Freeland, “Cultural Crossings”
- Far east gardens have spiritual dimensions, influenced English gardens
- Culture travels
- In the modern world, no culture is isolated
- Art is the best possible window into another culture
- Art is a universal language, but must be acquired
- Art as the expression of the life of the community
- To comprehend the social meaning of art requires understanding of how and why it is made
- Knowledge of context helps enhance our experience of other art forms
- Ignoring context can lead to cultural appropriation
- Much indigenous art emerges from a complex history reflecting many interactions during colonial rule
- Intercultural contact is age-old
- Various “indigenous” art forms have developed through cultural exchange
- Good/bad cultural connections hard to determine
- There is a form of art in all cultures
- Art as “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium”
- Anthropologist have influenced the cultures they study
- Interactions with markets changes the traditional forms
- Political powers often suppress art as it provides a point of critical resistance
- Diaspora and the spread of culture and hybridization
- Identity politics in the ‘80’s
Jung, “On the concept of the Archetype”
- The unconscious as the state of repressed or forgotten contents
- For Freud, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature
- The personal unconscious rests upon the collective unconscious
- A common psychic substrate of suprapersonal nature present in all of us
- “Psychic existence can be recognized only by the presence of contents that are capable of consciousness”
- The contents of the personal unconscious are the chiefly the feeling-toned complexes” that constitute the personal and private side of psychic life
- Archetypes as the contents of the collective unconscious
- The contents of the unconscious are primordial
- Myth and fairytale as the expression of archetypes
- The archetype is the unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious
- There is no essential difference between man and all other creatures
- Man has a preformed psyche
- Behavior results from patterns of functioning as “images”
- “images” are the human quality of the human being and are hereditary and present in the germ-plasm
- Everything psychic if preformed, such as creative fantasy
- Fantasy finds the expression of the primordial archetypes
- Archetypes not determined in content but in form
- Archetypal content if produced by the conscious mind
- The representations are not inherited, only the forms
Krippner, “Shamans, Sacred Places and the Healing Earth”
- Shamans as interface with the numinous for the community
- Personification of nature
- Each culture defined its own pantheism
- Animism was a perspective that saw nature as alive and sacred
- Totemism conceptualized various animal species
- Shamanism as “applied animism”
- Europeans justified “civilizing” indigenous peoples because they had no homes and further their territorial and economic goals
- Amazonian ayuhuasca art, Navajo sand paintings, Diegueno ground painting puberty rite
- Indian medicine wheels resembling placenta
- North American Indians felt that nature-in-movement had magical power
- Some locations are held to be more sacred than others
- The Balinese concept of dual worlds (niskala and sekala)
- The symbolic reality must learn to be seen
- Ceremonial landscapes as from the mind
- The shaman can utilize sacred locations
- Whenever two or more things are in harmony, energy is exchanged
- Earth as a living organism
Zak, “The Spirit of Space and Place Among the Inuit”
- Inuit: “the real people”
- Eskimo: “people who eat raw fish” (from the Cree)
- Inuit value space as the Modern man values time
- Inuit as hunter-gatherers
- The spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape
- Flesh is perishable, the soul immortal
- Men and animals have the bladder as the spiritual locus
- Belief in animism
- Hunting objects decorated with spiritual symbols to please the objects themselves
- Everything possess an awareness
- 3 concepts: 1) the power of a person’s thought. 2) the importance of thoughtful action in order to not injure another mind and 3) the danger inherit in following one’s own mind
- There is no empty space and everything needs to be treated with respect
- Traditional life revolves around avoidance of taboos
- Tattooing as a ritual observance
- Women have both powerful negative and positive energy
- Traditional Inuit houses serve many functions and cultural dimensions, becoming a nexus between sacred and secular worlds
- Women’s small houses analogous to wombs
- Walking a straight line in anger to measure the rage
- Garments as spiritual transformation
- The igloo divided into masculine and feminine space
- The home is considered sacred
- Inukshuit: Piling up stones to mark the passage of the dead, and the visual language of the people
- The land and game belong to everyone
- Lodgings and authority regularly rotated
- Everything pertaining to the natural world is a sign
Carroll, “From Huacas to Mesas”
- Healing and esoteric wisdom reside in the same place as the creative
- Sacred sites are natural altars
- The function of altars to challenge to expand in heart, mind and spirit
- Maslow: mystical experiences and psychological health go together
- The role of mountains and high places as sacred
- Unification experiences as a type of shamanistic journeying
- Sacred sites as the first altars
- Altars serve spiritual and utilitarian purposes
- The significance of building more permanent sacred structures near sacred sites
- The altar of the shaman as different from a temple altar
- The practice of invocation is essential to the creation of an altar that works, that produces and effect
- Altars are the mirrors, reflecting the illumination hidden in the unseen regions of the human psyche
- Altars represent pluralism: this reality and the other, distant or invisible realities they reflect
Baker, “Unlikely Finds”
- Can Buddhist art be made where there is no Buddhist tradition?
- The artist embodies the tradition in which he works, but may be misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the tradition
- In the West, prevailing notion’s of art’s functions tend to be vague, superficial and malleable
- The body is physical and public, the mind intangible and private
- Dualistic thinking is affirmed and reiterated as truth
- The demand that mindfulness of modern art can function as a spiritual method
- The belief in the healing power of modern art us the cornerstone of modernism
- 2 points: 1) modern Western art is allied with the individual ego’s struggle to shore itself up and 2) traditional Buddhist art if a function of the community
- If we look for things in unlikely ways we will find them in unlikely forms
- Art has been increasingly open to redefinition
- The uncertainty of art in the Western tradition is more akin to Buddhist insight
