Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-century Art

Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-century Art PDF Author: Evan R. Firestone
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781472477347
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys were the leading artists of their generations to recognize the rich possibilities that animism and shamanism offered. While each of these artists' connection with shamanism has been written about separately, Evan Firestone brings the four together in order to compare their individual approaches to anthropological materials and to define similarities and differences between them. The author's close readings of their works and examination of the relevant texts available to them reveal fresh insights and new perspectives.The importance of indigenous beliefs in animism for Kandinsky's philosophy of art and practice, especially the animism of inanimate objects, is analyzed for the first time in conjunction with his well-known enthusiasms for Symbolism and Theosophy. Ernst's collage novel, La femme 100 tetes (1929), previously found to have significant alchemical content, also is shown to extensively utilize shamanism, thereby merging different branches of the occult that prove to have remarkable similarities. The in-depth examination of Pollock's works, both known and overlooked for shamanic content, identifies textual sources that heretofore have escaped notice. Firestone also demonstrates how shamanism was employed by this artist to express his desire for healing and transformation. The author further argues that the German edition of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1957) helped to revitalize Beuys's life and art, and that his ecological campaigns reflected a new consciousness later termed ecoanimism.

Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-century Art

Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-century Art PDF Author: Evan R. Firestone
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781472477347
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys were the leading artists of their generations to recognize the rich possibilities that animism and shamanism offered. While each of these artists' connection with shamanism has been written about separately, Evan Firestone brings the four together in order to compare their individual approaches to anthropological materials and to define similarities and differences between them. The author's close readings of their works and examination of the relevant texts available to them reveal fresh insights and new perspectives.The importance of indigenous beliefs in animism for Kandinsky's philosophy of art and practice, especially the animism of inanimate objects, is analyzed for the first time in conjunction with his well-known enthusiasms for Symbolism and Theosophy. Ernst's collage novel, La femme 100 tetes (1929), previously found to have significant alchemical content, also is shown to extensively utilize shamanism, thereby merging different branches of the occult that prove to have remarkable similarities. The in-depth examination of Pollock's works, both known and overlooked for shamanic content, identifies textual sources that heretofore have escaped notice. Firestone also demonstrates how shamanism was employed by this artist to express his desire for healing and transformation. The author further argues that the German edition of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1957) helped to revitalize Beuys's life and art, and that his ecological campaigns reflected a new consciousness later termed ecoanimism.

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism PDF Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544498
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology.

Before Humanity

Before Humanity PDF Author: Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004502505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art

Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art PDF Author: Sharon Hecker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350196452
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art is the first edited volume to critically examine uses of lead as both material and cultural signifier in modern and contemporary art. The book analyzes the work of a diverse group of artists working in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, and takes into account the ways in which gender, race, and class can affect the cultural perception of lead. Bringing together contributions from a distinguished group of international contributors across various fields, this volume explores lead's relevance from a number of perspectives, including art history, technical art history, art criticism, and curatorial studies. Drawing on current art historical concerns with materiality, this volume builds on recent exhibitions and scholarship that reconsider the role of materials in shaping artistic meaning, thus giving a central relevance to the object and its physicality.

Historical Dictionary of Shamanism

Historical Dictionary of Shamanism PDF Author: Graham Harvey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442257989
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A remarkable array of people have been called shamans, while the phenomena identified as shamanism continues to proliferate. This second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Shamanism contains with examples from antiquity up to today, and from Siberia (where the term “shaman” originated) to Amazonia, South Africa, Chicago and many other places. Many claims about shamans and shamanism are contentious and all are worthy of discussion. In the most widespread understandings, terms seem to refer particularly to people who alter states of consciousness or enter trances in order to seek knowledge and help from powerful other-than-human persons, perhaps “spirits”. But this says only a little about the artists, community leaders, spiritual healers or hucksters, travelers in alternative realities and so on to which the label “shaman” has been applied. This second edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and extensive bibliography. The dictionary contains over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on individuals, groups, practices and cultures that have been called “shamanic”. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Shamanism.

Translating Indigenous Knowledges

Translating Indigenous Knowledges PDF Author: Ma Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040263690
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In this book, Vidal presents a new way of translating indigenous epistemologies. For centuries, the Western world has ordained what knowledge is and what it should be and has also been responsible for transmitting that knowledge. This "universal" knowledge has traveled to the four corners of the globe. In recent decades, there has been a steadily growing interest in dialogical epistemologies. Disciplines ranging from historiography and philosophy to anthropology are calling for this universalist idea of knowledge to be modified. Thanks to this change of perspective, other forms of knowledge, which until now have been ignored, are gradually coming to light. Indigenous knowledges are not constructed with the scientific, binary, static, Cartesian, or univocal logic characteristic of Western societies. Non-Western types of knowledge incorporate senses, emotions, body, objects, and matter. It is impossible to reduce indigenous knowledges to Western conceptualizations. The types of translation covered in this book assume that knowledge is not transmitted only in the Western way and that there are world views that take into account the emotions and body, as well as the intellect. This includes all types of beings: human, non-human, and extrahuman. In the face of this plurality of epistemologies, this book affirms that the static Western conceptual traditions characterized by a binary logic are not useful and that there is a need to translate outside the scope of these traditions. The examples given in this book show that translation is not only a process involving Western and non-Western languages. Translation is not a mere substitution of one word for another because knowledge is not only transmitted through words. It also involves non-verbal elements. Knowledge is transmitted through objects, songs, sensations, and emotions, as well as through words. Moreover, many non-Western traditions do not translate with language systems but rather with other semiotic systems, such as knots, threads, colors, and bodies in movement. This is a timely, topical, and transdisciplinary reading, of interest to advanced students and researchers in translation studies, anthropology, and beyond.

The New Werner Twentieth Century Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

The New Werner Twentieth Century Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 1078

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Book Description


The Way of Inuit Art

The Way of Inuit Art PDF Author: Emily Elisabeth Auger
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786418886
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Inuit art, both ancient and contemporary, has inspired the interest of scholars, collectors and art lovers around the globe. This book examines Inuit art from prehistory to the present with special attention to methodology and aesthetics, exploring the ways in which it has been influenced by and has influenced non-Inuit artists and scholars. Part One gives the history of the main art-producing prehistoric traditions in the North American arctic, concentrating on the Dorset who once flourished in the Canadian region. It also demonstrates the influence of theories such as evolutionism, diffusionism, ethnographic comparison, and shamanism on the interpretation of prehistoric Inuit art. Part Two demonstrates the influence of such popular theories as nationalism, primitivism, modernism, and postmodernism on the aesthetics and representation of twentieth-century Canadian Inuit art. This discussion is supported by interviews conducted with Inuit artists. A final chapter shows the presence of Inuit art in the mainstream multi-cultural environment, with a discussion of its influence on Canadian artist Nicola Wojewoda. The work also presents various Inuit artists' reactions to Wojewoda's work.

A Companion to Rock Art

A Companion to Rock Art PDF Author: Jo McDonald
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118253922
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
This unique guide provides an artistic and archaeological journey deep into human history, exploring the petroglyphic and pictographic forms of rock art produced by the earliest humans to contemporary peoples around the world. Summarizes the diversity of views on ancient rock art from leading international scholars Includes new discoveries and research, illustrated with over 160 images (including 30 color plates) from major rock art sites around the world Examines key work of noted authorities (e.g. Lewis-Williams, Conkey, Whitley and Clottes), and outlines new directions for rock art research Is broadly international in scope, identifying rock art from North and South America, Australia, the Pacific, Africa, India, Siberia and Europe Represents new approaches in the archaeological study of rock art, exploring issues that include gender, shamanism, landscape, identity, indigeneity, heritage and tourism, as well as technological and methodological advances in rock art analyses

Oirat and Kalmyk Identity in the 20th and 21st Century

Oirat and Kalmyk Identity in the 20th and 21st Century PDF Author: Johannes Reckel
Publisher: Universitätsverlag Göttingen
ISBN: 3863954645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Oirat-Kalmyk are Western Mongols that since the late 14th century stand in opposition to the Eastern Mongols like Khalka, Tümed, Buryat etc. They dominated for hundreds of years the western Central Asian steppes often in a fighting competition with Khazaks, Nogai and other Turkic nomadic tribes. The Dzungar Khanat of the Oirat was destroyed by Manchu China in 1757, but the death throes for the Oirat and Kalmyk community came in the middle 20th century when the limitless steppes became divided between socialist states with closed or at least fixed borders. Different groups of the Oirat-Kalmyk today live in four different states in a diaspora that threatens their common ethnic identity. In recent years borders that had been closed for decades opened again for mutual contacts and the Oirat again are looking for a common identity across borders, an identity that focuses on a common language, script and religion. The Oirat-Kalmyk are embedded in multi-ethnic social structures in which they have developed a great deal of adaptability to the environment as much as a conception of the own identity. This book presents various topics discussed at the international conference on Oirat and Kalmyk Identity in the 20th and 21st century at the Göttingen State- and University Library. The authors investigate Oirat cultural and linguistic heritage from different perspectives such as youth culture, internet language, dances and songs, as well as history, literature, linguistics and religion. The book contributes to the latest research trends in Mongolian and Central Asian Studies and their related disciplines.