Ellen Franzen Dissanayake came to Washington State College from
Walla Walla in 1953 as a music major. At the time, undergraduates
were required to take four science classes. After taking the
legendary BioSci 101 from Winfield Hatch and Human Physiology from
Donald S. Farner, she found it easy to "think biologically," which
influenced her subsequent interest in the evolutionary origins of
the arts.
At graduation, she married fellow student and zoologist John
Eisenberg, and they moved to Berkeley, where he would attend
graduate school. He was well on his way to becoming a prominent
mammalian ethologist and was a rich source of thinking on behavior
and natural selection.
Later, she married S.B. Dissanayake, a Sri Lankan professor of
dentistry with an interest in public health. Her life in Sri Lanka
seems idyllic, an invigorating combination of the tropics, the
arts, and intellectual stimulation.
Throughout all this, her ideas about a biological basis for the
arts had continued to develop. Through contact with anthropologists
Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger, she won a six-month fellowship
from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and spent six months
doing research in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. When she returned
to Sri Lanka, she wrote What Is Art For? (Univ. of
Washington Press 1988).
Dissanayake continued to develop her ideas in Homo
Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Free Press 1992) and
Art and Intimacy (Univ. of Washington Press 2000).
Dissanayake believes that the arts are an evolutionary
behavioral adaptation that began with the intimate interaction
between mother and infant and became the basis for social ritual,
bonding, and cohesion. Far from being the fortunate side effect of
other evolutionary developments or evolutionary "cheesecake," as
some evolutionary psychologists believe, art was, and is, essential
to human survival.
Lingua Franca ran an excellent overview article of
Dissanayake's work. Click here to
read it. Also, see Dissanayake's
website.
Tim Steury, editor of Washington State Magazine,
interviewed Dissanayake at her home in Seattle. The portion of the
interview that follows touches on her latest thinking about
mother-infant interaction as a precursor to art. Watch for a
feature about her work in the print version of Washington State
Magazine later this year.
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