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Ethnohistory 49.4 (2002) 871-873



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The Continuum Encyclopedia of Native Art: Worldview, Symbolism, and Culture in Africa, Oceania, and North America. Edited by Hope B. Werness. (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000. x + 360 pp., introduction, index of maps, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth.)

As an art historian and specialist in non-Western art, I welcome the publication of this moderately sized single-volume encyclopedia. This work will be especially useful for instructors and students in non-Western art survey classes, even though it does not cover Mesoamerican and South American art. In fact, only two of the African and Oceanic cultures covered in my own non-Western art history course do not receive entries in this encyclopedia, which gives a sense of its breadth. The excluded cultures are revealing, as they are those whose visual culture focuses on the body and clothing, such as the Mount Hagen peoples. In fact, among the numerous illustrations of this book, there are very few images of art in context (worn or otherwise manipulated in performance). This is only partly compensated by eight color plates, three of which show people in ceremonial attire. Thus, this encyclopedia maintains strong conceptual ties with the artifact-focused institutions of museums and collectors. This is not unexpected, given the summarizing goal of the encyclopedia and its clearly intended art-historical audience.

The coverage of topics is considerable, with entries given to most of the groups of traditional interest to anthropologists and art historians. There are also entries on media, key structures or objects (such as hei tiki), eminent scholars and native artists, supernatural beings, ceremonies, motifs/themes, and certain ethnological concepts such as altered states of consciousness. Geographically, there is a good balance between the three [End Page 871] major areas of Africa, North America, and Oceania. One of the most useful aspects of this work is the index, which is organized into eight broad categories: animals; art, artifacts, and techniques; artists; deity archetypes; geographical subdivisions and native cultures; the human body; natural phenomena and materials; and miscellaneous. These allow the reader to find information that escapes cross-referencing in the text and investigate, for example, images of water deities cross-culturally. Unfortunately, within the entries themselves, there is no consistent bibliographic referencing, which would allow the reader to track down primary sources for interpretations or ethnographic data. Occasionally, a source is mentioned, but it would be much more valuable to include citations after each entry, even to a numbered bibliography. This I consider to be the major drawback of this book, together with a lack of clarity in some of the drawings—especially in the renditions of three-dimensional figures with complex volumes and/or surface enrichment. Additional photographs would have been welcome.

In addition to a general orientation toward artifacts or "art" objects, this encyclopedia reveals certain cultural and philosophical missions. Mentioned briefly in the introduction and realized in diverse catalog entries is a strong interest in symbolic and communicative values of art. Perhaps the best example of this is the interesting series of entries on "sign systems" of eight different cultures. Often, however, the focus on symbolism comes at the expense of other aspects, such as techniques of production. For instance, the entry on bark cloth contains little reference to techniques, aside from a "pasting technique with stenciled and painted designs" and "felting with stamped designs." Instead, the entry gives examples of the social functions of the finished cloth (mostly from Polynesia—oddly, no mention is made of African bark cloth). In the entry on kente, there is no mention at all of the type of loom used to weave it or how the designs are rendered. Furthermore, there is an overall interest in universal archetypes that are supposedly expressed in visual form. While Jung is cited, the interpretations of myth by Joseph Campbell seem to be a more important influence, prompting not only certain features of the index (such as the extensive list of deity archetypes) but also entries on cosmic models, the world...

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