Tosca Snijdelaar: Was Anxiety the Motivation for Art Making in Deep Prehistory?
The incentive for the creation of art in deep prehistory might have been experiencing anxiety. The function of human anxiety is important for timely noticing and dealing with threats and, therefore, has obvious advantages for survival. Moreover, anxious people are capable of creativity. In this article, I confirm Dissanayake’s theory that rituals, being art behaviour, were the first art (products) ever created. It is generally accepted that rituals were performed to mitigate anxiety. Experiencing anxiety involves a non-sexual reaction of the genitals in human females and males. The concurrent experience of anxiety and this genital reaction could have led early hominins to ascribe an apotropaic meaning and function to these body parts. I propose that genitals, as body parts or in the form of artefacts, played a role I apotropaic ritual. I distinguish between primary and secondary apotropaic art.
[Paleolithic, origins of art, anxiety, apotropaic, rituals]
