Notes on the Cognitive Texture of an Oral Mind: Kitawa, A Melanesian Culture

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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 Levi-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’.