensive ... John Dewey's classic Art as Experience. That should set us up, though we will have to start with Kant's treatment of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment. As everyone says you simply Kant get away from him! One book we should investigate closely is Alfred Gell's Art and Agency. The late Gell was an anthropologist and that should point us in the direction we will want to go. The book inspired a collection of essays entitled Beyond Aesthetics which inspired our Liam Buckley to put together a symposium at the AAA meetings entitled Back to Aesthetics

For those of you planning to take this course, or who are thinking about taking it, make a pointing of dropping by this and the top page (http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ds8s/529b.html) from time to time. I will post my thoughts about the course as I go about pulling the material together.

J. David Sapir
Department of Anthropology