Southwest school of art and craft

If there's no southwest school of art and craft in the world, there will be no human.

southwest school of art and craft give people beauty. Beauty can adjust people's mood. A good mood will improve people's work. The word becomes more beautiful because of southwest school of art and craft.

Art works inspire people. Everybody in the world need inspiration. That's how people affect each other. That is how dead people affect living people. That's the wealth of human inherited from ancestors.

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While the Chalmer incident left a powerful impression on the mind of missionaries, the Rockefeller incident is the one that tends to linger most in the thoughts of those of us who are interested in the art and culture of this area. This latter event happened in the Asmat region, which is West through the Torres Straight and up along the coast of West Papua (Indonesian side) in relation to Goaribari Island where the Gope board that started this thread originated.

For example, in the heat of battle soldiers are supposed to kill their opponents. As one recent incident in Faluja, Iraq illustrated however, after an opponent was injured? A soldier who then caused the death of that opponent was deemed a murderer. My intention is not to make any moral judgment here?

Human behavior, it seems to me, has obviously innate components. We are certainly hard-wired not to try to fly off buildings, and the fear of stepping off a cliff when we can see that there's no place near to land arises pretty early.

But most cultural activities and ethical consciousness are learned behavior (in my judgment). Children learn to not be cruel, they aren't born empathetic.

The sort of most dramatic of the other plausible scenarios is that he became the victim of Asmat headhunters and all that implies. If that was how it happened, the bitter irony naturally is that the young Rockefeller was passionate about the area and had a great interest and respect for a smart people and culture.

In any case, as you say, tales of headhunting and cannibalism can be quite jarring. The really astonishing part of it in my opinion however, is just how relatively common such practices were around the planet.

I just like to add that in the seminal work, rimitive Art? By Boas, which was first published in 1927 I believe, Boas repeatedly cites the pleasure of virtuosity and the satisfaction of aesthetic creativity as one of the principal motivations for creating art.

I had several friends in various effected areas and they are all safely accounted for to my relief. But, sadly so many and so much has been lost, and while everyone I know directly has turned up safe, there are family and friends of friends who are missing, and at this point I’m afraid that hope of good news at this late date is fading.

Yes Steve P, I’d agree with your final comments on animal behavior. It is a point well taken and indeed my choice of terminology was imprecise.

Boas was on to something, and Miller’s ideas strike me as complimentary and mutually reinforcing. While Boas only mentions the personal creative satisfaction of the artisan him or herself, the idea that creative virtuosity could serve as an appeal to prospective mates, seems like a fairly reasonable extension of his conclusions on art motives? and one that could reinforce the artisans own pleasure in the aesthetically creative act.

A final comment or two on head hunting? for the majority of us who will read this discussion, I think it is safe to say that if this phenomenon is of interest at all, then at most we may possibly gain an intellectual understanding of why various societies might indulge in headhunting, but our own deeply ingrained cultural praxis will prevent us from ever looking at headhunting the way someone who is an autochthonous member of a headhunting society might.

As I mentioned I tend towards a nature and nurture explanation for a behavior, with a preponderance of weight on social conditioning for the category of behavior in question.

That particular event is extremely well documented, and despite happening over 100 years ago, seems to be an occurrence that left quite an impression - and one that remains on the minds of missionaries and their ilk to some extent if the frequency of references to the incident are any indication.

However, what is probably the most well known incident of this sort in the greater Papuan region, was not directly related to missionary activities. I am referring of course to the disappearance in November, 1961 of Michael Rockefeller while on a collecting expedition for the Museum of Primitive Art (when the museum was closed in 1976 the bulk of the collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Miller draws upon Darwin’s theories on sexual selection (which have generally been overshadowed by his more universally recognized thoughts on natural selection), and comes up with an engaging and very readable exploration of behavioral psychology and among other things, the evolutionary implications of the artistic impulse from the Pleistocene onward.

To many of us, it doesn't matter a bit whether the victim is "us" (by this, I guess you mean people from the more technologically developed part of the world) or not. Killing others is disturbing and difficult to accept, even when it is for cultural reasons.

I also think that describing the death penalty as "Killing people for reasons the government is actually forbidding..." is a description that misses the mark, especially in democratic societies in which the government serves at the pleasure of the governed.

Does a great artist have to graduate from art school? The answer is no. There might be some great artist indeed studied an art school. But it does not mean that people have to study in an art school to become great artists. There  are a lot of great painters and calligraphers in Chinese history. But almost none of them ever studied in an art school.

The argument is that such individuals are more desirable to the opposite sex and hence are more likely to pass their skills and aesthetic tendencies on to progeny? Reinforcing the creative/artistic tendencies of the species in the following generations.

Of course there are critics of these ideas, as there always are with anything of this sort, especially when ideas like Miller manage to exceed the boundaries of the specialized scientific community and generate interest among aymen but critiques aside, Miller perspective makes a lot of sense to me in general.

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Last modified: Tuesday October 18, 2005.