The ruses of Amerindian art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Starting from the concept of alterity, this article seeks to question the links between artefacts and designs among various Amazonian groups considered to have 'complex design systems'. The central hypothesis is that design among these groups is a visual rendering of social interactions with both human and nonhuman entities, and through an analysis of how artefacts are created, and the messages that design covered artefacts and bodies communicate, anthropologists can hope to understand the complex relationships governing the lived worlds of Amerindian cosmologies.
This article focuses on the problem of how native Amazonian peoples perceive and construct visual imagery on geological landscape and theorise on its causes and origin. Many native theory-building strategies seem to intertwine anthropogenic markings on lithological surfaces with systems of knowledge regarding geological and biological phenomena as a whole. When native Amazonian perceptions and theories are taken into account, it is not only graphic imagery, as a discrete entity, that is under consideration, but rather complex epistemological articulations between visual graphic expression and geo-environmental context. These cognitive articulations conceive geological phenomena just as culturally and intentionally constructed as rock art is considered in a Western perspective. The neuropsychological phenomenon of pareidolia is examined as a perceptual-cognitive trigger that intertwines geological features with sensorial constructs affording cultural responses. This phenomenon is exemplified by presenting evidence on the entanglement of rock art and geomorphic features in head representations with facial elements, which occur diversely and consistently throughout Amazonia and the Andes. The aim of this article is to explore the relational nature between Indigenous knowledge and geological phenomena, considering eventual consequences upon the ways native Amazonians conceptualise causal agency in geo-situated visual imagery. When geological phenomena are qualified as human-made, or made by ancestral, spiritual or animal/vegetal non-human persons, or are themselves considered as persons, this posits a basic question: what is anthropogenic?
: This article presents a preliminary hypothesis about a pattern of interaction between a sample of Amazonian petroglyphs and its lithological substratum expressed by a covariation between rock type and rock art stylistic patterns (i.e. perceived graphic behaviour or patterned arrangement of formal attributes) located on a geological frontier on the Lower Negro River, Northern Amazonia. Elements of Perspectivism derived from Amazonian ethnological studies are applied to the geological realm as an interpretive tool to help understand how ancient Amazonian indigenous groups might have thought about geological phenomena and thus, reflect upon possible consequences of this process on rock art behaviour in areas of marked geodiversity. This constitutes a tentative articulation between ethnology and archaeology to bring into play elements of an ethnogeological framework as applied to Amazonian rock art studies. KEYWORDS: Petroglyphs; Brazilian Amazon; Negro River; Geological Frontier; Perspectivism; Ethnogeology
LEARNING TO SEE IN WESTERN AMAZONIA How Does Form Reveal Relation
Social Analysis, 2019
Through the study of form, we explore how relations constitute persons for the Huni Kuin of Western Amazonia. Shamanistic song, and the role in it of patterned design, reveals a specific aesthetics that emphasizes processes of becoming, transformation, and figure/ground reversal. Since bodily substances and actions of others affect the 'thinking body', well-being depends on making visible the relational network that exists inside and outside one's embodied self. An aesthetic battlefield unfolds where the doubles of ingested substances invert the predatory relation and come to envelop the 'eye soul' of the one who ingested them with their design and ornaments. This setting allows us to address the fractal quality of personhood and the permanent disequilibrium between symmetrical and asymmetrical relations in Amazonia.