Ellen Dissanayake
Biographic Data
| ID | 202965 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ellen Dissanayake |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ellen |
| FAMILY NAME | Dissanayake |
| SIGNATURE | DISSANAYAKE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2473-4685 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma
Ancestral Minds and the Spectrum of Symbol
The Synthesis of the Arts: From Ceremonial Ritual to “Total Work of Art”
The 19th century notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art” referred to a performance spectacle that synthesized multiple forms of the arts into a unified work, often times taking place in a grand setting that befit the spectacle. Such a performance would be a quasi-religious ceremony occurring in a location akin to a temple. We argue here that, long before aesthetic theorists devised the notion of a total work of art, religious ceremonie…
Van Schaik, Carel, and Kai Michel. 2016. The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible
Article Van Schaik, Carel, and Kai Michel. 2016. The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible. was published on April 1, 2017 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 1, issue 1)
Response to the Esic Questionnaire
La structure profonde de l’art rupestre pléistocène: L’« hypothèse d’artification »
L’hypothèse d’artification ouvre une nouvelle voie pour décrire et comprendre l’art rupestre non-iconique du Pléistocène en le conceptualisant comme représentant le produit ou ce qui subsiste d’un comportement visant à « artifier », plutôt qu’une forme particulière de paléoart graphique. « Pourquoi nos ancêtres ont-ils laissé des marques (artifié) sur des surfaces rocheuses ? » devient la question initiale appropriée, au lieu de « Ces marques son…
The deep structure of Pleistocene rock art: The “Artification Hypothesis”
Most researchers of early rock art view their subject with an unexamined assumption about its origin. Stated simply, they believe that at a certain point in human evolution (say 50kya, perhaps earlier), our genus developed the ability to symbolize, thereby making possible the appearance and development of speech, religion, and art (Wade 2006: 164-165). In this paper I question the assumption that “art” is necessarily symbolic. Instead, I propose …
Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative
Despite its long oral and unrecorded history, literature means for most people printed texts and reading. Yet shades of this preliterate past remain and continue to affect our responses to written literary forms today. Studies of mothers' interactions with prelinguistic infants reveal “proto-”aesthetic characteristics that babies prefer to adult-directed speech, suggesting that adult psychology and experience grow from and build upon inborn motiv…
Doing Without the Ideology of Art
My invited comment on Steven Connor's essay, "Doing Without Art," proposes that a fuller understanding of the implications of my notion of "making special"-referred to by Connor in his essay as somewhat relevant to his own position-would expand his view of the human art impulse and allay some of his disaffections. Rather than contributing to aesthetic theory, the ideology of art, my work proposes an ethology of art: it suggests why members of the…
Bodies swayed to music: The temporal arts as integral to ceremonial ritual
The primary context for the temporal and performative arts in small-scale societies is in ceremonial ritual, where these activities—or this activity, since they occur together—appears to be essential and universal. The temporal arts—singing, playing instruments, expressive gesture, movement (clapping hands, marking time, dancing, performance)—are the behavioural means for conveying the message of the ceremony: they mark its importance and may eve…
If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success
This article departs from many discussions of the origin, evolution, and adaptive function(s) of music by treating music not as perceptual qualities (pitch, timbre, meter), formal elements (prosody, melody, harmony, rhythm), performed activity (singing, drumming), or genre (lullaby, song, dance). Rather, music is conceptualized as a behavioral and motivational capacity: what is done to sounds and pulses when they are “musified” — made into music …
Art in global context: An evolutionary/functionalist perspective for the 21st century
Regarding the arts as something peopledo — as behaviors, rather than the residue or artifacts of behavior — makes possible a theoretical grounding about their nature and importance, an endeavor that current anthropology of art has largely abandoned. A reconsideration of the suspect and largely discarded terms “functionalism” and “evolutionism” is presented in light of current evolutionary thinking. It is suggested that a contemporary reformulatio…
The Core of Art-Making Special
JCACS publishes scholarly, and some creative, works that provoke philosophical and theoretical debate, respond to critical questions and issues of interest to curriculum scholars, feature the work of Canadian cur
The poetics of babytalk
Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why
“Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable …
An Ethological View of Music and its Relevance to Music Therapy
An ethological view approaches music as an evolved or adaptive behavior that contributed to the fitness (survival and reproductive success) of ancestral humans. Such a view enlarges customary sociocultural treatments of music by seeking its components and their antecedents in evolved neural mechanisms and capacities that have emotional and behavioral correlates. Antecedents of musical behavior are identified in ritualized vocal, visual, and kines…
Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions
Ellen Dissanayake, Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions, SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 85-103
Chimera, spandrel, or adaptation: Conceptualizing art in human evolution
What Is Art For
The Evolution of Culture in Animals
Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic loc…
Art in Primitive Societies
Odilon Redon
An Ethological View of Ritual and Art in Human Evolutionary History
Awareness that in pre-industrial societies art and ritual are intimately associated leads the author to consider a number of provocative similarities among ritualized behaviour in humans and other animals, human ritual ceremonial behaviour, and art. In these, emotionally-motivated behaviour, for example, is formalized and social bonds are strengthened and expressed. The author suggests that in human evolutionary history, ritual and art were origi…
Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development
Along with Adler and Jung, Otto Rank was one of the intellectual giants in the inner circle around Sigmund Freud. Art and Artist, his major statement on the relationship of art to the individual and society, pursues in a broader cultural context Freud's ideas on art and neurosis and has had an important influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers, beginning with Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Art and Artist explores the human urge to cr…
Play as Exploratory Learning: Studies of Curiosity Behavior
The 'make-believe' nature of play-the realisation that the player is only temporarily committed to a particular set of circumstancesmakes it a useful therapeutic device for handicapped children and adolescents who are made anxious by the 'for keeps' demands of the real world. Such children also respond to carefully structured play in which their development can proceed at an individual pace. Written by six occupational therapists, this book (whos…
The poetics of babytalk
An Ethological View of Music and its Relevance to Music Therapy
An ethological view approaches music as an evolved or adaptive behavior that contributed to the fitness (survival and reproductive success) of ancestral humans. Such a view enlarges customary sociocultural treatments of music by seeking its components and their antecedents in evolved neural mechanisms and capacities that have emotional and behavioral correlates. Antecedents of musical behavior are identified in ritualized vocal, visual, and kines…
Chimera, spandrel, or adaptation: Conceptualizing art in human evolution
An Ethological View of Ritual and Art in Human Evolutionary History
Awareness that in pre-industrial societies art and ritual are intimately associated leads the author to consider a number of provocative similarities among ritualized behaviour in humans and other animals, human ritual ceremonial behaviour, and art. In these, emotionally-motivated behaviour, for example, is formalized and social bonds are strengthened and expressed. The author suggests that in human evolutionary history, ritual and art were origi…
Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative
Despite its long oral and unrecorded history, literature means for most people printed texts and reading. Yet shades of this preliterate past remain and continue to affect our responses to written literary forms today. Studies of mothers' interactions with prelinguistic infants reveal “proto-”aesthetic characteristics that babies prefer to adult-directed speech, suggesting that adult psychology and experience grow from and build upon inborn motiv…
Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why
“Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable …
Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions
Ellen Dissanayake, Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions, SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 85-103
Doing Without the Ideology of Art
My invited comment on Steven Connor's essay, "Doing Without Art," proposes that a fuller understanding of the implications of my notion of "making special"-referred to by Connor in his essay as somewhat relevant to his own position-would expand his view of the human art impulse and allay some of his disaffections. Rather than contributing to aesthetic theory, the ideology of art, my work proposes an ethology of art: it suggests why members of the…
What Is Art For
A Hypothesis of the Evolution of Art from Play
Observers of human behaviour have noticed similarities between art and play, e.g. both involve imagination, surprise, non-predictability and self-reward, and are considered biologically non-functional. Studies of these similarities led earlier philosophers and psychologists to construct hypotheses that attempted to explain art as arising from play during an individual’s life span (that is to say, ontogenetically). Recent students of the subject a…
Structure and Functions of Fantasy
A Hypothesis of the Evolution of Art from Play
Observers of human behaviour have noticed similarities between art and play, e.g. both involve imagination, surprise, non-predictability and self-reward, and are considered biologically non-functional. Studies of these similarities led earlier philosophers and psychologists to construct hypotheses that attempted to explain art as arising from play during an individual’s life span (that is to say, ontogenetically). Recent students of the subject a…
Modern Art and the Modern Mind
Evolution of Art from Play (Continued)
Cultural Policy in Sri Lanka
Play as Exploratory Learning: Studies of Curiosity Behavior
The 'make-believe' nature of play-the realisation that the player is only temporarily committed to a particular set of circumstancesmakes it a useful therapeutic device for handicapped children and adolescents who are made anxious by the 'for keeps' demands of the real world. Such children also respond to carefully structured play in which their development can proceed at an individual pace. Written by six occupational therapists, this book (whos…
Influence in Art and Literature
This is a systematic study of the conceptual framework used by critics and scholars in their discussions of influence in art and literature. Goran Hermeren explores the key questions raised in scholarly debate on the topic: What is meant by What methods can be used to settle disagreements about influence? What reasons could be used to support or reject statements about artistic and literary influence? The book is based on descriptive analyses in …
The Psychology of Play
Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development
Along with Adler and Jung, Otto Rank was one of the intellectual giants in the inner circle around Sigmund Freud. Art and Artist, his major statement on the relationship of art to the individual and society, pursues in a broader cultural context Freud's ideas on art and neurosis and has had an important influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers, beginning with Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Art and Artist explores the human urge to cr…
Odilon Redon
An Ethological View of Ritual and Art in Human Evolutionary History
Awareness that in pre-industrial societies art and ritual are intimately associated leads the author to consider a number of provocative similarities among ritualized behaviour in humans and other animals, human ritual ceremonial behaviour, and art. In these, emotionally-motivated behaviour, for example, is formalized and social bonds are strengthened and expressed. The author suggests that in human evolutionary history, ritual and art were origi…
Art in Primitive Societies
The Evolution of Culture in Animals
Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic loc…
What Is Art For
Chimera, spandrel, or adaptation: Conceptualizing art in human evolution
Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why
“Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable …
An Ethological View of Music and its Relevance to Music Therapy
An ethological view approaches music as an evolved or adaptive behavior that contributed to the fitness (survival and reproductive success) of ancestral humans. Such a view enlarges customary sociocultural treatments of music by seeking its components and their antecedents in evolved neural mechanisms and capacities that have emotional and behavioral correlates. Antecedents of musical behavior are identified in ritualized vocal, visual, and kines…
Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions
Ellen Dissanayake, Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions, SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 85-103
Art in global context: An evolutionary/functionalist perspective for the 21st century
Regarding the arts as something peopledo — as behaviors, rather than the residue or artifacts of behavior — makes possible a theoretical grounding about their nature and importance, an endeavor that current anthropology of art has largely abandoned. A reconsideration of the suspect and largely discarded terms “functionalism” and “evolutionism” is presented in light of current evolutionary thinking. It is suggested that a contemporary reformulatio…
The Core of Art-Making Special
JCACS publishes scholarly, and some creative, works that provoke philosophical and theoretical debate, respond to critical questions and issues of interest to curriculum scholars, feature the work of Canadian cur
The poetics of babytalk
Bodies swayed to music: The temporal arts as integral to ceremonial ritual
The primary context for the temporal and performative arts in small-scale societies is in ceremonial ritual, where these activities—or this activity, since they occur together—appears to be essential and universal. The temporal arts—singing, playing instruments, expressive gesture, movement (clapping hands, marking time, dancing, performance)—are the behavioural means for conveying the message of the ceremony: they mark its importance and may eve…
If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success
This article departs from many discussions of the origin, evolution, and adaptive function(s) of music by treating music not as perceptual qualities (pitch, timbre, meter), formal elements (prosody, melody, harmony, rhythm), performed activity (singing, drumming), or genre (lullaby, song, dance). Rather, music is conceptualized as a behavioral and motivational capacity: what is done to sounds and pulses when they are “musified” — made into music …
Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative
Despite its long oral and unrecorded history, literature means for most people printed texts and reading. Yet shades of this preliterate past remain and continue to affect our responses to written literary forms today. Studies of mothers' interactions with prelinguistic infants reveal “proto-”aesthetic characteristics that babies prefer to adult-directed speech, suggesting that adult psychology and experience grow from and build upon inborn motiv…
Doing Without the Ideology of Art
My invited comment on Steven Connor's essay, "Doing Without Art," proposes that a fuller understanding of the implications of my notion of "making special"-referred to by Connor in his essay as somewhat relevant to his own position-would expand his view of the human art impulse and allay some of his disaffections. Rather than contributing to aesthetic theory, the ideology of art, my work proposes an ethology of art: it suggests why members of the…
Art (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Cognitive science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · History (6 works)