Journal

LiYan Mao
Anthropology 2202
Instructor: Lisa Beiswenger
11/16/13
Expressive culture: behaviors and beliefs related to art, leisure and play.
Art and culture:
Art is the application of imagination, skill and style to matter, movement, and sound that goes beyond the purely practical.
Western fine art: rare, expensive art produced by artists trained in the western classical tradition.

Esthetics: refers to socially accepted notion of quality.
Ethno-esthetics: culturally specific definition of what art is. Importance of both individual agency and following traditions. The social status is another aspect to consider. Gender matters.

Micro cultures, art, and power.
Dive-bomb: further evidence of women’s subordinate position. Form of tipping the dancer in which the woman customer gets on her hands and knees and tucks a bill in her teeth into the dancer’s G-string.

Ethnomusicology: cross-culture study of music.
1. Music and gender among the temiar of Malaysia: their musical traditions emphasize balance of males and females.
2. Country music and generalization in brazil: a prominent feature of Brazilian music is the performance by a dupla, or two brothers, who may or may not be biologically related.
3. Theater and myth in south India: theater is a type of enactment that seeks to entertain through movement and through words related to dance, music, parades, and verbal art. The Kathakali ritual dance-drama blends mythology, acting, and music.

Architecture and decorative arts: Forager, being highly mobile, built dwelling as needed and abandoned them. They do not need permanent storage structures.
Horticulture shelter, is a little more elaborate.
Agricultural society: interior decoration is added, because permanent housing is a norm. Japanese middle or upper class housewives seek to express their status by abandoning three traditional features in Japanese architecture: tatami, shoji, and fusuma.

Heterotopia: something formed from elements drawn from multiple and diverse contexts.
Museums and culture: a museum is an institution that collects, preserves, interprets, and displays objects on a regular basis.
Repatriation:
returning its objects to its original owners.

Games and sports as a cultural microcosm:
Wa:
a Japanese word meaning discipline and self-sacrifice for the good of the group.
Blood sport: a competition that explicitly seeks to bring out a flow of blood from, or even the death of human-human, human-animal, or animal-animal contestants.

Tourism’s complex effects: One positive effect is material cultural heritage: the sites, monuments, buildings and movable objects considered to have outstanding values to humanity.

Lecture 13: Expressive Culture
Art and Aesthetics
Art is any human action that modifies the utilitarian nature of something for the primary purpose of enhancing aesthetic qualities.
Taking something that is useful and making it pleased for us or appealing to the eyes.
People can adjust it and modify it to make us pleased.
Aesthetics are qualities that make objects, actions or language more beautiful or pleasurable About these cars, I prefer picture I.
How is Art Defined?
Cross-cultural one. Also, it depends among different people.
How is Art Valued?
What constitutes good art is culturally dependent
Themes, Forms, rules, filling the blanket.
Social Functions of Art
Express individuality.
Public display of ethnic or group affiliation.
Social status or rank.
Reinforce or teach cultural beliefs or religion
Forms of Artistic Expression
Key Forms:
Body arts
Visual arts, painting, texture sculpture making, etc.
Performance arts, act of tattooing someone is kind of performance arts and also body arts.
Body Decoration and Adornment, rituals, beauty treatment, etc.
Cultural Universal
Purposes
Reinforces cultural identity
Demonstrates social status/rank
Enhance attractiveness
Forms of Modification, non-permanent.
Body painting, symbolic
Hair styling
Tattooing
Piercing
Wrapping/clothing
Finger Amputation
Nails/High shoes
Surgical enlargements/ reductions
Mummification
Veiling
Facial/Body hair removal
Corsetting/Foot binding
Head shaping
Scarification
Tattooing and scarification
Tattooing is common in the U.S
Scarification contains burning, cutting symbols into one skin under the condition that the skin is dark. It is used by many tribes in Africa to modify the people entering into Adulthood.
Maori, social category on their face.
Tattooing is not a new phenomenon
Dental modification –Tooth Jewelry
Grillz. Teeth from other animals are put to the remaining area of the people’s teeth.
Inserting Jewelry into the teeth
Tooth Filing, human ceremony. In July and August.
Kayan Lahwi women in Thailand- Neck “Lengthening”
First apply to young girls when they are 5 years old.
Corseting, tightening the waist our glass figure.
Foot Binding, in old china, beginning of 20th century.
Length is about to three to four inches long.

Film, 12
1. According to the film, how is blue-yellow vision different from red-green vision? How does this influence how these colors make us “feel”?
Blue-yellow are the colors that our ancestor first used to describe the things on earth.
And Red-green is to describe the warning signs in the world. They are the colors that we are born with.
Yellow makes us feel warms and energetic. Blue makes us feel cold and calm. Red makes us stop. Green makes us feel that it is safe to pass.
They are linked with pleasure and pain.
2. In our single-celled ancestors, what was the evolutionary advantage to being able to perceive a difference between yellow and blue?

Yellow is the color of long wave length which is color of energy. And blue is like the color of stable stuff.
3. What was the evolutionary advantage to acquiring red-green vision?
Making people’s life more colorful and bringing people more vocabularies to describe the colors.
4. How does language influence how we see color?
We learned language which teach us which color is linked to which symbols and gradually we have an impression of colors in our brains.
5. How does the Himba language influence the way that they perceive color?
Water is white. Milk is white. Sky is black. They have near 6 words that describe colors. They have different words that represents totally different color sets which is different with our people.
6. At the end of the film, the narrator and Dr. Beau Lotto list some of the other influences to how we see colors. What are they?
Sex, age, levels of status, light default in people’s eyes.