From: "Gene Smith" <SmithFrow@worldnet.att.net>
To: <baidarka@lists.intelenet.net>
Subject: Re: baidarka spirit /life lines
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1999 22:38:14 -0000
This is a fascinating observation - thank you for posting it and adding your
own comments. I wanted to post a response, but I am still thinking about
the implications in what you have written. Unless one is endowed with a
world view that allows one to simply dismiss things like this a primitive
nonsense - either more or less interesting intellectually, but certainly
devoid of any validity outside of psychology or anthropology - then it
reveals an alternate world view that is quite overwhelming in its
'otherness'.
Gene Smith
still thinking about it in Houston
>I ran into the following paragraph in _Eskimo Essays_ by Ann
>Fienup-Riordan, Rutgers University Press, 1990 and am quoting it here
>as I thought it relevant to the earlier thread on spirit lines.
>Although the book is primarily about Yupik culture, the quote is
>probably applicable to traditonal Aleut culture as well.
>
>"In the past, inanimate objects were also believed to posess souls.
>Thus, hunters decorated their implements not only to endow them with
>favorable attributes (as seen in the extensive use of predatory-beast
>motifs) and to draw the animals they hunted but to simultaneously
>impart life into and please the objects themselves."
>
>I think what this paragraph implies is that decoration of the kayak
>both with carvings and with paint were thought of not just as esthetic
>practices but as practices essential to the proper functioning of the
>kayak in the spiritual realm.
>
>Wolfgang
>
>
>
>
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