Okakura Kakuzō's Art History: Cross-Cultural Encounters, Hegelian Dialectics and Darwinian Evolution

How Darwinian is cultural evolution?

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progres...

Cultural evolution is not equivalent to Darwinian evolution

Darwinian evolution, defined as evolution arising from selection based directly on the properties of individuals, does not account for cultural constructs providing the organizational basis of human societies. The difficulty with linking Darwinian evolution to structural properties of cultural constructs is exemplified with kinship terminologies, a cultural construct that structures and delinea...

Faust on Film: A Hegelian Modern Art

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between German Expressionist film and Hegel’s system of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the aesthetic qualities of Hanns Ewers’ The Student of Prague (1913) and F.W. Murnau’s Faust, I believe we have evidence to believe that the subjectivity that German Expressionist film sought to capture is aligned with the ‘interiority’ that Heg...

Copyright and Cross-Cultural Borrowing: Indo-Western Musical Encounters

History and Human Nature: Cross-cultural Universals and Cultural Relativities