In Focus

Betel nut chewing is practiced from India to New Guinea and northward to the Philippines. Its origins are not known, but it is assumed that the practice began thousands of years ago. The ingredients for a chew consist of a betel (areca) nut, the leaf of a pepper vine, and a touch of lime. Chewing acts as a mild stimulant, somewhat similar to a cup of coffee.

While the basic form and use of this textile (lawo butu) are equivalent to those of 1990.205, its overall composition differs. Contrasting with the asymmetric placement of beadwork motifs in the other lawo butu, here the decoration is more rigid and balanced.

"I meet people. One at a time they step inside me and live inside me. Some of them only for a moment, some stay. They set up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and put their own in their place. They lie on my back and press their toes into my Achilles tendons. They appear in every pause and come out when I am in doubt and fill all the empty space.

The Dallas nkisi belongs to a class of minkisi called nkondi (pl. minkondi). The term is translated as "hunter" of wrongdoers in matters of civil law; the hunter is simulatenously chief, doctor, priest, and judge.

The Small Passion is a series of thirty-seven prints that relates the Christian history of man’s salvation, beginning with the Temptation of Adam and Eve and ending with the Last Judgment. It was published as a set in 1511 and bound with explanatory text in Latin written by the Benedictine monk Chelidonius of Nuremberg.

The following is a 2001 essay by Alan Wilkinson published in Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century. While the aesthetics of various cultures from the Americas, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa had significant influences on the development of modernist abstraction, the modernist use of the term "primitive art" to refer collectively to w