10 Colour palettes and beauty Diana J. B. Young Introduction Some years after the anthropological debate on ‘aesthetics as a cross-cultural category’, Ingold famously wrote that social scientists treated culture as though it hovered above the material world, but did not permeate it (1996). Substitute ‘colour’ for ‘culture’ and you have the way that colour is approached by such scholars. That is, as I’ll argue in this chapter, colour is a culturally constructed concept – but there it hovers above things, things that are often described as though they were colourless. Colour does not suffuse them. More recent interest in ‘the line’ and in drawing as a way of revivifying anthro- pology, along with interest in making as a means of accessing and generating anthropological knowledge, emphasises the processual while following the anthro- pological tradition of ignoring colour or treating it as an incidental quality of things rather than as a primary material (Ingold 2010; Taussig 2009; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015). Ingold, following Deleuze and Guttari’s argument on matter as lowing, as having vitality and propulsion (2004), has recently argued for the substitution of material for matter (2010). The properties of materials anticipate the form that will emerge, he suggests (ibid). Lines, says Ingold, with their itinerant, emergent, lowing quality, are the bringing into being of things. Lines produce dynamism and change and are processual. He quotes art historian Bryson who says that painting covers up that process of making unlike drawing where the process is exposed. I agree with Ingold that the qualities of materials are crucial to making things. The idea of paint, and by inference of colour, as something to be dismissed or at any rate not attended to, I’ll explore here. I assume that whilst there are differ- ent technologies of colour in the sense of photographic, computer, dyes, paints, thread, cloth, land, rocks, gem stones, plastics, etc., colour is material. Colour materialised is one way to attend to beauty. Colour need not be opposed to line, as in Florentine Renaissance art historical dualism or in the Venetian separation of drawing and colouration, designo et colore, as distinct aesthetics, where the line is cerebral, structural, and colour sensuous and decorative (see Gage 1993, 117, 126). In this chapter, I suggest that to treat colours as a permanent aspect of surfaces is a mistake. Indeed the openness of colour to processes of transformation, I’ll argue, is what opens colour to becoming beautiful. Ingold wants to ‘assign primacy’ to the lows and properties of materials, not to the inished form (Ingold 2010). 15031-1300-FullBook.indd 148 11/16/2017 3:04:25 PM