Tradition and the New

by CKR

I’ve had a cluster of ideas gestating for some time now. A post by hilzoy at Obsidian Wings made me decide to work on them for WhirledView.

One of the good things about blogging is that you can form your ideas as you go. I did a bit of that a while back on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (click on Nuclear Issues under Categories).

I came back from Kamchatka with new eyes (as the Buddhists say) after two weeks with no access to the internet. I thought before I left, and still think now, that the business in Iraq is sucking all the oxygen out of all political and international relations discussions. It pulls me in and sucks all the other ideas out of my head.

So I’d like to step back from that for a while, if it turns out I am able to.

I’ll also echo hilzoy’s caveats: I’m working these ideas out as I go, and I may be totally off base. But that’s worth doing from time to time, too. Making new mistakes can show you things you didn’t see before.

And now I’ll start.

Last month, PLS wrote on Santa Fe and its International Folk Art Market. Last weekend, I attended Santa Fe’s Indian Market, the original folk art market. The hotels and streets began filling up early last week, and the climax came early Saturday morning. By nine o’clock, it was almost impossible to get close to many of the stands. Mutton stew and frybread is a pretty heavy brunch, but the lines were lengthening at the food stands too.

I didn’t look much at the jewelry, but I’m sure it included traditional abstract sandcast designs and the leaves and flowers of the 1960s along with today’s highly colorful polished stones and slick silverwork. Paintings ranged from styles reminiscent of Pop Chalee’s to Andy Warhol modern and less categorizable abstractions. Some aged women sat with their traditional pottery, while a young man told me how he uses pine pitch to give his mother figures their gray shadings. I particularly liked some pottery (Hopi, I think) with heavily incised figures that I hadn’t seen before.

I bought a sand painting of a tree of life. The tree of life is a traditional motif; here’s a traditional treatment in a Navajo rug. My sandpainting is of a stylized corn plant with more naturalistic birds around it. I can distinguish a bluebird, a robin, a canyon wren, an eagle, a quail, and more.

Sandpaintings provide some of the conflicts between the old and the new. They were originally used in curing ceremonies, drawn with colored sands upon the ground and dispersed when the ceremony was over. The colored sands in mine have been glued to a board. Making sandpaintings permanent, and the kinds designs allowed to go into them, have been controversial. These are parts of religion, and sharing of traditional knowledge has been frowned upon by Native Americans as by others.

Traditional is a word that is frequently applied to folk arts. How long does something have to be practiced to be a tradition? The Navajos didn’t make silver jewelry and the Pueblo people didn’t make oven bread until the Spanish arrived.

Sometimes there’s a tendency to insist on an imagined purity that goes with tradition. A purist of this persuasion criticized a piece of amber jewelery recently. The amber had been heated, which causes small water inclusions to burst into circular reflectors that the Russians call “fish scales.” This purist pointed to the fish scales and said, carefully so as not to be accused of offending, “You know, this amber has been treated.” Ah yes, amber that has been shaped and polished to bring out the variations in its color has not been treated, but amber that has been heated to produce fish scales is lessened.

The Indian Market also offered the inevitable kitsch. I tend to consider all Kokopellis lacking the fertility accoutrement as kitsch, along with geometrically multiplied stylized running horses. This year brought a new sort of kitsch, far more than I expected of Plains-style drawings on what looked like historic paper, although it is hard to believe that so much historic paper is available. My objection to them is their lack of authenticity: some charming 19th century drawings on printed paper turned up within the past few years. Presumably the reason printed paper was used was lack of unprinted paper. Modern drawings on old paper have no reason to be, other than their resemblance to those older and genuinely charming drawings.

Ah, but it’s not art criticism I’m really about in this maundering, although I think kitsch is part of this discussion and I’ll probably return to it. The conflict between old and new is endlessly fruitful in multiple dimensions. Sometimes, as in the drawings on historic paper, a synthesis misses the mark, even though it may become faddishly popular.

The wrenching conflict is in accommodation to one’s neighbors. Must tribal people modernize? It could be argued that the entire Indian Market is a sell-out, but it also makes art available to those who love it and provides the artists their recognition. When we visited the Manadik campsite in Kamchatka, we were told that the indigenous people wanted to regain their traditional ways by living in moveable camps. They had been nomads, following the reindeer, until the Russians, and then Soviets, insisted that they live in villages, forcibly imposing the new.

But the life of a reindeer-herder is hard, and the world has moved on. We all live in villages now, some of them very large indeed. There is still room, particularly in Kamchatka, for such independent living, but the villages, where you can buy your food instead of having to catch or grow it, are tempting.

Living in cities (those large villages), which house a multitude of people following a multitude of ways, can be confusing and frustrating. Traditional ways provide an emotional safety net that helps us to feel we are who we are: the sons and daughters of our parents and grandparents, who made meatloaf in these ways and who dressed in those ways. But we wear jeans and eat at McDonald’s.

We need connections to our history and to our neighbors. We also want a good life. All those things pull in different directions.

Comments

[JLo]

You make some interesting allusions there to the way living our lives obscures and distorts our history, even as we seek connection to it. I'm looking forward to reading more of your reflections on this.

[CKR]

Thanks, JLo. There's more to come--a lot more. I hope not too much for readers' tastes.