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L W FE RSN S—————— Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the EloWH,* whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania — while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents — also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization. Further inversions occur in the domains of spir- itual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion”.** Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work. Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.

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L W FE RSN S—————— Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the EloWH,* whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania — while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents — also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization. Further inversions occur in the domains of spir- itual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion”.** Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work. Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.
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Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 19:58:56 JST Rasmus Fleischer

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus." (some street art)
Or maybe... the palace is just returning to its original form?
According to some anthropologists, the court essentially began as a circus, a "theatre state" as Clifford Geertz termed it. Which must of course be a very ambigous and possibly terrible thing. I think that Graeber & Wengrow's "The dawn of everything" has some brief but nuanced thoughts on that point.

In conversation 3 months ago from tldr.nettime.org permalink