ABSTRACT
Latin Ars was likewise used of professional or technical skill as something acquired and practiced; skilled work, and craftsmanship, as well as artificial methods and all human ingenuity, such as a cunning trick or a clever military tactic. The modern, “aesthetic” sense of art as a detached appreciation of higher-order sensitivities is part of the “institutional” understanding of art against which ethologists of art militate, and it tends to emphasize the skill of reception. The heart of Ellen Dissanayake’s thesis is that art is making special, and she claims “that it is as distinguishing and universal in humankind as speech or the skillful manufacture and use of tools”. Absorbing the insights of the ethology of art allows us to redefine religion in such a way that it is seen as persistent behavior motivated by experiences of “special” sacred experiences that involves a class of cognitions concerning the normativity of future behavior, and thus determining future behavior.
