La "distincion de lo estetico" en clave pragmatista. Dewey, Gadamer y la antropologia de la cultura

John Dewey's criticism to the “museum conception of art” dates back to 1934, that is 26 years before Gadamer's well-known criticism of the so-called “aesthetic culture” and its radically differentiating attitude. But while Gadamer's criticism was basically focused on the philosophical tradition which was supposed to be at the basis of the modern idea of art as an alleged autonomous realm, Dewey was much more interested in the material culture favoring the separation of the arts and aesthetic pleasure from the other fields of our compartmentalized life. Of course, this kind of approach was nourished by Dewey's widely political approach to the role of artistic practices in human life, combined with a general naturalistic, but not naturalizable stance, towards experience. In this paper, I argue that an important contribution in configuring Dewey's peculiar kind of criticism of the separation of the arts from the rest of our lives in current societies was played by his closeness to anthropology and particularly to those figures like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski and their conception of culture.