Notes on the Cognitive Texture of an Oral Mind: Kitawa, a Melanesian Culture - Hardcover

This book marks the culmination of Giancarlo M.G. Scoditti's renowned series of publications on the cultural production of the northern Massim island of Kitawa, Papua New Guinea. It explores how the Nowau 'creators of images' conceive of the way their artistic compositions come about - sketching Kitawan cognitive philosophy and aesthetic practice. Describing how for them images grow like the loops of the Nautilus shell - one of nature's prominant demonstrations of the logarithmic spiral and the golden section - Scoditti's analysis of Kitawan cognitive and artistic principles resonates with Lévi-Strauss's work on myth and Kant's notion of the mental schema, and makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the 'oral mind'.

Giancarlo M. G. Scoditti is Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Classical Archaeology and History of Ancient Art, University of Urbino in Italy. From 1973 he has carried out extensive field research on both Kitawa and Kiriwina Islands (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea), focusing his attention on the verbal as well as non-verbal oral expressions of those cultures. He began by analysing the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of kula canoes' prowboards to their carvers. Then he worked on poetic formulas chanted on different occasions by Kitawa inhabitants. Currently his researches concern the analysis of interpretations of the text of the myth of foundation narrated by the leaders of the four clans living on Kitawa and Kiriwina island.