{"id":74290,"date":"2012-10-04T22:35:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T06:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18611"},"modified":"2012-10-04T22:35:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T06:35:19","slug":"beauty-is-objective-subjective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/10\/04\/beauty-is-objective-subjective\/","title":{"rendered":"Beauty is objective &amp; subjective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/10\/230px-Nofretete_Neues_Museum.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-18612\" title=\"230px-Nofretete_Neues_Museum\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/10\/230px-Nofretete_Neues_Museum.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"230\" height=\"337\" \/><\/a>On occasion it is useful to outline definitions and frameworks. One thing that I often hear (i.e., I am constantly told) is that beauty is a subjective, and culturally defined, construct. In particular it is common for me to listen to explanations of &#8220;Eurocentric Western&#8221; beauty standards, as if they are <em>sui generis<\/em>. These views do not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, they grasp upon a real phenomenon: that beauty standards are malleable and vary across time and place. But like Classical Greeks who may have promoted a converse view, that beauty is an objective aesthetic reflection of innate characteristics of human value, modern subjectivists ignore the empirical reality in favor of a clean and simple narrative.<\/p>\n<p>From where I stand it strikes me that Western intellectuals who engage in a discourse which engages the construction of the non-Western Other sometimes forget that the non-Western Other is itself a social construct with only constrained utility. To unpack it in more plain language, <strong>non-Western societies are diverse across themselves, and can not be bracketed as \u00a0singular non-Western Other in a deep sense<\/strong>. And, they exhibit strong similarities to each other, and Western &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/M73en0HRIDw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On occasion it is useful to outline definitions and frameworks. One thing that I often hear (i.e., I am constantly told) is that beauty is a subjective, and culturally defined, construct. In particular it is common for me to listen to explanations of &amp;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,991],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-beauty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74290"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74380,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74290\/revisions\/74380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}