Ethics and Rock Art: Images and Power addresses the distinctive ways in which ethical considerations pertain to rock art research within the larger context of the archaeological ethical debate. Marks on stone, with their social and religious implications, give rise to distinctive ethical concerns within the scholarly enterprise as different perceptions between scholars and Native Americans are encountered in regard to worldviews, concepts of space, time, and in the interpretation of the imagery itself. This discourse addresses issues such as the conflicting paradigms of oral traditions and archaeological veracity, differing ideas about landscapes in which rock art occurs, the intrusion of "desired knowledge", and how the past may be robbed by changing interpretations and values on both sides. Case studies are presented in regard to shamanism and war-related imagery. Also addressed are issues surrounding questions of art, aesthetics, and appropriation of imagery by outsiders. Overall, this discourse attempts to clarify points of contention between Euro-American scholars and Native Americans so that we can better recognize the origins of differences and thus promote better mutual understanding in these endeavors.

What do we mean by 'art'? As a category of objects, the concept belongs to a Western cultural tradition, originally European and now increasingly global, but how useful is it for understanding other traditions? To understand art as a universal human value, we need to look at how the concept was constructed in order to reconstruct it through an understanding of the wider world. Western art values have a pervasive influence upon non-Western cultures and upon Western attitudes to them. This innovative yet accessible new text explores the ways theories of art developed as Western knowledge of the world expanded through exploration and trade, conquest, colonisation and research into other cultures, present and past. It considers the issues arising from the historical relationships which brought diverse artistic traditions together under the influence of Western art values, looking at how art has been used by colonisers and colonised in the causes of collecting and commerce, cultural hegemony and autonomous identities.World Art questions conventional Western assumptions of art from an anthropological perspective which allows comparison between cultures. It treats art as a property of artefacts rather than a category of objects, reclaiming the idea of 'world art' from the 'art world'. This book is essential reading for all students on anthropology of art courses as well as students of museum studies and art history, based on a wide range of case studies and supported by learning features such as annotated further reading and chapter opening summaries.

Jewish texts are a hidden treasure of information on Jewish art and artists, the patronage and use of art, and the art created by non-Jews. Most of these texts are written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Those scholars able to read them often do not understand their art-historical importance, while many art historians who would understand the references to art are hindered by language barriers. Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts includes fifty translated texts dating from the bibilical period to the twentieth century. They touch on issues such as iconoclasm, the art of the 'Other', artists and their practices, synagogue architecture, Jewish ceremonial art, and collecting. Through the introduction and essays that accompany each text, Vivian Mann articulates the importance and relevance of these sources to our understanding of art history.

OBSERVATIONS OF THE SUN, moon, planets, and stars played a central role in ancient Maya lifeways, as they do today among contemporary Maya who maintain the traditional ways. This pathfinding book reconstructs ancient Maya astronomy and cosmology through the astronomical information encoded in Precolumbian Maya art and confirmed by the current practices of living Maya peoples.

Susan Milbrath opens the book with a discussion of modern Maya beliefs about astronomy, along with essential information on naked-eye observation. She devotes subsequent chapters to Precolumbian astronomical imagery, which she traces back through time, starting from the Colonial and Postclassic eras. She delves into many aspects of the Maya astronomical images, including the major astronomical gods identified with the sun, moon, naked-eye planets, and constellations and their associated glyphs, astronomical almanacs in the Maya codices (painted books), and changes in the imagery of the heavens over time.

This investigation yields new data and a new synthesis of information about the specific astronomical events and cycles recorded in Maya art and architecture. The first major study to focus on the relationship between art and astronomy in ancient Maya culture, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Precolumbian art history and anthropology, archaeoastronomy, ethnography, and comparative mythology.

Susan Milbrath is Curator of Latin American Art and Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Affiliate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. A former student of Esther Pasztory, she did postdoctoral work with Michael Coe and Anthony F. Aveni and served asguest curator of "Star Gods of the Ancient Americas", a traveling exhibit that opened at the American Museum of Natural History and toured nationally between 1982 and 1984.

Miniatures - canoes, houses and totems, and human figurines - have been produced on the Northwest Coast since at least the sixteenth century. What has motivated Indigenous artists to produce these tiny artworks? Through case studies and conversations with artists themselves, So Much More Than Art convincingly dismisses the persistent understanding that miniatures are simply children's toys or tourist trinkets. Jack Davy's highly original exploration of this intricate pursuit demonstrates the importance of miniaturization as a technique for communicating complex cultural ideas between generations and communities, as well as across the divide that separates Indigenous and settler societies.

In this newly revised edition of ALASKA'S TOTEM POLES, readers learn about the history and use of totems, clan crests, symbolism, and much more. A special section describes where to go to view totems. Foreword writer David A. Boxley offers the unique perspective of a Native Alaskan carver who has been a leader in the renaissance of totem carving.

The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation.

This collection focuses on David Lewis-Williams and the extent of his personal impact on the field of rock art research. It is largely through his work that San rock art has come to be understood so well, as a complex symbolic and metaphoric representation of San religious beliefs and practices. The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate the depth and wide geographical impact of Lewis-Williams' contribution, with particular emphasis on the use of theory and methodology drawn from ethnography that he has used with inspirational effect in understanding the meaning and context of rock art in various parts of the world. "Seeing and Knowing "explores how best archaeologists study rock art when there exist ethnographic or ethno-historic bases of insight, and how they study rock art when there do not appear to exist ethnographic or ethno-historic bases of insight--in short, how to understand and learn from rock art with and without ethnography. Because many of the chapters are based on solid fieldwork and ethnographic research, they offer a new body of work that provides the evidence for differentiation between knowing and simply seeing. This volume is unique in that it focuses exclusively on rock art and ethnography, and covers such a wide geographic range of examples on this topic, from southern Africa, to Scandinavia, to the United States. Many of the chapters explore studies in other rock art regions of the world where variation and constancy can be observed and explored across distances both in space and in time. The editors have entitled the book "Seeing and Knowing "to echo Lewis-Williams' "Believing and Seeing "published" "almost thirty years ago; they say "seeing" again because" "looking at rock art is and will always be central, and then" "what is seen when human eyes and minds look; they say" ""knowing" in recognition that, by his work and by his" "example, archaeologists now know a little more than they" "knew before. Even so, as Lewis-Williams will be the first to" "say, we still know only a fraction.

Thirty years ago Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today, it is considered to be an important contemporary art movement, often promoted as being connected to a deep cultural past. Becoming Art provides a new analysis of the shifting cultural and social contexts that surround the production of Aboriginal art. Transcending the boundaries between anthropology and art history, the book draws on arguments from both disciplines to provide a unique interdisciplinary perspective that places the artists themselves at the centre of the argument.Western art history has traditionally regarded Aboriginal art as distanced from time and place. Becoming Art uses the recent history of Aboriginal art to challenge some of the presuppositions of western art discourse and western art worlds. It argues for a more cross-cultural perspective on world art history.

The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Maori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg: hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes - like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins. In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can't travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored. The folk tales in this book tell of these lost lands and hidden people, remembered through migrations, dreams and memories.

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folkore Award 2003Malanggan are among the most treasured possessions in the Pacific, yet they continue to confound anthropologists. Central to funerals in New Ireland, these 'death' figures are intended to decompose as symbolic representations of the dead. Wrapped in images that are conceived of as 'skins', they are both visually complex and intriguing. This book is the first to interpret these mysterious agents of resemblance and connection as having a cognitive rather than a linguistic basis.Found in nearly every ethnographic museum in the world, Malanggan collections have been left virtually untouched. This original study begins by tracing the history of the collections and moves on to consider the role these artefacts play in sacrifice, ritual and exchange. What is the relationship between Malanggan and memory? How can Malanggan be understood as a life force as well as a vehicle for thought? In an analysis of the cognitive aspects of Malanggan, Kuchler offers a highly original conceptualization of the centrality of the knot as a mode of being, thinking and binding in the Pacific."Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice "is a groundbreaking study. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork and collection research, it provides an incisive new take on one of the Pacific's classic puzzles, as well as a wealth of new information and resources for anthropologists, collectors and curators alike.

Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folkore Award 2003
Malanggan are among the most treasured possessions in the Pacific, yet they continue to confound anthropologists. Central to funerals in New Ireland, these 'death' figures are intended to decompose as symbolic representations of the dead. Wrapped in images that are conceived of as 'skins', they are both visually complex and intriguing. This book is the first to interpret these mysterious agents of resemblance and connection as having a cognitive rather than a linguistic basis.
Found in nearly every ethnographic museum in the world, Malanggan collections have been left virtually untouched. This original study begins by tracing the history of the collections and moves on to consider the role these artefacts play in sacrifice, ritual and exchange. What is the relationship between Malanggan and memory? How can Malanggan be understood as a life force as well as a vehicle for thought? In an analysis of the cognitive aspects of Malanggan, Küchler offers a highly original conceptualization of the centrality of the knot as a mode of being, thinking and binding in the Pacific.
"Malanggan: Art, Memory and Sacrifice "is a groundbreaking study. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork and collection research, it provides an incisive new take on one of the Pacific's classic puzzles, as well as a wealth of new information and resources for anthropologists, collectors and curators alike.

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery.
Taking as his starting point the magnificent Linton panel in the Iziko-South African Museum in Cape Town, J. D. Lewis-Williams examines the artistic and cultural significance of rock art and how this art sheds light on how San image-makers conceived their world. It also details the European encounter with rock art as well as the contentious European interaction with the artists' descendants, the contemporary San people.

The anthropology of art is currently at a crossroads. Although well versed in the meaning of art in small-scale tribal societies, anthropologists are still wrestling with the question of how to interpret art in a complex, post-colonial environment. Alfred Gell recently confronted this problem in his posthumous book Art and Agency. The central thesis of his study was that art objects could be seen, not as bearers of meaning or aesthetic value, but as forms mediating social action. At a stroke, Gell provocatively dismissed many longstanding but tired questions of definition and issues of aesthetic value. His book proposed a novel perspective on the roles of art in political practice and made fresh links between analyses of style, tradition and society.
Offering a new overview of the anthropology of art, this book begins where Gell left off. Presenting wide-ranging critiques of the limits of aesthetic interpretation, the workings of objects in practice, the relations between meaning and efficacy and the politics of postcolonial art, its distinguished contributors both elaborate on and dissent from the controversies of Gell's important text. Subjects covered include music and the internet as well as ethnographic traditions and contemporary indigenous art. Geographically its case studies range from India to Oceania to North America and Europe.

The anthropology of art is currently at a crossroads. Although well versed in the meaning of art in small-scale tribal societies, anthropologists are still wrestling with the question of how to interpret art in a complex, post-colonial environment. Alfred Gell recently confronted this problem in his posthumous book Art and Agency. The central thesis of his study was that art objects could be seen, not as bearers of meaning or aesthetic value, but as forms mediating social action. At a stroke, Gell provocatively dismissed many longstanding but tired questions of definition and issues of aesthetic value. His book proposed a novel perspective on the roles of art in political practice and made fresh links between analyses of style, tradition and society.
Offering a new overview of the anthropology of art, this book begins where Gell left off. Presenting wide-ranging critiques of the limits of aesthetic interpretation, the workings of objects in practice, the relations between meaning and efficacy and the politics of postcolonial art, its distinguished contributors both elaborate on and dissent from the controversies of Gell's important text. Subjects covered include music and the internet as well as ethnographic traditions and contemporary indigenous art. Geographically its case studies range from India to Oceania to North America and Europe.

Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine is a survey of domestic government and party printed propaganda in revolutionary Ukraine. It is the first account in English to study these materials using an illustrative sample of printed texts and to assess their impact based on secret police and agitator situation reports. The book surveys texts published by the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Ukrainian Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Independentists, Ukrainian Communist Party (UCP), Ukraine's Bolshevik Party (CPU), and anti-Bolshevik warlords. It includes 46 reproductions and describes the infrastructure that underlay the production and dissemination of printed text propaganda. The author argues that in the war of words neither Ukrainian failures nor Bolshevik success should be exaggerated. Each side managed to sway opinion in its favour in specific places at specific times.

More than 125 vivid color photographs display Indian-made wrought silver, turquoise, shell and coral jewelry brought together from the American Southwest's bright deserts, red canyon and timeless pueblos. The authors explore the diversity of this hand-crafted jewelry from historic collections as well as those available today on reservations and in shops and galleries. They explain the heritage conveyed by these distinctive products of Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grande Pueblo artisans.

This introduction to the art of tribal peoples of North America, Africa, and the South Pacific does not briefly cover the hundreds of artistic traditions in these three vast areas but rather studies in depth thirty-six art styles within all three areas using the methods of art history, including stylistic analysis and iconographic interpretation. Emphasis is on the art in cultural context and as a system of visual communication within each tribal area. Where appropriate for a more complete understanding of the art, data from archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, religion, and other humanistic disciplines are included.Among the peoples and cultures whose art is studied are the Haida, Kwakiutl, and Tlingit; the Hohokam and Mongollon, the Anasazi and Hopi; the Dogon and Bamana of Mali; the Asante of Ghana; the Benin, Yoruba, and Ibo of Nigeria; the Fan, the Bamum, and the Kuba of Central Africa; Australian aboriginal and Island New Guinea art; Island Melanesia art; central and eastern Polynesia; Hawaii and the Maori in Marginal Polynesia.The format of the text and selected illustrations is based on seventeen years of teaching African, North American Indian, and South Pacific art to undergraduate and graduate students at Herbert H. Lehman College (CUNY), New York University, and Columbia University. The book is intended for art history and anthropology students and the interested lay reader or collector. The detailed notes at the end of the book are for further study, research, and understanding of the tribal art style under discussion.

A stunning introduction to the history of Japanese printmaking, with highlights from the de Young museum's vast collectionIn 1868, Japan underwent a dramatic transformation following the overthrow of the shogun by supporters of Emperor Meiji, marking the end of feudal military rule and ushering in a new era of government that promoted modernizing the country and interacting with other nations.Japanese print culture, which had flourished for more than a century with the production of color woodcuts (the so-called ukiyo-e, or "floating world" images), also changed course during the Meiji era (1868-1912), as societal changes and the once-isolationist country's new global engagement provided a wealth of new subjects for artists to capture. Featuring selections from the renowned Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts' permanent collection, Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World documents the shift from delicately colored ukiyo-e depictions of actors, courtesans, and scenic views to brightly colored images of Western architecture, modern military warfare, technology (railroad trains, steam-powered ships, telegraph lines), and Victorian fashions and customs.

This engaging exploration of the Maya pantheon introduces readers to the complex stories of Mesoamerican divinity through the stunning carvings, ceramics, and metalwork of the Classic period Focusing on the period between A.D. 250 and 900, Lives of the Gods reveals that ancient Maya artists evoked a pantheon as rich and complex as the more familiar Greco-Roman, Hindu-Buddhist, and Egyptian deities. The authors show how this powerful cosmology informed some of the greatest creative achievements of Maya civilization, represented here from the monumental to the miniature through more than 140 works in jade, stone, and clay. Thematic chapters supported by new scholarship on recent archaeological discoveries detail the different types of gods and their domains, the role of the divine in the lives of the ancient Maya, and the continuation of these traditions from the colonial period through the present day. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (November 21, 2022-April 2, 2023) Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (May 7-September 3, 2023)

Glory and Exile: Haida History Robes of Jut-ke-Nay Hazel Wilson marks the first time this monumental cycle of ceremonial robes by the Haida artist Jut-Ke-Nay (The One People Speak Of)-also known as Hazel Anna Wilson-is viewable in its entirety. On 51 large blankets, Wilson uses painted and appliqued imagery to combine traditional stories, autobiography, and commentary on events such as smallpox epidemics and environmental destruction into a grand narrative that celebrates the resistance and survival of the Haida people, while challenging the colonial histories of the Northwest Coast. Of the countless robes Wilson created over fifty-plus years, she is perhaps best known for The Story of K'iid K'iyaas, a series about the revered tree made famous by John Vaillant's 2005 book The Golden Spruce. But her largest and most important work is the untitled series of blankets featured here. Wilson always saw these works as public art, to be widely seen and, importantly, understood. In addition to essays by Robert Kardosh and Robin Laurence, the volume features texts about each robe by Wilson herself; her words amplify the power of her striking imagery by offering historical and personal context for the people, characters, and places that live within her colossal work. Glory and Exile, which also features personal recollections by Wilson's daughter Kun Jaad Dana Simeon, her brother Allan Wilson, and Haida curator and artist Nika Collison, is a fitting tribute to the breathtaking achievements of an artist whose vision will help Haida knowledge persist for many generations to come.