Towards Hybrid Aesthetics

Abstract

In order to avoid limiting hybridity to sterile ‘racial’ considerations, it needs to be placed firmly in its cultural context. Cultures and civilisations have often been taken as synonyms. For E.B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, words such as ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ refer to the body of sciences, arts, beliefs, moral principles, laws, customs, in short all the habits and faculties acquired by human beings as part of their social life. Tylor draws a distinction between three stages in the evolution of societies: the savage, the barbarian and the civilised. He thus reintroduces a hierarchy between ‘civilisation’, which is reserved for the highest point on his evolutionary scale, and ‘culture’, which can apply to the so-called ‘primitive’. This eminently questionable hierarchy has been queried by anthropologists such as Sapir who distinguishes between ‘authentic’ and ‘spurious’ cultures, categories which one also has difficulty accepting.