Art and Creativity in a New Guinea Society
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€38.99
A01=Ross Bowden
Author_Ross Bowden
Category=AGA
Category=JBGB
Category=JBSL
Category=NHM
Comparative art history
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Indigenous Art
Papua New Guinea
Sepik River
Product details
- ISBN 9781793611383
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Jan 2025
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Kwoma, the subject of this book, are one of a number of peoples in the Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea who have created some of the most distinctive visual art in the Pacific. Through case studies of their painting, sculpture, architecture and ritual this book examines in detail how people in this society understand their art as a cultural phenomenon. This includes how they understand its origins in the spirit world, how they judge quality in art and how they understand artistic creativity. The book contrasts Kwoma beliefs with the radically different approach to art found in the modern West. The modern Western concept of art first emerged not in the eighteenth century in the Enlightenment, or even later, as anthropologists and art historians often assume, but several centuries earlier in the Renaissance. The book gives an account of radical changes that took place culturally in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries in the way human intellectual creativity was understood, and how this gave rise to a new concept of art, one that remains unchanged in the modern West today.
Ross Bowden is an Australian cultural anthropologist whose main interests are in the art, history and social organization of societies in the Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea.
