ANTHROPOLOGY

Masques Primitifs is a neat book I found at the Newberry Library Book Fair several years back for $2. It contains about 30 or so pictures of ancient masks from around the world. Written and photographed by I.L. Schneider, published in 1951.

These are some good ones, (unfortunately they are not dated):

 
(Ivory Coast)

(Haida People - Pacific Northwest/ Alaska)

 (Peninsula of the Gazelle, Papua New Guinea)

FROM MAY

"We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

[several passages later, May is quoting from Erich Fromm] '...There is much less difference between a mystic's faith in god (by which he means the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-worldly creeds) and an atheist's rational faith in mankind than between the former and that of a calvinist whose faith in god is rooted in the conviction of his own powerlessness and in his fear of god's power.'"

- Rollo May, Man's Search For Himself

CHICAGO: THE WAYSTATION IN TIME

"The home park of the big soap-chip and sausage-stuffing tycoons, the home cave of the juke-box giants and the mail-order dragons, the knot that binds the TV waves to the airlanes and the railroad ties to the sea, but also the psychological nerve center where the pang goes deepest when the whole country is grinding its teeth in a nightmare sleep."

- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City On The Make