In recent years, the concept of 'animism' has gained considerable popularity among archaeologists in exploring non-Western expressions of material culture. This development has also influenced recent academic approaches towards the study of 'rock-art' of people living as hunter and gatherers or in a hunting and gathering tradition. We argue here that attempts in this direction so far are generally compromised, because they fail to take Indigenous philosophies and intellectual contributions seriously. Any concern with Indigenous material expressions, including so-called rock-art, has to involve a critical re-assessment of academic discourse itself and a challenge to the primacy of Western scientific and literary, academic methodologies. With reference to the 'rock-art' and the world-view of the Ngarinyin (Kimberley, Northwest Australia), we present some preliminary thoughts for the development of an alternative interpretative framework, while offering a (much needed) legitimacy to another more balanced epistemology.
This article examines aspects of social memory in the Aurignacian mobiliary art of southwest Germany. An analytical distinction is introduced between cultural and communicative memory with different characteristics and functions in Palaeolithic social life. It is argued that the statuettes are reflections of cultural memory, but also stood in a complex and unstable relationship with the flexible conditions of everyday life. The figurative objects are not passive reproductions of collective ideas. Rather, they have to be seen as products of an active individual and intense concern with the field of meanings and associations of cultural memory, and consequently represent individual variations of a socially shared meaningful ideology
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