Totem Poles Outside of Original Context
When poles are removed from their original context their meaning changes. Poles used in the CCC-created totem parks of Southeast Alaska were removed from their original places as funerary and crest poles to be copied or repaired and then placed in parks based on English and French garden designs to demystify their meaning for tourists.
Poles from the Northwest have sometimes been exported to be displayed out of their original context. In Britain, at the side of Virginia Water Lake, in the south of Windsor Great Park there is a 100-foot (30 m) high Canadian totem pole given to Queen Elizabeth II, commemorating the centenary of British Columbia. In Seattle, Washington, a Tlingit funerary totem pole was raised in Pioneer Square after being taken from an Alaskan village.
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Famous quotes containing the words totem poles, totem, poles, original and/or context:
“Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)