Essay On Tradition And Style

The concept of tradition and the was tradition is preserved comes into play among many other communities of potters. Tradition can be seen as a set of limitations on a potter or an opportunity for a manifestation of communal artistry. If one of the key characteristics defining an artist, is their agency over their creative decisions and a tradition that sets a guideline for how their pots should be made their agency could be said to be removed from the equation. Jon Muller argues that tradition and style are not necessarily limiting factors and that, mathematically speaking, there are infinite ways that style can manifest under set restrictions or guidelines of culture. Other scholars have argued the opposite. Herschel B. Chipp who claimed …show more content…
al., claim that in Mafa communities in Northern Cameroon, even as recently as the 1960s, decoration is seen as necessary and yet, “it is carried out as part of the craft rather than as an art, generally quite neatly but without either much imagination or care” (1988, 370). Perhaps for the Mafa potters, decoration was not a form of self expression nor a means to add an aesthetic appeal to the piece. Instead it was viewed as a standardized feature as necessary to the structure of the pot as a handle or spout. It is possible as well that decoration gave potters a means to identify their work with the tradition from which it was a part of. Without these associations derived from the decorations, their pots would not be recognizable as Mafa vessels. For the Mafa potters decoration followed a specific, clearly determined code. Through this code, pottery design was embedded in Mafa tradition and culture. As a result individual pots represented individuals only to the extent that said potters represented society. (David, Sterner, & Gavua …show more content…
Patrick Geary’s definition of commodity being “a good destined for circulation and exchange" (1986,169) provides a concise definition that can be applied across many strata.The flexibility of this definition too is useful because it does not establish that commodity and art are mutually exclusive. While some societies of potters undoubtedly viewed their ceramic vessels as commodities that had a significant role economically, it is not necessarily true that this negated the idea of the vessels being works of art. During the Inkan empire, production of goods had a specific was a means of paying tribute to society. However, the value of an individual’s contribution was in their labour and not the goods that they produced. Perhaps in such societies where the effort taken on producing a vessel there was a greater opportunity for individual potters to make creative decisions. (Cremonte,