Art of the Northern Tlingit

Art of the Northern Tlingit is the first book-length treatment of the complex and greatly admired art of the Tlingit Indians, inhabitants of what is now southeastern Alaska. It is also the first attempt to analyze the art of any Northwest Coast group from the perspective of a comparison between secular crest art, which the elite display to communicate their social status, and sacred art, which the shaman manipulates during his rituals. The few theoretically oriented scholars of Nrothwest Coast art in the past have approached it either from a mystical, shamanic perspective that focuses on the sacred, or from a sociological point of view that concentrates on the secular. In this book Aldona Jonaitis concerns herself with the interrelations between the sacred and the secular in Tlingit art, basing her analyses on the theories of both the “classic” anthropologists Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Arnold van Gennep and the contemporary scholars Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Edmund Leach. After providing some background on the fascinating men who collected northern Tlingit art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially Louis Shotridge and George T. Emmons, Professor Jonaitis describes the types and the stylistic characteristics of secular and sacred pieces and offers some general observations on the comparisons between the two kinds of art. She then presents the cultural setting of the art, including a discussion of Tlingit social structure and shamanism and analyses of the potlatch and the seance. She proposes that much of the Tlingit culture can be understood as a manifestation of the concepts of hierarchy, complementarity, exchange, and the phases of the rite of passage. Since animals constitute the subject matter of much of northern Tlingit art, the kinds of animals that apepar on secular objects, on the one hand, and on shamanic pieces, on the other, are listed, described, and interpreted in terms of how they convey cultural concepts. The book draws heavily on the unpublished manuscripts of G. T. Emmons, which are invaluable sources on the Tlingit culture and art, and is fully illustrated with numerous photographs, both old and new. As one reader commented: “With this book, Dr. Jonaitis has advanced the analysis of Northwest Coast art to a considerably higher level of sophistication than has until now characterized the field… Such aspects of culture as social organization, house architecture, village plans, potlatches, shamanistic seances, mythology, and concepts of wealth are succinctly described and smoothly integrated with an iconographic, functional, and interpretative analysis of Tlingit art that uses appropriate classical and modern theories. The analysis is presented in simple lively prose which makes her points easy to grasp while at the same time the reader is barely aware of the formidable complexity of the analytical task.” Aldona Jonaitis, Associate Provost of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is an art historian who has published widely on Native American art, concentrating ont he art of the Tlingit. [text from hardcover book jacket]