ABSTRACT
At one point in his initial argument for the motion ‘aesthetics is a crosscultural category’, Jeremy Coote remarks on the spate of anthropological monographs that have appeared in the past few years with the word ‘aesthetics’ in their titles, and he wonders why this word so rarely appeared in such titles before, say, 1970. Undeniably, social science and anthropology have recently been seized by a concern with aesthetics (and also poetics). The reasons for this have to do, I think, with current theorizing about modernity and modernism, and the place of anthropology and of social theorizing in general, within late twentieth-century Western culture and society.
