Anthropology and Beauty

Stephanie Bunn is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK.

1. Introduction 2. The problem with beauty: an anthropological perspective 3. The material labour of artful mathematics 4. With beauty all around me, I walk 5. The unexpected gift of beauty 6. Beauty and captivation: Fuyuge gab and Gell’s anthropological theory of art 7. The continual changes: transforming art styles in Enlightenment Scotland and beyond 8. Grace in moving and joy in sharing: the intrinsic Beauty of communicative musicality from birth 9. The Favourite Sounds Project 10. Colour palettes and beauty 11. Aso iyi, aso eye: resplendence and the Yoruba prestige textile aso-oke 12. Beauty as a capacity: a study of hands-in-craft 13. Cinematographers’ skilled vision and aesthetic praxis 14. Beauty as skill and ‘common sensing’ 15. Fleshly beauty: an anthropological perspective 16. Beauty in motion: collective creativity in contemporary dance 17. Surprised by beauty: Imagining Autism 18. Threshold and temporality in architecture: practices of movement in Japanese architecture 19. Carbuncles, surfaces and beautiful built environments 20. Paradigms of transmission: aesthetic affinities and intertextualities in the art of Will Maclean 21. Beauty and belonging 22. Beauty and economy 23. Mysterious equations: formulating good design for Textiles U.S.A. 24. Engineering as a process of beauty 25. Collaborative forms 26. Appropriation, imitation and creation: glass beadwork among Panará people 27. The beauty of sand-drawing in Vanuatu: kinship and continuity on Paama Island 28. The beautiful and the blessed: brightness, balance and bones in Kyrgyz shyrdak felt 29. From the North with my cello, or, five propositions on beauty