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ART AND CULTURE OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST COM

游客2024-01-02  19
问题                                         ART AND CULTURE OF PACIFIC NORTHWEST COMMUNITIES
    (1) The 1,600-kilometer stretch of the northwestern Pacific coast of North America (from southern Alaska to Washington State) provided an ideal environment for the growth of stable communities. Despite the northerly latitude, the climate is temperate. Natural resources were originally so rich that the inhabitants could subsist by fishing and hunting and gathering, without the need to domesticate livestock or cultivate the land. Forests yielded an abundance of wood for buildings, for boats, and for sculpture. Beyond them the Rocky Mountains were an impenetrable barrier against raids. The area appears to have been settled around 500 A.D. by tribes of diverse origins speaking mutually unintelligible languages: from north to south they include the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Bella Coola, the Kwakiutl, and the Nootka. The culture to which they contributed has, nevertheless, an underlying homogeneity and a distinct visual character.
    (2) The peoples of the Northwest engaged in trade as well as warfare with one another, and this may account for the diffusion of cultural traits and artistic motifs throughout the area. Much of their art was concerned with religious ritual objects. But the rest is secular and springs from a preoccupation with the hereditary basis of their complex social structures.
    (3) The Tlingit and other nations or language groups were collections of autonomous village communities composed of one or more families, each with its own chief, who inherited his position through matrilineal descent. They had no centralized political or religious organization, but cohesion was given by extensive kinship networks established through marriage, and men and women were obliged to marry outside the larger divisions of clans and moieties (tribal subdivisions) into which they were born and into which the social group was divided by matrilineal or patrilineal descent. Thus families built up riches by marriage without any one family acquiring a dominant position.
    (4) Totem poles, the most distinctive artistic product of the Northwest, were conspicuous declarations of prestige and of the genealogy (family history) by which it had been attained. These magnificent sculptures that probably originated as funerary monuments were first described by travelers in the late 18th century. Each one was carved from a single trunk of cedar, and the increasing availability of metal tools both permitted and encouraged more complex compositions and greater height—up to 27.4 meters. Their superimposed figures—eagles, beavers, whales, and so on—were crests (symbols of identity) that a chief inherited from his lineage, his clan, and his moiety. They were not objects of worship, though the animals carved on them might represent guardian spirits. Poles were designed according to a governing principle of bilateral symmetry, with their various elements interlocked so that they seem to grow organically out of one another, creating a unity of symbolism, form, and surface.
    (5) [A] Masks are the most varied of the carvings from the Northwest, where they were an essential part of communal life. [B] In style they range from an almost abstract symbolism to combinations of human and animal features and to a lifelike naturalism sometimes bordering on caricature (a style that strongly exaggerates features or characteristics), taken to its extreme in Tlingit war helmets. Some differences must have been due to those among the cultures in which they were created, but their place of origin cannot always be ascertained as they seem to have passed from one contiguous nation to another in the course of trade or warfare. [C] Although carvers worked according to established conventions, no two masks are identical and those with basic similarities reveal varying degrees of skill. [D]
    (6) The major differences between masks were determined by their purpose. Some were representations of chiefs and their ancestors and made to be displayed and treasured as heirlooms. Although they appear to record the styles of facial tattooing customary in different groups, it is difficult to say how far they were intended to be portraits rather than generalized images. Many masks, sometimes quite large, were carved to be worn in dance dramas that re-enacted and kept alive the cohesive myths of a culture. Often, Tlingit masks were made for religious leaders and incorporated the animals that were believed to be their spirit helpers. Conjuring up forces of nature from the ocean, the forests, or the sky, they mediated between life on Earth and the inscrutable powers around and above. [br] An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points.
The peoples who lived along the northwestern coast of North America had stable communities and a distinctive artistic style.
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Answer Choices
(A) The peoples lived on food from the sea, animals, and wild plants, and used wood from the forests for building construction, boat making, and sculpture.
(B) In the absence of a central political or religious organization, wide kinship networks established through interclan marriage helped to maintain social cohesion.
(C) Totem poles had a chief’s symbols of identity imposed on them, and were thus used as objects of worship, whereas masks were used for secular purposes.
(D) Although the peoples of the northwestern communities came from various language groups, their languages were closely related and they could generally understand one another.
(E) The most remarkable artistic products of the northwestern peoples were totem poles and masks, which often represented families and their spirit guides.
(F) Carvers made masks using a principle of bilateral symmetry that resulted in the creation of a unity of symbolism, form, and surface.
选项
答案 A,B,E
解析 A项“西北部民族从海洋获取食物，以动物和野生植物为食物，以森林里的树木来建筑房屋、制船和做雕像”符合文中第1段第3、4句话的表述，故选此项。B项“他们没有集权政治或者宗教组织。庞大的亲族网络通过宗族间通婚来建立，以维持社会凝聚力”符合原文第3段第2句话的表达，故选此项。E项“西北民族最杰出的艺术作品是图腾柱和面具，它们通常象征着家族和人们的精神指引”是对第4段和第6段的概括。C项“图腾柱上刻有象征首领的图案，因此，被用来作为人们崇敬的对象，而面具则用于世俗事务”，原文第4段倒数第2句明确指出，图腾柱不是人们崇敬的对象，C项错误；D项“尽管西北部社群的各个民族来自不同的语言群体，但他们的语言却有着密切的联系，所以总体来说，彼此之间没有交流障碍”，第1段倒数第2句明确提到了这些部落之间语言互不相通，故D项错误。F项“雕刻者运用左右对称的原则来制作面具，创造出象征意义、形式和外在的统一”。该项大部分符合第4段最后一句的描述，但文中说的是图腾柱的特点，而F项说的是面具，故F项不符合原文说法。
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