12/14/2009
A. Bunce Island was once home to one of the many British slave castles. This was a place where slaves were taken before they were shipped off to other countries to be slaves there.
B. Edward Hopper was an American artist from the 20th century. He was actually one of the most famous realist painters from America during his time. He was well known for painting things the way he really saw and felt about them. We saw some of his work at the Chicago Art Institute.
C. Teleman was a great German composer and some of his work was performed by the Chicago Symphony.
D. The Kumbha Mela is a huge Pilgramage performed by Hindu's. This pilgramige occurs four times every twelve years and during this pilgrimage people perform a ritual bathing ceremony of enormous proportions.
E. The Great Rift Valley is a piece of land that stretches 6000 km and is located between Lebanon and Mozambique.
F. A savanna is a flat grassland located in tropical or subtropical regions.
G. Porte de L'Afrique is French for door to Africa. This is the name for a port in Marseille, France which leads to Africa.
H. 1. Grinding corn to make flour
2. Transportation- Canals and Roadways
3. The way they farmed to get better results out of their crops and to make farming easier.
1. Well I didn't get to get quite as much first hand experience as I had hoped (due to sickness for those of you who weren't there), but in the few things I did experience I definitly found out why looking at artifacts and things such as art would be so revealing to a people's culture and beliefs at the time. This was most obvious to me during our visit to the Chicago Art Institute. There we were guided on a two hour tour through many different times and cultures. We went to the African exhibit and saw the diffierence in East and West Africe just by looking at the art that had come out of each region. In the East there were books and tablets with Jesus and Mary painted and etched into them. Then when we looked at the west it was a much different culture. There we saw a statue of a man covered in nails. This statue was kept in a "healers" house and people would come to it and when they hammered a nail into it it was believed that this would purify them of any demons or sins. There was also a statue of a king and his queen. This one was particularly interesting because it really gave you a feel for how their culture potrayed the status of men and women. The king was nearly half the size of the woman and was seated on a thrown. The queen was standing behind him towering over him in an almost protective way. This can be translated many different ways, but I would say the most obvious conclusion is that yes the man is in charge and he is the procrlaimed leader, but the woman is the overseer of the family and is a very strong and powerful part of their culture. Also another neat fact about the statue was that the king was wearing a hat with a bird on it to symbolize, that like a bird can see his entire kingdom from above, so can he. We also came to an area of the museum that was full of a bunch of different miniature sized artifacts. There was everything from horses, houses, dogs, clay pillows, and noblemen. These were all things people were buried with. As we looked at these things you could tell that they defintily believed in life after death and that everything you were buried with you could use in the afterlife. It was very cool to see what they believed and how serious they took this belief. It was also neat to see how over time the artifacts got better and more detialed. For example, once the silk road opened up and trade between Europe and Asia became easier things such as colored glaze were introduced to these new cultures and were used in making these artifacts.
2. I think that art, or the lack there of, is the best and most universal way to see a society's fundamental beliefs and actions. Not everyone can read or write, and there are too many languages in this world for any one person to possibly learn, but everyone can interpret art. Everyone can look at a peice of art and get something out of it. A good example of the lack of art was the Islamic center. As we sat and listened to their afternoon prayer we looked around and noticed that it was much different then most religious centers we are used too. There were no paintings of their prophets or important people to their rligion, just bare walls with one painting of just the many names for God. This is important to their culture and religion because they believe there is to be no false depictions of their God and they are to have no idols and since nobody has a picture of God or any of their prophets, their walls remain empty. The Spertus musuem was filled with art and relics Jewish history. I found it very interesting because the theme was "What does it mean to you?". So, the tour guide would tell us all about an object and then ask us the question "What does it mean to you?" This was a very inventive idea as it made you you fill in the blank as to why that peice was important or if it was even important at all. The Art Institute definitly had the largest variety's and examples of art and how it pertained to culture and times. One of my favorite examples was the impressionist's art. I loved how it just told it how it was and was very upfront about their culture dirty little secrets that had mostly been ignored, atleast by the mainstream art world. Such as, the statue of a regular man with all his flaws, instead of the nearly perfect bodies of the men in other sculptures. It was also unbelievable to see how much American art as a whole has changed over just the last couple hundred years. It has moved from your everday self-portait to, well, anything you can think of, from clown torture to a pile of rocks.
Posted at 12:14 AM by Josh Seifert