Art, resistance, and culture change

Petitions, boycotts, strikes, emigration, terrorism, assassination. People have used a wide variety of violent and non-violent means to resist what they view as oppressive social and political systems. One fascinating form of resistance is art. While artwork expresses the values, moral sensibilities, and perspectives of the culture in which it is created, artists also use their work to turn cultural convention on its head. This past November,  Benjamin Murphy, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art, visited UNCG to give a talk on this topic. His presentation, "Identity, Hybridity, and Transformation in Latin American Art from the Colonial Period to the Present," focused on how indigenous Americans overtly or covertly used their artwork to critique aspects of the colonial culture imposed on them by Spain.

A key component of this process was what Murphy called "hybridity," or the melding of cultural traditions, especially in terms of religious practices and iconography. Anthropologists call this syncretism. Native American artists would, for example, use indigenous techniques and raw materials (like feathers) to create art in the European Christian style. They would also draw analogies between indigenous religious beliefs and Christian doctrines. For instance, indigenous artists made sense of the Catholic Christian idea of transubstantiation--the idea that the elements of the eucharist convert into the body and blood of Christ--by referencing the Aztec concept of ixiptla, which also held that a material substance (a human female chosen for sacrifice) could hold an essence (of the Aztec god Huixtocihuatl). Hybrid art was also used to subtly critique the dominant Christian culture. Diego Quispe Tito's Last Judgement, created in 1675, is an interesting example of this. Tito, an ethnic Incan, showed his displeasure with what he saw as an indulgent Catholic clergy by painting the pope himself descending into the Hell Mouth. 

While listening to this presentation I found myself thinking about culture change and cultural borrowing. Indigenous artists clearly drew from Christian culture, and colonial officials co-opted indigenous concepts, and both did so to suit their respective needs. Just like there is no such thing as a pure human race, there is no such thing as a pure human culture. Whenever cultures come into contact--as they always have--an exchange of ideas, norms, and material culture follows. Indeed, such exchange can justifiably be seen as a core feature of the human experience. This process does, however, inevitably lead over time to a loss of cultural knowledge and a transformation of individual and collective identities. As unavoidable as it is, culture change feels especially distasteful when it is coerced, either implicitly or explicitly, by a more powerful, unjust, and oppressive culture. The hybridity described by Murphy is an example of this. However, the intentional manipulation of Catholic Spanish symbols by indigenous artists reminds us that members of a subordinate culture are not passive recipients of, but, rather, active participants in, culture change (as unwanted as that change may at first be).

Museo del Prado

A few weeks ago (3.15), my wife Noell and I visited the Museo del Prado, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. It is an impressive museum indeed. We did see most of what the museum considers to be its masterpieces. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes's El 3 de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid and its less well-known companion piece El 2 de Mayo de 1808 in Madrid are both very powerful images. The museum also has a vast collection of Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age paintings. However, I have to say that my favorite piece was Dona Juana la Loco (Queen Joanna the Mad) by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz. What struck me most about the work is the artist's ability to capture movement, especially with the candles. Any photo I could take would not do it justice, but I do have the information panel! (Apologies for the blurry image, my phone's camera is not fantastic.)

Information panel for Pradilla y Ortiz's Dona Juana la Loco.

One thing I noticed: among the hundreds of pieces of art on display, not one that I was aware of was the work of a woman. A sign of the times, I suppose.

Bead-making in the early Upper Paleolithic

Mary Stiner and her colleagues (2013) recently published a really fun analysis of shell beads from the Paleolithic site of Üçağızlı Cave I in Turkey. The levels at the site date to the early Upper Paleolithic, between about 41,000 and 29,000 radiocarbon years ago (calibrated dates place the occupations between about 45,000 and 35,000 years ago).

Examples of perforated shells from Üçağızlı Cave I. From Stiner et al. (2013: Figure 5). 

After demonstrating (convincingly) that the modified shells are, in fact, artificially punctured beads, Stiner et al. (2013) show that the types of shells brought back to the cave, and the types that were chosen as beads, change over time. They provide four hypotheses to explain the change in shell type frequencies: (1) environmental changes determined what sorts of shelled animals were living near the cave, and thus what was available for bead exploitation; (2) the distance from raw materials (mediated by sea level fluctuation) changed over time, in which case people would accumulate more "junk" when raw materials were close and/or convenient and be very selective (i.e., only take the best stuff) when raw materials were distant and/or inconvenient; (3) the diversity of shell types is a function of the number and heterogeneity of shell collectors and users (that is, the more folks, and the more types of folks, exploiting shells will result in greater shell diversity); (4) cultural "conformism," where norms determine the types of shells used during any one time period.

The first hypothesis was not supported, as habitats don't appear to have changed significantly over time. The second hypothesis found some support in the fact that the diversity of ornament shells increased in those levels with evidence of frequent shellfish consumption. The latter would, theoretically, signal that the coast, and thus the raw materials for beads, were relatively close by and people became less picky about what they brought back to the cave for ornamental use. However, Stiner et al. (2013) question whether the distances to, and the weight of, the shells would have played much of a role in mediating what was, or was not, transported to the cave.

In the end, they feel that group size and composition and conformist behavior best explain the patterning in shell usage at the site. This is based on two observations. First, an inverse relationship exists between the diversity of species brought back to the site and the frequency of shells that were actually perforated for use as beads. That is, during time periods where many different types of shell were collected, only a few of those types appear to have been utilized for bead use. In the earliest levels, on the other hand, people transported only a few types of shells back to the cave, but most of them were subsequently perforated. Second, the size and shape of perforated specimens is relatively consistent regardless of time period. Stiner et al. (2013: 396) therefore conclude that:

Several factors contributed to the variation in the UcI ornament assemblages. Sample size effects were addressed early in the analysis and do not explain the patterns that concern us. The taxonomic diversity of the assemblages as a whole stems first from the natural biotic diversity of the marine environment. However, changes in littoral habitats to not seem to account for the differences between assemblages or changes over time. Many other aspects of the variation developed as the material was filtered by human choices. The narrow range of shapes and shell sizes is clearly attributable to human preferences, as are the bias toward whole specimens and the methods of modifying the shells for suspension. The extent of 'noise' or variance in the ornament assemblages is a product of the relationship between raw material collection activities and ornament manufacture and use. 

The fact that the taxonomic diversity of the UcI shell ornaments increased with time while the percentage of holed specimens decreased demonstrates that variation in the assemblages must be considered according to two distinct technological stages: raw material collection and artifact manufacture. The more playful and less constrained stage of artifact life history is raw material collection. Variation in overall raw material diversity among the assemblages related in part to how convenient access was to the shoreline and/or the overall importance of marine foraging from UcI. Variation in raw material also correlates with increasing occupation intensity and dietary breadth; the least variable assemblages formed during the lightest occupations. Changes in the size and complexity of the social groups that occupied UcI therefore may have played a role in shaping variation in the ornament assemblages. Unfortunately, the predictions for neutral social effects (more people on site or present for longer periods) and high-grading effects (raw material access) are difficult to distinguish in this particular case. What we can be certain about is that more 'junk' found its way into the shell raw material brought to the site at some intervals and that very different criteria took over at the manufacture stage. As the times collected were streamed into more formal uses, their characteristics narrowed, and many of the shells initially collected were rejected before further modification. It is for these reasons that we conclude that post-manufacture characteristics of the ornament assemblages most clearly reflect the influence of shared esthetic and visual norms. 

I actually ran into this article while I was mining the latest publications on modern human origins, which we are currently covering in my Paleolithic Archaeology class. One of the traits that many archaeologists associate with "modern" behavior is the use of personal adornment, since it is extremely likely that these items were used by ancient people as symbols to transmit information about themselves (just as jewelry does today). Stiner and her colleagues do not involve themselves in the modern human origins debate (as they note, the beads are not among the oldest in the world, or even in the Levant), but there analysis got me thinking about the importance of group size and complexity in the production of symbols. There is, in fact, quite a bit of recent work in Paleolithic archaeology that invokes the importance of demographic factors (mainly population size and density), rather than cognitive factors, to explain the appearance (and disappearance) of symbolic objects among pre-Upper Paleolithic cultures. Think about it: if you interacted with other groups only very rarely, or you ran into the same groups over and over again, there is very little incentive, even if you were cognitively able, to create a ton information transmitters (i.e., symbols) of any kind, much less those that would preserve in the archaeological record.

References:

Stiner, MC, Kuhn, SL, Güleç, E (2013). Early Upper Paleolithic shell beads at Üçağızlı Cave I (Turkey): Technology and the socioeconomic context of ornament life-histories. Journal of Human Evolution 64, 380-398.