HOPI CERAMICS AS A CULTURAL CODE IN RESEARCH OF L. S. McCHESNEY

HOPI CERAMICS AS A CULTURAL CODE IN RESEARCH OF L. S. McCHESNEY

Authors

• S. Bysha L.

Keywords:

HOPI CERAMICS, ETHNOGRAPHY, TRAUMA, SOCIAL ORGANISM, CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of Hopi women pottery (Indian reservation in Arizona), which the American anthropologist L.S. Mc Chesney addressed to describe the phenomenon of physical and psychological trauma experienced in childhood. She uses the concept of «cracked pot» and «crackpot» as a cross-cultural metaphors of body diseases. The author's research reflection is of particular importance since it means rethinking personal traumatic experiences of childhood. Accordingly Hopi pottery masters is not only the cultural comprehension of the phenomenon of trauma but the codification of unconscious emotional experience transformed into a matter as the exponent of the integrity or fragmentation (in the case of a crack) forms of social presence.