From the Preface:
The short study presented... attempts to give a description of the major aspects of both Bush Negro art and culture. It attempts to give the cultural setting of the major facets of the art, within the limits set, in the hope that its formal aspects are thus set in a wider configuration of culture patterns and do not stand alone without context to be admired only for themselves. It is hoped that the cultural divisions covered in this short summary may enrich the general picture, or, failing this, that they may promote a more extensive enquiry than has been possible here, and thus lead to a deeper understanding of Bush Negro art.
Obituary:
Philip J. C. Dark, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), died on April 4, 2008, in St. Mawes, Cornwall, England. He was a leading authority on tribal arts, particularly of Benin and the Pacific. (...) [Dark] took anthropology courses with the Africanist Daryll Forde, with whom he would retain a lifelong friendship. Forde encouraged him to continue his studies in anthropology at Yale under Linton, a major scholar of what was then called “primitive art.” Linton had a significant influence on Dark, and he introduced him to the art of the Maroons of Suriname, usually referred to in the anthropological literature of the time as “Bush Negroes.” The intricate wood and calabash carvings and basketry of these descendants of fugitive slaves became the subject of Dark’s 1950 Master’s thesis; based on secondary ethnographic literature and a trait analysis of several museum collections, it was later published separately in a pioneering monographic study (Dark 1954a).
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