The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) is a research center for ethnology and cultural anthropology.

BULLETIN OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ETHNOLOGY Vol. 23 No. 1 1998

Kuroda, Etsuko
From Murals to Portable Murals: Transformations of the Expressions of Resistance of Mexican-Americans (A Perspective)
1
Furuya, Yoshiaki
Negotiating Art/Culture: Guatemalan Indigenous Painters
35
Hayashi, Isao
The Topology of Dream Narratives: Narratives by Spirit Mediums among the Bedamuni, Papua New Guinea
95
Watanabe, Hitoshi
Jomon Clay Figurines and the Goddess Cult: An Ethnoarchaeological Study, part 2
129
Nishi, Yoshio
The Development of Voicing Rules in Standard Burmese
253

 

From Murals to Portable Murals:
Transformations of the Expressions of Resistance of Mexican-Americans
(A Perspective)
Etsuko Kuroda

This is a summary article on the murals created by Mexican-Americans from the 1960s to the 1990s. The purpose is to provide the Japanese audience with a general perspective of the Mexican-American Murals from their origin to the present-day forms, through a period of creative criticism.
1.The activities of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros in the United States in the1920s-30s are briefly summarized, with the tentative conclu-sion that Siqueiros may have had a major impact on the Chicano mural painters for three reasons : 1) political activism, 2) group painting in-cluding non-professionals and his taller in Cuernavaca in Mexico, and 3) newly developed techniques well fitted to the US environment .
2. The major trends of Chicano murals in the1960s-70s are summarized with references to the regional variations in Los Angeles, East L.A., San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas ( N.M.), Denver, Tucson, Phoenix and Houston ( Texas ) . The continuation of Chicano-style murals in the 1980s-90s is also commented on.
3. The criticisms of stereotyped murals by Willie Herrón, Gronk, and others, represented by their performance of “walking murals,” are summarized.
4. The appearance of “portable murals” for museums is interpreted as an artistic development in murals which had existed as street art, and at the same time it is suggested that murals still exist as conveyors of cultural expressions of ethnic identity, and as decorations for Mexican-American neighborhoods.
I remain thankful to the SPARC ( Social and Public Art Resource Center, Venice, California ) for offtring me two time reproduction rights For four copyrighted works. Photos 1to 14 are all taken by the author.
 
Key Words: mural, portable mural, Mexican-American, Siqueiros, Chicano

 

Negotiating Art/Culture: Guatemalan Indigenous Painters
Yoshiaki Furuya

Two Mayan communities, Santiago Atitlán and San Pedro la Laguna, are located on Lake Atitlán, one of the most popular tourist Spots in Guatemala. These two communities are famous for their professional indigenous painters, Who produce oil paintings depicting ‘traditional Mayan ways of life. ’ This paper will discuss the processes of production, circulation and consumption of those paintings, as sites of ‘negotiation’ about the meaning of Mayan ‘art’and their ‘culture’.
The Western art world has played a dominant role as gatekeeper in the recognition and disavowal of artists and works of art around the world. It works within the discourse of the modern ‘Art-Culture System’( Clifford 1988 ) , which has long been hegemonic in the West’s appropriation of non-Western objects. Even in this era of ‘Postmodern’dissemination and decentralization this is still the case. The objects produced in the non-West have been either recognized and collectedas ‘authentic’ artifacts/works of art, or disavowed as ‘inauthentic,’ unworthy of collecting. The most salient problem of this whole system is the lack of reciprocity between dominant players and subordinate ones, and the fact that this inequality has been naturalized.
Mayan indigenous oil paintings are commodities in two difftrent markets ; they may be consumed either as ‘ works of art ’or as ‘tourist souvenirs.’ The painters try to negotiate with potential buyers about the price and the artistic value of their work. However, their subordinate economic position forces them to compromise both artistically and economically. The most popular subject among the consumers ( art dealers as well as tourists ) is costumbre, the Mayan ‘ traditional folk life, ’ and the painters cannot help but meet the consumers ‘demand. At the same time, painting costumbre is nevertheless the painters’conscious signifying practice, which produces difftrences, and as such is indigestible for the Western discourse of art and artist. Thus, the indigenous paintings are commodities made for sale and,at the same time, creative expressions of the producers.
This situation is not unique to Guatemalan indigenous painters. Artists, not recognized as such, in the non-West are producing their work under similar conditions. This paper examines three similar cases : Australian aboriginal acrylic paintings ; African ‘ tourist art ’ and ‘popular art’ from Côte d’Ivoire and Zaïre ; and Balinese peasants’paintings in the 1930s.
All these paintings are ‘bicultural products,’ born under the unequal distribution of power in ‘contact zones.’ They are considered lacking in universal artistic value or are digested as an exotic but intelligible difference by the Western art world and tourism.Western painting techniques are borrowed by those painters, who appropriate them to invent new ways of representing their life, culture, tradition, or history. Being made for sale, these paintings are subordinated to the market law of supply and demand,but these transactions are simultaneously cultural negotiations between contesting signifying practices.
This paper concludes with a few remarks on the importance of giving a voice to those unacknowledged producers of art, who are negotiating, on a daily basis, their position as subaltern artists, in order to explore the fertility of human artistic expression, once it has been released from hegemonic Western artistic conventions.
 
Key Words: Art-Culture System, negotiation, Guatemala, indígena, Maya, oil paintings, tourism

 

The Topology of Dream Narratives:
Narratives by Spirit Mediums among the Bedamuni, Papua New Guinea
Isao Hayashi

Spirit mediums of the Bedamuni, one of the linguistic groups in Papua New Guinea, narrate their own dreams at the beginning of the rainy season each year. This type of dream narrative, gala,circulates extensively with some variations among the people. One of characteristics of gala is that no land name, except ones indicating topographic features, is referred to in the narratives.In contrast to medium’s songs and recountings during sances, as well as the other personal dream narratives, gala does not lead the people in a group to associate its contents with their social life or to interpret the significance of the dream experience. By examining some gala narratives with reference to their dream theory and cosmology, I demonstrate that the omission of land names makes the narratives points of reference for individuals to under-stand personal experiences which are rarely discussed with others.
 
Key Words: Bedamuni, gala, spirit medium, dream theory, place

 

Jomon Clay Figurines and the Goddess Cult:
An Ethnoarchaeological Study, part 2
Hitoshi Watanabe

It was demonstrated in Part 1 of this ethnoarchaeological study, published in the last issue of this Bulletin that Jomon clay figurines were images of the mother goddess as protector of birth or reproduction of the people. However, the conclusion brought forward another question : the possibility that the goddess may not have special-ized in birth protection but may have had a wider function as tutelary goddess of family welfare.
This paper consists of chapters III and IV of which the former is devoted to the elucidation of the above problem. The first key to the solution is the presence of an area of distribution of family cults involv-ing tutelary deities which covers the traditional hunting societies of the north Pacific maritime Far East. Most notable of these are the cult of the traditional Japanese hunting people the “Matagi” and that of the hunter-fishermen of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin. The second key is that images of the family goddess of the “Matagi” are morphologically and culturally linked to Jomon figurine while the corresponding images of the Amur people are morphologically, i.e.culturally linked to clay figurines of the Amur Neolithic. Figurines of the Japanese goddess and those of the Amur goddess share a common morphological pattern of “armlessness”or the kokeshi form.This suggests that the pattern originated from the same cultural source, i.e. the Upper Palaeolithic tradition of female figurines from the Baikal region of Siberia.
Chapter IV is devoted to amorphological analysis of the Upper Palaeolithic female figurines, in search of the origin of the common mor-phological pattern shared by goddess figurines from Japan and the Amur region of the Neolithic and ethnographic present. An attempt is made to re-classify the figurines in the round on the basis of a new criterion of“trunk form,”which is evolutionarily meaningful from the Far Eastern perspective.
As a result it is proved that the figurines distributed in northern Eurasia from Europe to Siberia can be classified into 3 trunk forms : A ( trapezoid ) , B ( rectqngular ), and C ( invertedtrapezoid ), and that Type A is distributed only in Europe, Type C only in Siberia, while Type B only is widely distrjbuted throughout both regions, and that the basic patterns of goddess figurines of the Far East, i.e. in Japan and the Lower Amur-Sakhalin, are descended from the Upper Palaeothic figurines of Types B and C.
Another result of the analysis is that there is sufficient evidence that in Upper Palaeolithic Europe cave-paintings of animals represented the group cult while female figurines represented the domestic cult. The presence of the same structure in the religious system is suggested for the Jomon society : their religious system may also have consisted of two sub-systems : the domestic cult represented by female figurines and the group cult represented by large scale circular structures such as stone-circles.

 
Key Words:family goddess of the Matagi hunters, clay figurines of the Amur Neolithic, family goddess of hunter-fisher of the Lower Amur, Upper Palaeolithic female figurines, classification of the trunk form of the upper palaeolithic figurines

 

The Development of Voicing Rules
in Standard Burmese **
Yoshio Nishi*

In Modern Standard Burmese ( Myanmar ) are observed two distinct types of voicing sandhi : (1) in the environment , and if both and are any one of/p t t c k s/, both and become voiced, and (2) in the environment where C occurs after nonstop rhymes except atonic ones within a word or phrase with a postposition or postpositions, C becomes voiced if it has the voiced counterpart, hence C=/p ph t th c ch k kh ; s sh/.However, a fair number of varied exceptions are found for the first rule. The aim of the present paper is to explain the development of these two sandhi rules and the exceptions by assumlng four stages for the devlopment of three phonological rules, either obligarory or optional, or the orders of their application on the evidence from the regional dialects of Burmese.

 
*Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
**This paper was written while I was staying in Beijing, and as I did not have all the necessary references at hand,I had to leave some works related to the present topic unmentioned in the text and references.
Apart from the use of / / ,/ / and / -n / for his / / , / ð / and / /,the phonemic transcription used in this paper is the same as that in ( Okell 1995 ) , but dihrent from that in ( Okell 1969 ) . The system of literary transliteration of Written Burmese ( WB ) is Duroiselle’s with some modifications. The vocalic onset is preceded by a symbol’, and the serial numbers for tone marks are rearranged in accordance with Cornyn’s. All WB forms, which are, strictly speaking, Modern WB forms,registered in the Myanmar-English Dictionary ( 1993 ) , are enclosed by braces, and phonemic transcriptions ( at the level of traditional phonemics ) by slants.
Key Words: Burmese ( Myanmar ) , historical phonoIogy, Sandhi Rules, atonicization, dialects