248
pages • 55 b/w plates• index• references
70 color images on CD-ROM
6" x 9" • cloth
1-931707-81-2
978-1931707-81-7
$39.95
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Santa
Cruz Island Figure Sculpture and Its Social and Ritual Contexts
William
H. Davenport
In
this ethnographic study of traditional sculpture from Santa
Cruz Island, near the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific
the late anthropologist William H. Davenport presents a distinctive
genre of figure sculpture produced for and used in traditional
religious rituals and ceremonies.
The body of the book discusses the history of Santa Cruz Island
society since the first Europeans came to the area in 1595,
the cultural meanings of its most conspicuous features, and
descriptions of the main components of worship, the rituals.
The book includes discoveries about the making and use of the
figurines, as well as the iconography of the pieces. The latter
information is derived from general ethnographic data collected
in the course of field research between 1958 and 1976 on Santa
Cruz Island and the adjacent islands of the Santa Cruz Group,
where Davenport’s many close friends included both his
informants in the villages and officers of the British Colonial
Service.
A dual study of a tradition of so-called tribal art in its context
and a study of Santa Cruz Island society, the book includes
meticulous descriptions of the sacred objects, currency, dances,
and social interactions. Davenport’s records of 55 specimens
of Santa Cruz sculpture from both private collections and museums—–initial
acquisition, subsequent ownership, and other detailed physical
information––constitute the catalogue section of
the book.
An engaging and previously unrecorded transcription of information
distilled from local informants of the oral myths, rituals,
and ceremonies reveals how Santa Cruz believers distinguished,
celebrated, and communicated with their deities.
Davenport’s own unique photographs––both black
and white and color–– illustrate rituals on the
island and life as it was lived before independence in 1978.
His work here is a record of a culture which is barely now either
lived or remembered by the descendants of those who created
it, and all figural sculpture discovered in the future must
be judged against this corpus of authenticated originals.
Audiences will include anthropologists interested in the tribal
arts of Pacific peoples, libraries with Melanesian collections,
art historians, contemporary historians interested in the difference
between description and comparison, and the special political
and economic situation of colonialism.
MEET THE AUTHOR
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William H. Davenport |
Professor
Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania,
earned a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Hawai’i
in 1952, after attending the Art Center School in Los
Angeles, 1939-41, and serving in the U.S. Navy during
WWII. He received a Ph.D. in ethnography/ethnology from
Yale in 1956. He was the author of more than 60 articles
in scholarly and popular journals, museum journals, edited
volumes, and encyclopedias and book chapters. |
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