Secret societies, supporting the medicine man, maintain standards of behavior by special initiation tests, rituals for many occasions, oaths of secrecy, and the like. They supervise morality, uphold tribal traditions, and dispense justice. They set standards for art forms from birth through puberty, marriage, and death. Masks, sculptures in the form of ancestor figures, fetishes, and ritual implements (rattles and drums) conform to these traditions. Fetishes are objects endowed with magical powers for a special purpose and are usually crudely fashioned by the medicine man.
African art gives form to the supernatural and invisible. Its abstract imagery does not even attempt to imitate concrete appearances. How does one represent the power and virtue of an ancestor or the rhythm of an animal concretely? From this emerge a rhythmic unity and a reduction of every formal element to its eternal geometry.
African art is one that is in equilibrium with nature and forms a communion with nature. To the African, sculpture can be receptacle of the ancestor’s spirituality and has the ability to transmit that spirituality when necessary. Its message or meaning becomes its presence.
African art is closer to life than the art of other countries. Its art forms are within every man’s reach. They are a necessity, an integral force, and part of living. As functional forms, they invite direct participation in their use. This is the vitality of African art.
In summary, African art explains the past, describe values and a way of life, helps man relate to supernatural forces, mediates his social relations, expresses emotions, and enhances man’s present life as an embellishment denoting pride or status as well as providing entertainment (such as with dance and music).
10. Turtle Island
I am a poet. My teachers are other poets, American Indians, and a few Buddhist priests in Japan. The reason I am here is because I wish to bring a voice from the wilderness, my constituency. I wish to be a spokesman for a realm that is not usually represented either in intellectual chambers or in the chambers of government.
I would like to think of a new definition of humanism and a new definition of democracy that would include the nonhuman that would have representation from those spheres. This is what I think we mean by an ecological conscience.
I don’t like western culture because I think it has much in it that is inherently wrong and that is at the root of the environmental crisis that is not recent; it is very ancient; it has been building up for a millennium. There are many things in Western culture that are admirable. But a culture that alienates itself from the very ground of its own being—from the wildness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing, ecosystems) and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within—is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior.
The West is not the only culture that carries these destructive seeds. China had effectively deforested itself by A.D.800. The soils of the Middle East were ruined even earlier. The forests that once covered the mountains of Yugoslavia were stripped to build the Roman fleet, and those mountains have looked like Utah ever since. The soils of southern Italy and Sicily were ruined by slave-labor farming in the Roman Empire. The soils of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States were effectively ruined before the American Revolution because of the one-crop (tobacco) farming. So the same forces have been at work in East and West.
A line is draw between primitive peoples and civilized peoples. I think there is wisdom in the world view of primitive peoples that we have to refer ourselves to, and learn from. If we are on the verge of post civilization, then our next step must take account of the primitive world view which has traditionally and intelligently tried to keep open lines of communication with the forces of nature. You cannot communicative with the forces of nature in a laboratory. One of the problems is that we simply do not know much about primitive people and primitive cultures. If we can tentatively accommodate the possibility that nature has a degree of authenticity and intelligence that requires that we look at it more sensitively, then we can move on to the next step. 感谢您阅读《Society 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。