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This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape
notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic
studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and
Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and
artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how
peoples in both regions 'live in' and 'navigate' time each through
their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions
by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original
theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable
reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and
in anthropological approaches to time.
This volume examines the way objects and images relate to and shape
notions of temporality and history. Bringing together ethnographic
studies from the Lowlands of Central and South America and
Melanesia, it explores the temporality inhering in images and
artefacts from a comparative perspective. The chapters focus on how
peoples in both regions 'live in' and 'navigate' time each through
their distinctive systems of images and the processes and actions
by which these come to be manifest in objects. With original
theoretical and ethnographic contributions, the book is valuable
reading for scholars interested in visual and material culture and
in anthropological approaches to time.
Known for their beautiful textile art, the Kuna of Panama have been
scrutinized by anthropologists for decades. Perhaps surprisingly,
this scrutiny has overlooked the magnificent Kuna craft of
nuchukana-wooden anthropomorphic carvings-which play vital roles in
curing and other Kuna rituals. Drawing on long-term fieldwork,
Paolo Fortis at last brings to light this crucial cultural facet,
illuminating not only Kuna aesthetics and art production but also
their relation to wider social and cosmological concerns. Exploring
an art form that informs birth and death, personhood, the dream
world, the natural world, religion, gender roles, and ecology, Kuna
Art and Shamanism provides a rich understanding of this society's
visual system, and the ways in which these groundbreaking
ethnographic findings can enhance Amerindian scholarship overall.
Fortis also explores the fact that to ask what it means for the
Kuna people to carve the figure of a person is to pose a riddle
about the culture's complete concept of knowing. Also incorporating
notions of landscape (islands, gardens, and ancient trees) as well
as cycles of life, including the influence of illness, Fortis
places the statues at the center of a network of social
relationships that entangle people with nonhuman entities. As an
activity carried out by skilled elderly men, who possess embodied
knowledge of lifelong transformations, the carving process is one
that mediates mortal worlds with those of immortal primordial
spirits. Kuna Art and Shamanism immerses readers in this sense of
unity and opposition between soul and body, internal forms and
external appearances, and image and design.
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