A(a)rt

The Ames reading for today and its examination of the reciprocal processes of cultural cross-influencing between Northwest Coast native cultures and museum anthropologists was particularly compelling. I was reminded of Amber's response to my comments during last week's class, where I somewhat incompletely asserted that an indigenous culture's entire universe is torn open with the arrival of European explorers, and she countered that the effect was not dissimilar or insignificant to the explorers' worldviews either. Like Amber said, the Kwakiutl had as significant an impact on the ideas, practices, and values of the anthropologists with whom they interacted as did the opposite: as more was learned about the Northwest Coast cultures, at first anthropological and later artistic and cultural ideas about what "art" is and who makes it were altered. The Kwakiutl and other cultures had the effect, essentially, of transforming and enhancing what the Western world will call "fine art". This, of course, then had a profound effect on the Aboriginal cultures by recasting their traditional craft practices as capital-"a" Art, worthy of display in white museums, and then this in turn influenced the way white curators, anthropologists, and other museum-types interacted with and approached Native art in museological terms. I suppose this relationship, and by extension, probably all cross-cultural relationships, are kind of dialectical in nature, in that they are constantly reiterating one another once contact, coexistence, and integration are established.