Dorothy K. Washburn

Emory Sekaquaptewa dedicated most of his life to promoting Hopi literacy and creating written materials to strengthen the language and lifeway of his people. He understood how intimately cultural ideas are embedded in language, and by transcribing and translating early recordings of katsina songs he helped strengthen the continuity of Hopi religious thought and cultural practices. Sekaquaptewa believed that the advice contained in the katsina songs, some of which were recorded over a century ago, could be used by future generations as guideposts for navigating contemporary life. Hopi Katsina Songs contains Hopi transcriptions, English translations, and detailed commentaries of 150 katsina songs, recorded throughout the twentieth century from all three Hopi mesas, as well as twenty-five recorded by Sekaquaptewa himself. To further continue the creative process of the Hopi legacy, Sekaquaptewa included song fragments with the hope that readers would remember the songs and complete them. These features make his collection an invaluable resource for preserving and teaching Hopi language and culture.

The essays in this volume, which was originally published in 1983, present an innovative and unified approach to the archaeological analysis and interpretation of art and design. Together, they illustrate a variety of approaches to the discovery and systematic description of the underlying regularities in the organization of art forms. A group of ethnographic papers show how structural consistencies both relate to and reflect other aspects of the cultural system, while archaeological case studies suggest potential uses of this concept for archaeological material. Thus, through the study of the structure of art, this volume adds to our understanding of the total cultural system. The case studies demonstrate how structural analysis can be particularly systematic for comparative synchronic and diachronic studies. Moreover, the contributors boldly advocate a cognitive basis for the structural regularities underlying art forms. They demonstrate that art is much more than decoration; it is a sophisticated communication system.

Winner of the George Wittenborn Award

This is a print on demand publication. Cognitive psychologists are now suggesting that there are two kinds of features which people use in the recognition & classifiation process.The first are very basic properties which have been studied by experimental psychologists. The second are object-specific features which have been the basis of most stylistic analyses. However, experimental psychologists have largely studied the categorization process in an acultural setting, & both they & their subjects were largely from Western, modernized cultures. Since what is perceived varies greatly from culture to culture, the challenge to anthropologists is to develop methodologies that will reveal which features are salient in a given cultural situation. It is therefore the purpose of this study to re-examine the issue of how people sort & group things in their world by utilizing both the methodologies of cognitive psychology & anthropology to understand the kinds of features people use to make category decisions. To test this approach, the author examined how the Bakuba of central Zaire manipulate certain basic design properties in their process of naming pattern categories on raffia cloth. Illus.