Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
The Public Faces of Sarah Winnemucca
Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891), a Northern Paiute woman, pretended to be an American Indian Princess and promoted herself in this image. This is clearly seen in the formal studio portraits she had made. In creating this image, however, she joined herself to a stereotype that on the one hand would make her acceptable to Euro-American mentality, but on the other hand tied her to the 19th-century notion of "Indian Princess," an expression of what Rayna Green has called "the Pocahontas Perplex."' To be an effective Indian activist and a promoter of Indian self-determination (which Sarah Winnemucca attempted) in a period when women in general and Indians in particular had little input into the white male power structure was, I believe, incompatible and even in conflict with this stereotype. The image that she promoted may, in fact, have worked against her and limited her credibility. This study is based on the existent formal studio portraits of Sarah Winnemucca.2 Formal portraits make purposeful statements of how the subject wanted to be known, and can be as revealing as a personal diary. These photographs, however, must be viewed as a group. Individually they cannot tell us much about the subject or patterns in her life, just as a page in a diary gives no holistic view. For any viable study of photographs there must be a critical number that allows us to form a hypothesis and interpretation. That finite number, however, will vary with the subject. In this article I will examine these photographs "as artifacts of culture and the social process surrounding photography as an 'ethnographic' situation revealing of culture" (Ruby 1981:23). These portraits are thus not unrelated, but form a body of visual documents whose study reveals distinctive cultural and social patterns. In general, scholars fail to take photographs seriously and do not use them as primary documents. They are considered too subjective, and difficult to extract reliable facts from. The written word alone carries the validity. I believe that if we approach the visual material critically and with proper historical method we
Bodies Politic : Disease , Death and Doctors in Britain , 1650-1900
In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced. Expansive, humorous, intelligent, and incisive, his broad range of historical works has excited and educated several generations of students of history over the past thirty years. His death leaves an unfillable void within the global history of medicine. At the same time, however, this book itself, completed well before his death, is haunted by elements of despair and uncertainty that should make us carefully reconsider not only the purpose and direction of our professional inquiries but also our own mortality.