Thunder and being : attribution, continuity, and symbolic capital in a Nuxalk community ...

• Main Author: Smith, Christopher Wesley
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2019
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0380408; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0380408

This ethnography investigates how Nuxalk carpenters (artists) and cultural specialists discursively connect themselves to cultural treasures and historic makers through attributions and staked cultural knowledge. A recent wave of information in the form of digital images of ancestral objects, long-absent from the community, has enabled Nuxalk members to develop connoisseurial skills to reinterpret, reengage, and re-indigenize those objects while constructing cultural continuity and mobilizing symbolic capital in their community, the art market, and between each other. The methodologies described in this ethnography and deployed by Nuxalk people draw from both traditional knowledge and formal analysis, problematizing the presumed binary division between these epistemologies in First Nations art scholarship and texts. By developing competencies with objects though exposure and familiarity, Nuxalk carpenters and cultural specialists are driving a spiritual and artistic resurgence within their community. One ...