Word: kwakiutls
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...contention," Feder declares, "is that anyone can appreciate Indian art, regardless of his knowledge, background or previous experience." Perhaps-but in a strictly limited way. Few people could encounter the carved ceremonial masks of the Northwest Coast Indians, the Tlingit. Kwakiutl or Tsimshian, with their exquisite shell-inlay work and flowing, knife-blade forms that so inexplicably resemble archaic Chinese bronze decoration, without feeling some instant response to the vitality of their stylistic language. Through their art runs a supreme capacity to make sensation concrete: what European artist, for instance, could develop a more concise epigram of a grizzly bear...
...most mysterious and commanding work in the show is by a young New York sculptor. Nancy Graves. 30. Her Shaman is a group of ten objects made of latex, muslin and wire, hanging from the ceiling. They derive (she says) from the ceremonial costumes worn by priests of the Kwakiutl Indian tribe in North America, and they have an eerie "presence," as if the magicians, like shadows, had vacated the elaborate cloaks and headdresses, which were also their skins of power, and left the shucked-off relics behind them, battered but still imbued with magical force...
...that ever-widening circle of giving outside the family, Christmas sometimes takes on an aspect of the potlatch, a ceremony of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest, during which the chiefs showered gifts on each other. Their object was to surpass a rival in generosity, and to crush him under future obligations. To avoid this nowadays, ground rules must be observed. Within an office, the first move must come from the superior-and if the subordinate responds with a gift, it should be clearly less valuable...
Gardner entered anthropological film making in 1949. After reading Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, he made "an honest little documentary" on Benedicts's Kwakiutl Indians...
Preaching v. Practice. Old-fashioned psychoanalysis, says Neurologist Percival Bailey, the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute's director of research, is no science but a pseudoreligious faith. "Its mystical ceremony of initiation resembles in many ways that of the shamans of the Kwakiutl Indians," he says. Bailey believes the analysts' "organized guild" to be "as powerful in its way as the Society of Jesus." And he accuses it of ignoring the plight of patients suffering from psychoses...