Affiliation:
1. Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia
Abstract
Halpin challenges Franz Boas’s representationist reading of Northwest Coast art, and the hegemonic discourse that he initiated. In contrast to the Boasian rule-based paradigm, and with specific reference to Tsimshian-speaking peoples, she argues that Northwest Coast Native art is ambiguous, imaginative, unstable, poetic, endlessly variable, changing, and productive of the new, the unexpected. Of paramount importance in her analysis is the relationship between crest art and the oral tradition that still gives it meaning, a relationship that Boas did not understand.
Reference50 articles.
1. AMES, MICHAEL M. 1991 "Biculturalism in Exhibitions," Museum Anthropology, 5(2):7-15.
2. BAL, MEIKE 1993 "His Master's Eye," pp. 379-404 in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, David Michael Levin, ed. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
3. BARBEAU, MARIUS 1917 "Review of Tsimshian Mythology by Franz Boas", American Anthropologist, n.s. 19:548-563.
4. BARBEAU, MARIUS 1929 Totem Poles of the Gitksan, Upper Skeena River, British Columbia Bulletin No. 61. Anthropological Series, No. 12. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.
5. BARBEAU, MARIUS AND WILLIAM BEYNON 1914-57 Field Notes on Deposit in the Centre for the Study of Canadian Folklore, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. A copy of the Tsimshian notes made by Wilson Duff is in the author's possession.