ART. 30 DESIGN AEEAS IN OCEANIA KEIEGEK 37 



The entire gamut of artistic expression is applied to t'.ie shapini; of 

 devices to scare away the demons. 



Sinhalese art. — The large island of Ceylon, just ofl' the southeastern 

 coast of India, through the Sinhalese has developed a rather dec- 

 orative style of art. This may be traced to Brahmanistic and 

 Buddhistic religious influences from India, and the more ancient 

 ])rimitive native religion of the Sinhalese. The so-called devil wor- 

 ship of the Sinhalese reaches an expression in art through the use of 

 grotesque wooden masks, representing for the most part major and 

 minor demons. As in northwestern North America, masks are the 

 accessories of the shaman, and each mask represents one kind of 

 disease. In the Museum collection from Ceylon are several Ceylonese 

 masks. 



Elementary decorative art of the Veddah. — Another primitive tribe 

 in Ceylon, the Veddahs, are apparently related to the primitive peoples 

 in the Malaysian Peninsula, the Sakai, perliaps also to the >7e.'>:rito 

 and black peoples of Indonesia, These peoples apparently are almost 

 devoid of artistic expression through the means of decorative art. 

 In fact not even bodily decorations are practiced, such as scarifica- 

 tions, or even the piercing of the ears for earrings. The same might 

 be said for other primitive tribes in the interior of the islands of 

 Malaysia and Indonesia, except that for each of them a few objects 

 of ornamental art are known, such as wristlets, leg bandages, neck- 

 laces, and other rudimentary forms of decorative art. 



Cultural affiliations in Indonesia. — No region of the earth is so 

 isolated as Australia and New Guinea, while none is so rich in types, 

 so articulated, and so hybridized as Indonesia. 



Indonesia lies at the boundary of South Asia, facing on the one 

 hand Micronesia, on another, Melanesia, and on still another New 

 Guinea. It fronts southeastern Asia as a compact-land mass, and 

 has sent out a tentacle as far as the southeastern coast of Africa, 

 i. e., Madagascar. 



It is not attempted in this article to discuss art styles of the several 

 cultural areas of Asia, although a cradleland, so to speak, of insular 

 art styles as found in Indonesia, particularly the Malayan islands of 

 Java, Borneo, and the Philippines. Then, too, the environmental 

 influences of diverse geographical regions of Asia have tended to 

 make for dissimilar art forms and styles. Prevalent use of rattan 

 and bamboo in the insular world off the southwestern coast of Asia 

 likewise has introduced a central motive in Indonesian art that is 

 not found on the mainland. 



The Japanese, perhaps more than any modern insular Asiatic 

 people, can trace their art to a direct continental source, but there, 

 too, we find a great divergence from Chinese prototypes. Asia 



