The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial artsVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts
Veblen, Thorstein
Industrial arts -- History; Industries -- History; Technology -- History; Workmanship -- History
There is a further and obscurer aspect to this facile borrowing. In
the cultures where the technological and decorative elements are
first invented, or acquired at first-hand by slow habituation, there
will in the nature of the case come in with them into the scheme of
technology or of art more or less, but presumably a good deal, of
extraneous or extrinsic by-products of their acquirement, in the way
of magical or symbolic efficacy imputed and adhering to them in the
habits of thought of their makers and users. Something of this kind has
already been set out in some detail as regards the domestication and
early use of the crop plants and animals; and the like is currently
held to be true, perhaps in a higher degree, for the beginnings of
art, both representative and decorative, by the latterday students of
that subject; the beginnings of art being held to have been magical
and symbolic in the main, so far as regards the prime motives to its
inception and its initial principles.[89]
In the origination and indigenous working-out of any given
technological factor, e. g., such as the use of the crop plants or the
domestic animals, elements of imputed anthropomorphism are likely to be
comprised in the habitual apprehension of the nature of these factors,
and so find lodgment in the technological routine that has to do with
them; the result being, chiefly, a limitation on their uses and on the
ways and means by which they are utilised, together with a margin of
lost motion in the way of magical and religious observances presumed
to be intrinsic to the due working of such factors. The ritual
connected with tillage and cattle-breeding shows this magical side of a
home-bred technology perhaps as felicitously as anything; but similar
phenomena are by no means infrequent in the mechanic arts, and in the
fine arts these principles of symbolism and the like are commonly
present in such force as to afford ground for distinguishing one school
or epoch of art from another.
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