scholarly journals Tobacco visions: shamanic drawings of the Wauja Indians

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aristoteles Barcelos Neto
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Animal Spirits ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Pencil And Paper ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ethnographic Collections

Abstract This article analyzes shamanic drawings based on research of two ethnographic collections gathered between 1978 and 2004 among the Wauja Indians of the Upper Xingu. The drawings present a visual interpretation of animal-spirits (the apapaatai) and their transformations, as seen by Wauja shamans in tobacco-induced trances and dreams. This article argues that drawing on paper allowed the shamans to broadly express their understanding of the many potential bodily forms the apapaatai can take, either voluntarily or involuntarily. The lack of a visual canon for visual representation of the apapaatai on paper gave the shamans the freedom to produce drawings which reflect an extraordinary diversity of singular perspectives. These singularities, when associated with the narratives of myths and dreams, potentiate the drawings as a kind of visual exegesis of Wauja cosmology. Further analysis considering material culture objects shows that the appropriation of pencil and paper by Wauja shamans channelled their creative energy towards an unexpected expansion in the conceptual boundaries of shamanic translation.

Roman Knossos: Discovering the City through the Evidence of Rescue Excavations

2010 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 339-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Sweetman
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Industrial Areas ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City ◽  
Do So

Thus far, much of the analysis of Roman and Late Antique Knossos has been based on the material culture produced through research excavations such as the Villa Dionysus and the Unexplored Mansion. Such excavations provide a tantalizing view of select aspects of the community and city and are essential for an understanding of the chronology of much of the material culture. However, these excavations cannot provide a complete picture of the character and diachronic range of the entire city. To do so, it is necessary to turn to the hitherto unpublished rescue excavations undertaken in dispersed locations of the valley. These range from the many graves located on the slopes of the surrounding hills, to monumental architectural remains in the area to the east of the Villa Dionysus, and to mundane features such as cisterns and roads in the modern village. In this paper, within the context of the published Roman material and with a focus on mosaics and ceramics, the evidence of the rescue material is used to develop a better perception of the city and all its residents, including the layout in terms of administrative, residential, and industrial areas from the first to the seventh centuryad.Μέχρι σήμερα ένα μεγάλο μέρος της εξέτασης της Κνωσού κατά τη ρωμαϊκή περίοδο και την ύστερη αρχαιότητα έχει βασιστεί στα υλικά κατάλοιπα από συστηματικές ανασκαφές, όπως στην Έπαυλη του Διονύσου και την Ανευξερεύνητη Οικία. Αυτές οι ανασκαφές παρουσιάςουν μία δελεαστική όψη επιλεκτικών εκφάνσεων της κοινότητας και της πόλης. Επιπλέον είναι σημαντικές για την κατανόηση της χρονολόγησης ενός μεγάλου μέρους των υλικών καταλοίπων. Ωστόσο, δεν μπορούν να παρουσιάσουν μία συνολική εικόνα του χαρακτήρα και της διαχρονικής αλληλουχίας όλης της πόλης. Για να γίνει κάτι τέτοιο είναι απαραίτητο να στρέψουμε την προσοχή μας στο μέχρι σήμερα αδημοσίευτο υλικό των σωστικών ανασκαφών που έχουν πραγματοποιηθεί σε διάφορες θέσεις στην πεδιάδα. Αυτές οι ανασκαφές ποικίλλουν: από τους πολλούς τάφους στις πλαγιές των γειτονικών λόφων, στα μνημειακά αρχιτεκτονικά κατάλοιπα στην περιοχή ανατολικά της Έπαυλης του Διονύσου και τα κοινότοπα στοιχεία, όπως δεξαμενές και δρόμοι στο σύγχρονο χωριό. Στο άρθρο αυτό, μέσα στο πλαίσιο του δημοσνευμένου ρωμαϊκού υλικού και με έμφαση στα ψηφιδωτά και την κεραμεική, τα δεδομένα από το υλικό των σωστικών ανασκαφών χρησιμοποιούνται για την καλύτερη κατανόηση της πόλης και όλων των κατοίκων της συμπεριλαμβανομένης της διάρθρωσής της ως προς τις περιοχές διοίκησης, κατοίκησης και βιοτεχνικής παραγωγής από τον πρώτο μέχρι τον έβδομο αιώνα μετά Χριστόν.

scholarly journals Four Sistine Ethiopians? The 1481 Ethiopian Embassy and the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican

Aethiopica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 121-135
Author(s):  
Marco Bonechi
Keyword(s):  
Red Sea ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Sandro Botticelli ◽  
Sistine Chapel ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

As proposed by several scholars, among the many modern on-lookers depicted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, foreign diplomats are also portrayed: e.g., the Portuguese ambassador and the Florentine emissaries. In the present paper it is suggested that portraits of four of the six members of the momentous Ethiopian delegation – which was headed by Antonio, chaplain of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr, and arrived at Rome in the first half of November 1481 – may be identified in two scenes, i.e. the Temptation of Moses by Sandro Botticelli and the Crossing of the Red Sea by Biagio d’Antonio Tucci. The paper focuses on the relationship between the visual representation of these four men – Antonio being most probably included – and two contemporary literary works: the treatise by Paride de Grassi on the ambassadors to the Roman curia and the writing by Andreas Trapezuntius on the Roman political situation at the end of 1481 respectively. Such  topics as the genuflexion of the Ethiopians and the content of Sixtus IV with the Ethiopian embassy are dealt with. The importance of the suggested identifications for the problematic chronology of the frescoes is also discussed, and so a few other aspects of the two narrative scenes.

scholarly journals Museums and indigenous memory: the Katxuyana’s collections and the contemporaneity of musealized material culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Adriana Russi ◽  
Astrid Kieffer-Døssing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Indigenous Memory ◽  
Ethnographic Collections

Currently, ethnographic collections are at the center of a debate about the new meaning of museum collections, which questions the actuality of the preserved material culture. These issues also refer to the promotion of otherness and protagonism of the ‘collected people’ in museums, which trigger the interest of both researchers and indigenous people. The same is happening with the collections of the Amerindian Katxuyana. These collections count more than 700 objects collected by different expeditions at different moments in time and the collections have been preserved for more than 50 years in European and Brazilian museums. Despite this long timespan the objects are material records from everyday life, rituals and festive moments, and they reveal a little about the life of this people in the first half of the twentieth century. Some parts of these collections have been the source of dialogical experiences between researchers and Katxuyana in order to evoke memories and knowledge. This paper describe a bit about this course of approximation between Katxuyana and the collections.

Infancy and Earliest Childhood in the Roman World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
High Infant Mortality ◽  
The Family ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Many

The book is a comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood in a cultural overview encompassing the entirety of the Roman Empire. It brings together some of the most recent discoveries and presents a fresh perspective on archaeological, historical, and social debates. Despite the developing emphasis in current scholarship on children in Roman culture, there has been little research on the role and significance of the youngest children in the family and society. Because of the very particular historical circumstances that affected the beginning of the life cycle of a Roman child, the book isolates the age group of the under one-year-olds to explore their lives as well as Roman attitudes towards the young and the perception of personhood. It integrates social and cultural history with archaeological evidence, funerary remains, material culture, and the iconography of infancy, an approach for which this subject matter is especially well suited. An examination of the many and varied strands of evidence enables us to contextualize the rhetoric about earliest childhood in Roman texts. The volume refutes the notion that high infant mortality conditioned Roman parents not to engage in the early life of their children or to view them, or their deaths, with indifference, and it concludes that even within the first weeks and months of life Roman children were invested with social and gendered identities.

The “Last Word” in Pictures: Enhanced Visual Interpretation of Revelation in Luther’s High German Bible (1534)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
W. Gordon Campbell
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Analysis And Evaluation ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Pictorial Illustration ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Visual Exegesis

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Martin Luther and his associates were active in Bible translation, publishing first the New Testament, from 1522 onwards, and by 1534—at roughly the mid-point of these endeavours—the whole Bible in German. Across this entire period, until his death, Luther continuously offered reader-viewers of the final New Testament book, Revelation, not only verbal commentary—in a preface (1522), or replacement preface with accompanying marginal notes (1530)—but visual exegesis, in the form of successive series of woodcut engravings designed to illustrate the text. A set of images commissioned for Luther’s 1534 German Bible was the crowning achievement of this visual interpretation: the 1534 Bible even extended pictorial illustration and adornment to the Gospels and Epistles, as well as Old Testament texts. From the perspective of art history, to regard these acclaimed illustrations as “the last word in pictures” represents no novelty, for the 1534 Luther Bible has long been counted among “the finest things that the art of printing produced in the Reformation period” (Schramm 1923, 22–23; my translation). However, to make the same assertion about the Revelation illustrations specifically, from an explicitly exegetical standpoint—and in English—is new and requires substantiation through supporting evidence. I will provide this through close analysis and evaluation of the interpretative moves that the 1534 images make, in conjunction with Luther’s translation and comment, over and against the visual exegesis of their predecessors created, from 1522 onwards, for Luther’s German New Testament.

scholarly journals Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Vessel Sherd Studies: Buddy Calvin Jones Sites in East Texas

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy K. Perttula
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Red River ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
East Texas ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Archaeological Collections ◽  
Ceramic Vessel ◽  
Ceramic Vessels ◽  
The Many

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Buddy Calvin Jones of Longview, Texas, identified and investigated archaeological sites across many counties in East Texas. Many of those sites were ancestral Caddo sites occupied from as early as ca. A.D. 850 to the early 1800s, and in his work he obtained surface collections of ceramic sherds from sites as well as large sherd assemblages and ceramic vessels from excavations in habitation deposits and Caddo cemeteries. Jones published only a few papers on his investigations, but his expansive archaeological collections (accompanied by notes and documentation) were donated to the Gregg County Historical Museum in 2003, where they are available for study. Since that time, his various site specific collections of ancestral Caddo material culture remains have begun to be documented, along with more extensive analyses of excavations of Caddo sites in the Little Cypress Creek basin in Upshur County, Texas and along the Red River in Red River County, Texas. This article continues the analyses of the 100+ ancestral Caddo ceramic collections from sites in the Buddy Jones collection by focusing on several of the many previously unanalyzed sherd samples obtained from sites throughout much of East Texas. Jones did not publish analyses of any of these collections in his lifetime.

scholarly journals The lithic assemblage from Lapa da Galinha (Alcanena, Portuguese Estremadura) and the “Cave Megalithism” phenomenon in the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Van Calker
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Funerary Practices ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Lithic Assemblage ◽  
Funeral Practices ◽  
Minimum Number ◽  
The Many

The present work proposes to present the analysis results of the flaked stone artefacts from Lapa da Galinha, a cave necropolis, located in the Estremadura Limestone Massif, that is a classic example of the funerary practices of the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE. The excavation dates back to 1908, and it was performed by members of the current National Museum of Archaeology, resulting in an extensive votive ensemble, associated with a minimum number of 70 burials. The evident collective nature of the burials, the votive ensemble and the rituals there identified emphasise its “Cave Megalithism” character, an expression that invokes only one of the many facets of the complex phenomenon that is Megalithism. Since the Megalithic funerary structures, such as natural caves, are utilized over a long period of time, it’s not easy- but not impossible- to reclaim in full, the events that took place. Focusing on the flaked stone artefacts, the main goal of this text is to contribute to the reconstruction of the belief system that characterizes the Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities from this region. Hence, the morpho-technological criteria, that followed previously established standards, and raw material analysis of the artefactual categories, even on a macroscopic level, were absolutely essential for us to suggest an extensive diachrony of the funerary use of the natural cave With that in mind, we reflected on the importance of the transformations that occur within the material culture exposed throughout the text and their chronological meaning, but also on the true potential of this artefactual category as a tool to build a solid perspective regarding the symbolism inherent to these funeral practices.

scholarly journals Maud Allan's Salomé : a case study into the psychology of costume, dance and performance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dori Kwong
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Object Description ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
First Time

Maud Allan (1873-1956) was a trailblazer of modern expressionist dance and costume design who drew from her family’s tradition of shoemaking and her experience in corset making to design and construct a novel costume for her renowned and controversial performance, The Vision of Salomé (1906). She wore this costume more than 250 times to perform on the international stage, becoming one of the most successful dancers of her era from 1906 to 1925. By challenging the customs and conventions of Edwardian London through the use of her revealing costume and performance, she was also pioneering costume design, and yet scholarship to date has largely ignored the costume itself as an important material culture object. By using a material culture approach, and performing an object description and analysis of the two sets of Salomé costumes held at Dance Collection Danse in Toronto, this major research project establishes for the first time the many important innovations of Allan’s costume design techniques such as illusion mesh, pearl netting, bejeweled breastplates, eyelet hook bra fasteners and other novel details. Furthermore, I argue that scholarly object analysis used alongside theories of enclothed cognition allows us to elucidate the powerful affective link between psychology and dance costumes, further heightening our appreciation of Allan’s dance costume, while also specifying the details of her problematic appropriation of elements of Orientalism and the Femme Fatale in constructing the costume. More than a century after its creation, the aesthetic of Allan’s costume innovations continues to resonate in other dance costumes today.

scholarly journals DEPERSONALIZED OBJECTS: PARADOXES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (47) ◽  
pp. 113-136
Author(s):  
Dmitry Baranov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Shape Design ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
The People ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
Ethnographic Collections

In ethnographic studies of material culture, things are described primarily as signs of social phenomena; but things themselves remain in the shadows. Even when it comes to museum research, a material object is considered either as an element of the classification series, or as an example of the manufacturing and living techniques in the local tradition, or as a representative of the cultural contexts from which it was removed. The very collection format of museum storage hides the uniqueness of a thing, because the collection is not able to accommodate its singular nature, since each thing is really a “universe of individuality”. The article examines possible ways for museum ethnography to go beyond its inherent anonymous and depersonalizing discourse. As an alternative to the latter, a “biographical” focus is proposed, which allows one to see subjectivity and individuality in things. The uniqueness of a thing is manifested not only in its biography, but also in its very materiality: material, shape, design, texture, color, weight, smell, etc. The close attention of the ethnographic museum to specific objects and the people to whom they belonged makes it possible to highlight those details and particulars, without which it is impossible to understand culture as a whole.

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