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The Bungling Host motif appears in countless indigenous cultures in North America and beyond. In this groundbreaking work Daniel Clément has gathered nearly four hundred North American variants of the story to examine how myths acquire meaning for their indigenous users and explores how seemingly absurd narratives can prove to be a rich source of meaning when understood within the appropriate context. In analyzing the Bungling Host tales, Clément considers not only material culture but also social, economic, and cultural life; Native knowledge of the environment; and the world of plants and animals. Clément’s analysis uncovers four operational modes in myth construction and clarifies the relationship between mythology and science. Ultimately he demonstrates how science may have developed out of an operational mode that already existed in the mythological mind.
African Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group. Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best known. Anitra Nettleton’s study of the uses and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain an understanding of form, style and content in African art objects. Her drawings of each and every headrest encountered become a major part of the project.
"The present exhibition, whose success is due to the diligence and sustained efforts of the American Federation of Arts, is one of a series of continual Franco-American cultural exchanges. Founded on a long tradition, these exchanges have been able to combine the exceptional with the revelation of remove and mysterious worlds, here in the realm of African musical instruments, which lies at the boundary between the sacred and profane, a world largely unknown, but rich and teeming in aesthetic forms and in the range of its sonorities, and which every amateur or connoisseur is invited to discover with interest and amazement." --Foreword
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