Over the last fifteen years a select group of professionally trained and politically astute Canadian artists of Native ancestry has produced a compelling body of work that owes much of its power to a wry and ironic sense of humour rooted firmly in oral tradition. More than a critical/political strategy, such humour reflects a widespread cultural and communal sensibility embodied in the mythical Native American Trickster. The present study explores the influence of this comic spirit on the practice of several artists through the presentation of a "Trickster discourse," that is, a body of overlapping and interrelated verbal and visual narratives by tricksters and about trickster practice. Most of the research for this project took place between January 1990 and November 1991 and involved extended conversations with artists, elders, actors, writers, linguists, curators and art historians in six Canadian provinces. Over 80 hours of interviews were amassed along with several hundred slides and photographs of artists' work. From this body of material 140 images were selected for analysis with well over 100 commentaries and reflections on practice excerpted from the interviews. These verbal and visual narratives have been gathered together under the broad headings of self-identity, representation, political control and global presence. In light of the highly eclectic and hybrid nature of these narratives, an eclectic and hybrid conceptual framework has been constructed to consider them. Accordingly, a multiplicity of theoretical concepts has been braided together and interwoven throughout the chapters to reflect the complexity, density and interconnectedness of the material. To convey the sense of raultilayered communication and simultaneous conversation, quotation and footnote have been used extensively as parallel and overlapping texts. In this they constitute a form of hypertext or hypermedia. More importantly, the text honours and participates in a non-linear process of representation shared by many of the artists. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 715-774).

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Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-105). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.I.S.)--Oregon State University, 1992. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-100). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-309).

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Before the mid-1980s Lambayeque style artifacts were often mislabeled in museums, private collections and catalogues as representative of the Chimú style. This “Chimuization” (Zevallos Quiñones 1971) of Lambayeque style objects was symptomatic of long-standing confusion between the two sets of material culture, which are now better defined thanks to ongoing archaeological projects in the north coast regions of Peru where the objects were produced. The semblance between these artistic traditions, which was responsible for their initial classificatory muddling, is often mentioned anecdotally in works concerning the late Middle Horizon and Late Intermediate Periods of Andean prehistory during which the styles flourished. The exact nature of the relationship between them, however, awaits a thorough, directed study. This dissertation aims to address this lacuna in pre-Columbian art historical scholarship by means of a comparative iconographic analysis focused on a specific type of figural imagery that was ubiquitous in each corpus and associated with institutions of divinely sanctioned rulership. The primary sample of images compiled and reviewed by this project is limited by medium to those found on ceramic vessels. Ultimately, however, iconographic representations and objects of ritual use in various media are positioned as different facets of the same overarching aesthetic concept, offering one possible model for interpreting the visualization of divine rulership in ancient cultures more generally.

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