Indigenous Aesthetics

"When we take a systems orientation towards aesthetics, we consider the broader connection between expression and experience. How does expression reflect our experience of the world at the broadest level?"
pg.7

"While I critique the universalizing tendencies inherent in the ethnocentric use of the term 'art,' I stop short of advocating the abandonment of 'art' altogether. Rather, I advocate a broader understanding of the concept, one that acknowledges ties among art, ethics, and spirituality and counters the materialism, ethnocentrism, and specialized uses of the term often found in recent Western theory."
pg. 9

"Where contemporary art in the West invites us to theorize to understand its role and complexities, traditional indigenous arts involve embodied, and often religious, experience. A state of immediacy and immersion, an experience of oneness between the audience and the artwork, seems present in much indigenous expression."
pg. 45

"[Rabindranath Tagore] added that Western ideas about how to interpret and criticize art have influenced scholars and artists in India, specifically Western assumptions about art's universality, its social usefulness, its role in philosophical speculation, or its expression of a particular culture or people. For Tagore, this is judging art by that which is not inherent to it; he felt that if these social and theoretical responses to art became primary, then the 'excellence of the river is going to be judged by the point of view of a canal.' . . . Despite these critiques of Western attempts at defining and theorizing about art, Tagore presented his own ideas about art based upon the classical Indian theory of rasa, which holds that 'The principal creative forces, which transmute things into our living structure, are emotional forces'."
pg. 46

"In their focus on the principality––and implied universality––of emotion in art, Tagore's ideas were remarkably similar to the thought of his contemporaries in the West such as Clive Bell, Henri Bergson, and Wassily Kandinsky, who had shifted focus of aesthetic to feeling rather than representation (mimesis) or taste by the early twentieth century.   .   .  .  The universalism of Tagore's ideas about art derived from religious belief (and ethics), whereas the universalism of early-twentieth-century Western aesthetics eventually led to principles of the unity of art that were not based in religion, but science and theory. . . . Though critics note modernism's tendency to universal definitions, the basis of this tendency fluctuated over the course of the twentieth century (from a search for metaphysical principles to a search for 'scientific.' then formal, principles)."
pg. 46 - 47

"The danger of modernism, then, was not in its search for universals but in its failure as a method to understand indigenous non-Western ideas about art. By beginning with an idea about art that privileged either emotion, spirituality, formal principles, or organic unity before conduction a cross-cultural investigation, the danger was that pre-formed notions would create the mold into which all 'art' would be cast. Modernist art theory never really sought out indigenous ideas about art as much as it appropriated non-Western artworks; therefore it could not accurately translate those ideas by discovering corresponding ideas within Western culture."
pg. 48

"...a popular assumption about much contemporary art in the West is that it is not tied to shared belief systems, consisting instead of private languages, actions, or ceremonies that have their basis in the personal, psychological experience of the individual artist. Recent theory, of course, argues for the institutional character of art in all cultures, but one of the West's institutionalized beliefs is in the 'freedom' or 'individuality' of the artist."

"That is why 'art,' if we define it according to the above attributes, is an inappropriate term for describing indigenous expression. Natives often believe there are social rules for art that they should follow and guard, including rules of content, context, form, and personnel; that art should be community-oriented; that art is an expression of the scared; and that art is useful, beautiful because it 'works' at some fundamental level). The artist is not above or separate from society (not different, eccentric, or professional0; there is little social pressure toward innovation form its own sake; and art is understood in the context of religious, communal, and personal narratives, and through it utilitarian functions. . . .we can challenge the appropriateness of these attributes of art in indigenous aesthetics, especially as indigenous peoples become more assimilated into Western social and economic systems."
pg. 49

"Especially since Kant, aesthetics has been afforded its own place in philosophical systems, distinct from logic, ethics, metaphysics, and so forth. While this has helped us define and understand issues unique to art, it has also tended to downplay the importance of the connections between art and religion, ethics, or social life in general, connections that are paramount in most indigenous aesthetic systems."
pg. 56

"Perhaps one way to guard against inscribing essential identities onto 'others' is to emphasize that the formation of collective identity is a continuous process. Rather than thinking of groups as 'having' an identity, a more accurate approach may be to think of groups as constantly forming or negotiating collective identity."
pg. 64

"Events that lasted several days threatened the economic system, in which Indians were an available pool of manual labor, that whites hoped to impose on the reservation. By limiting the length of dances, whites attempted to assimilate Indians into a new temporal system structured around the demands of work. But 'culture' is not easily contained by the temporal structure of the work world; this difference is another site of conflict between natives and non-natives."
pg. 95

"Few native media expressions produced to date are self-consciously modernist or avant-garde. Though innovation takes place in indigenous media, it tends to be innovation within traditions of documentation, storytelling, and visual expression, not radical departure from the past. In both stylistic and thematic concerns, indigenous media reflect many natives' valuation of historical continuity."
pg. 107

"...concepts of nation that follow from tribal boundaries, and the current drive for sovereignty by aboriginal groups, may be layered over other experiential bases of place.

This layering risks shifting the conceptualization of place toward a Euro-American model that ultimately undermines a more fundamental experience of place. In the view of the artist and social critic Jimmy Durham, 'Americanness' rests on ideology and statism more than a sense of place. He writes that Americans do not have the same sense of place found by Europeans in Europe. According to Durham, America is only a state, not a place, so its ideology must be absolute. For this reason, Euro-Americans never seem to feel 'at home.' Their patriotism is not based in or on the land. Based on his belief that statism is not the sames as sense of place, Durham rejects the notion of tribal sovereignty, which he sees as an extension of colonialist concepts and language. Durham notes that the concept of tribe is drawn from Roman tribunal and, therefore, is part of a discourse of enclosure and concealment.'"
pg. 200

Indigenous Aesthetics
Steven Leuthold
1998 University of Texas Press