beauty ! the making of it across cultures.
Great read on the cultural construction of beauty across cultures with a Chinese perspective.
Focusing on changing representations of beauty in Chinese and Japanese cultures, Cho Kyo, in The Search for the Beautiful Woman, attempts to clarify such riddles from the angle of comparative cultural history.
What constitutes a beautiful woman? Intrinsically, criteria vary greatly depending upon peoples and cultures. A woman thought of as a beauty in one culture may be considered plain in another. This is not normally in our consciousness. Rather, images of beauty are thought to be universal across all cultures. Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn gain worldwide fame as beauties, not simply in American eyes but in Asian and African eyes. But on what criteria?
Princess Shokushi from One Hundred Poets by Katsukawa Shunsho. Tokugawa, private collection.
Have universal standards for determining beauty emerged with the global reach of consumer culture and of the media? As products of multinational enterprises transcend national boundaries to spread worldwide, people of different races and nations have come to use the same cosmetics, and people of different skin colors and facial and bodily features have come to don similar fashions. As a result, the fact that different cultures have different standards of beauty was forgotten before we realized it.
How foreign races were regarded It was in the 20th century that images of beauty became homogenized from the West to Asia and Africa. Before then, aesthetics of facial features not only differed, but, with some exceptions, different peoples thought one another ugly.
Beauty as a metaphor
Detailed inspection of changes in aesthetics from age to age clarifies that criteria for "beauty" are affected by elements other than beautiful looks. "Insiders" are beautiful, "outsiders" are ugly. "The noble" are beautiful, "the humble" are ugly. "The upper" are beautiful, "the lower" are ugly. "The affluent" are beautiful, "the poor" are ugly. "The holy" are beautiful, "the secular" are ugly. "The good" are beautiful, "the evil" are ugly. The more we go back to ancient times, the more striking this tendency becomes.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NL08Ad03.html
Focusing on changing representations of beauty in Chinese and Japanese cultures, Cho Kyo, in The Search for the Beautiful Woman, attempts to clarify such riddles from the angle of comparative cultural history.
What constitutes a beautiful woman? Intrinsically, criteria vary greatly depending upon peoples and cultures. A woman thought of as a beauty in one culture may be considered plain in another. This is not normally in our consciousness. Rather, images of beauty are thought to be universal across all cultures. Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn gain worldwide fame as beauties, not simply in American eyes but in Asian and African eyes. But on what criteria?
Princess Shokushi from One Hundred Poets by Katsukawa Shunsho. Tokugawa, private collection.
Have universal standards for determining beauty emerged with the global reach of consumer culture and of the media? As products of multinational enterprises transcend national boundaries to spread worldwide, people of different races and nations have come to use the same cosmetics, and people of different skin colors and facial and bodily features have come to don similar fashions. As a result, the fact that different cultures have different standards of beauty was forgotten before we realized it.
How foreign races were regarded It was in the 20th century that images of beauty became homogenized from the West to Asia and Africa. Before then, aesthetics of facial features not only differed, but, with some exceptions, different peoples thought one another ugly.
Beauty as a metaphor
Detailed inspection of changes in aesthetics from age to age clarifies that criteria for "beauty" are affected by elements other than beautiful looks. "Insiders" are beautiful, "outsiders" are ugly. "The noble" are beautiful, "the humble" are ugly. "The upper" are beautiful, "the lower" are ugly. "The affluent" are beautiful, "the poor" are ugly. "The holy" are beautiful, "the secular" are ugly. "The good" are beautiful, "the evil" are ugly. The more we go back to ancient times, the more striking this tendency becomes.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NL08Ad03.html
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:29
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