Encyclopedia
The
humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment to studying aspects of the human condition and a qualitative approach that generally prevents a single paradigm from coming to define any discipline. The humanities are usually distinguished from the
social sciences and the
natural sciences and include subjects such as the
classics,
languages,
literature,
music,
philosophy, the
performing arts,
religion and the
visual arts. Other subjects at times included as humanities in some parts of the world include
archaeology, area studies, communications, cultural studies and history, although these are often regarded as social sciences elsewhere.
Branches
Arts
The arts are usually considered as part of the humanities. These include visual arts such as
painting and
sculpture, as well as performing arts such as
theatre and
dance, and
literature. Other humanities such as language are sometimes considered to be part of the arts, for example as the language arts.
Visual art
History
The great traditions in
art have a foundation in the art of one of six ancient civilizations:
Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions.
Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features .
In
Byzantine and
Gothic art of the
Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.
The
Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.
Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour . A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline . This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
Religious
Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.
The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by
Einstein and of unseen psychology by
Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development.
Increasing
global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
Media types
Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are
graphite pencils, pen and ink,
inked
brushes, wax
color pencils,
crayons,
charcoals,
pastels, and
markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing,
hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling,
stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a
draftsman or
draughtsman.
Painting
Painting taken literally is the practice of applying
pigment suspended in a carrier and a binding agent to a
surface such as
paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with
drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to
The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.
Colour is the essence of painting as
sound is of
music. Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including
Goethe,
Kandinsky,
Isaac Newton, have written their own
colour theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalisation for a colour equivalent. The word "
red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalised register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as
C or
C# in music, although the
Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with
cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as
sand,
cement,
straw or
wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of
Jean Dubuffet or
Anselm Kiefer.
Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.
Classics
The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of
classical antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Classical study was formerly considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities, but the classics declined in importance during the
20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas in humanities such as philosophy and literature remain strong.
History
History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the name of a
field of study,
history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of
humans, families, and
societies.
Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. However, in modern
academia, history is increasingly classified as a
social science, especially when
chronology is the focus.
Languages and literature
The study of individual modern and classical languages form the backbone of modern study of the humanities, while the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is a
social science. Since many areas of the humanities such as literature, history and philosophy are based on language, changes in language can have a profound effect on the other humanities. Literature, covering a variety of uses of language including prose forms ,
poetry and
drama, also lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign language usually include study of important works of the literature in that language, as well as the language itself .
Performing arts
The
performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some art object.
Performing arts include
acrobatics,
busking, comedy,
dance, magic,
music,
opera,
film,
juggling, marching arts, such as brass bands, and
theatre.
Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including
actors, comedians,
dancers, musicians, and
singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft.
Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with
costumes and
stage makeup, etc.
There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists
perform their work live to an audience. This is called
Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a
plastic art during the
Modern dance era.
;Music
Music as an academic discipline mainly focuses on two career paths, music
performance and music education . Students learn to play instruments, but also study music theory, musicology,
history of music and composition. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as concentration and listening.
;Theater
Theatre or
theater is the branch of the
performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as
opera,
ballet,
mime,
kabuki,
classical Indian dance,
Chinese opera,
mummers' plays, and
pantomime.
Dance
Dance generally refers to
human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or
performance setting.
Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication between humans or
animals , motion in inanimate objects , and certain
musical forms or
genres.
Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer.
Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on
social,
cultural,
aesthetic artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement to codified,
virtuoso techniques such as
ballet. In sports,
gymnastics,
figure skating and synchronized swimming are
dance disciplines while
Martial arts '
kata' are often compared to dances.
Religion and philosophy
Most historians trace the beginnings of
religious belief to the Neolithic Period. Most religious belief during this time period consisted of worship of a Mother Goddess, a Sky Father, and also worship of the
Sun and the
Moon as deities.
New
philosophies and
religions arose in both east and west, particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the world, with
Hinduism and
Buddhism in
India,
Zoroastrianism in
Persia being some of the earliest major faiths.
In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were
Taoism, Legalism, and
Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of
Plato and
Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of
Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.
Abrahamic religions are those
religions deriving from a common ancient
Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to
Abraham , a patriarch whose life is narrated in the
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and as a prophet in the
Quran and also called a prophet in Genesis 20:7. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include
Judaism,
Christianity,
Islam, and the
Bahá'í Faith, and comprises about half of the world's religious adherents.
History of the humanities
In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven
liberal arts evolved, involving grammar,
rhetoric and logic , along with arithmetic,
geometry,
astronomia and
music . These subjects formed the bulk of
medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."
A major shift occurred during the Renaissance, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practised, with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a
democratic society.
Humanities today
Humanities in the United States
Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which places an emphasis on all college students studying the humanities in addition to their specific area of study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included
Mortimer J. Adler and E.D. Hirsch.
The 1980
United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report,
The Humanities in American Life:
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.
Criticism of the traditional humanities/liberal arts degree program has been leveled by many that see them as both expensive and relatively "useless" in the modern American job market, where several years of specialized study is required in many/most job fields. This is in direct contrast to the early 20th century when approximately 3% to 6% of the public at large had a university degree, and having one was a direct path to a professional life.
After
World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college or university to be at least 60% of the population. As a consequence, degrees in such things as literature, art history, classics, etc, are no longer viewed as viable career path options by many. As a result, many graduates find themselves returning to school to earn another degree or waiting much longer than average to kick off their career successfully.
Meanwhile, there are many changes and debates occurring today in the humanities:
Questioning distinctions
The very concept of the ‘humanities’ as a class or kind, distinct from the ’sciences’, has come under repeated attack in the twentieth century.
T.S. Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an analysis of the history of science [i]. ...
argued that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with objective inference from unbiased observation than with much more value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More recently, Richard Rorty has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty’s position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new ‘fuzziness’. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where" the oppositions between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually fade away... In this situation, ‘the humanities’ would no longer think of themselves as such...."
Modernism and postmodernism
In the United States, the late
20th century saw a challenge to the "elitism" of the humanities, which
Edward Said has characterized as a "conservative philosophy of gentlemanly refinement, or sensibility." Such postmodernists argue that the humanities should go beyond the study of "
dead white males" to include work by women and people of color, and without religious bias. The French philosopher
Michel Foucault has been a very influential part of this movement, stating in
The Order of Things that "we can study only individuals, not human nature."
However some in the humanities believe that such changes may be detrimental, as they lead to moral relativism and the concept that one person's interpretation is as good as any other. The literary critic Denis Donoghue suggests that modern criticism reduces the rich symbolism of a play like Macbeth to a simplistic "find the villain", with Lady Macbeth regarded as the victim of bloody-minded, power-mad masculine society; the result is said to be what E. D. Hirsch Jr. refers to as declining cultural literacy.
The modernist considers that there is a canon of "great works" in literature and art which have an inherent quality, but the postmodernist argues that such ideas of greatness have been heavily biased by gender and culture. The modernist advocates close reading of a few works in literature, but the postmodernist generally favors more "extensive reading" of a large variety of works.
National institutions
President
Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965 , creating the National Council on the Humanities and funded the
National Endowment for the Humanities in 1969. NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.
NEH facilitated the creation of in the 56 U.S. states and territories. Each council operates independently, defining the "humanities" in relationship to the disciplines, subjects, and values valued in the regions they serve. Councils give grant funds to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the humanities in their region. Councils also offer diverse programs and services that respond to the needs of their communities and according to their own definitions of the humanities.
Humanities in the digital age
Language and literature are considered to lie at the heart of the humanities, so the impact of electronic communication is of great concern to those in the field. The immediacy of modern technology and the internet speeds up communication, but may threaten "deferred" forms of communication such as literature and "dumb down" language. The library is also changing rapidly as bookshelves are replaced by computer terminals. The humanities will have to adapt rapidly to these changes, though it is unlikely that the traditional pen and paper will disappear altogether.
Terminology
- Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as humanists. But that term also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some antihumanist scholars in the humanities reject.
See also
References
External links
