Primitive Religious Art 1

Abstract

WE have on several occasions directed attention to works by American ethnologists dealing with investigations on the meanings of the designs and patterns of aboriginal decorative art. This fruitful and interesting field of inquiry is by no means exhausted, and two papers on the subject have recently been published by the American Museum of Natural History which merit the careful attention of students. Dr. Clark Wissler has made a valuable study of the decorative art of the Sioux Indians which is a model of clear and concise expression and of adequate illustration. As he truly states, the investigation becomes psychological, because it is necessary to know what ideas the artists have of their designs, and what motives lead to their execution. The assumption that all primitive decorative designs are executed with consciousness that they symbolise some definite object or relation in nature1 is fairly supported by the facts so far accessible, but does it follow that these symbolic designs were produced by a gradual transition from the realistic representation? That some of them were so produced has been satisfactorily demonstrated; but is this the law of growth for decorative art? It appears, among the American Indians, that the more abstract the idea, the simpler and more geometric the design. On the other hand, it is obvious that a vigorous conventionalisation of representative forms must tend to reduce them all to a few simple geometric designs. In such an event, confusion as to the symbolic aspect of similar designs must arise in the minds of the artists, necessitating re-interpretation or creation of new symbols. Thus any given interpretation need have no certain relation to the origin of the design itself; indeed, the association of the symbol and the idea can be shown in some cases to be quite secondary. Amongst the Sioux there are two main kinds of decorative art—realistic painting and conventional bead- or quill-work; the former is done by the men and the latter by the women, and there is every reason for assuming that the pictographic mode.is on the whole the older. One sex has often appropriated the designs used by the other to express divergent ideas, and thus we see how even within the same tribe two or more modes of expressing symbolic motives may make simultaneous use of the same graphic designs.