Ellen Dissanayake: 4 books

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for the joint evolutionary origin of art and intimacy,...

Every human society displays some form of behavior that can be called �art,� and in most societies other than our own the arts play an integral part in social life. Those who wish to understand art in its broadest sense, as a universal human endowment, need to go beyond modern Western elitist...

The growing absence of meaningful ritual in contemporary Western societies has led to cohesive research on the history of ritualizing behaviour in different cultures. The relatively new field of ritology, which includes neuroscience, anthropology, cultural psychology, psychotherapy and even art and...

The earliest rock art�in the Americas as elsewhere�is geometric or abstract. Until�Early Rock Art in the American West,�however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety....