Terminology

This glossary of terms is based on:

Petersen, Michelle. 2017. “Arts Development for Scripture Engagement.” Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith 5 (December). https://artsandchristianfaith.org/index.php/journal/article/view/31.

Schrag, Brian. 2013. Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities to Reach Their Kingdom Goals. Edited by James Krabill. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library.

Agency: The ability of a group or an individual to exert power, usually in terms of making decisions.

Analytical performance: Presentation designed by a researcher in order to isolate features of artistic production.

Artistic communication: An act of conveying messages marked by heightened attention to form and visceral and emotional impact. 

Artistic creativity: when one or more people draw on their personal competencies, symbolic systems, and social patterns of their community to produce an event of heightened communication that has not previously existed in its exact form.

Artistic domain: An abstract category of special communication determined by the nature of its production. In the manual, we use this term to refer to common Euroamerican categories, including music, dance, drama, oratory, architecture, culinary and visual arts. Other communities organize their thoughts and words about arts differently. 

Artistic event: Something that occurs in a particular place and time, related to larger sociocultural patterns of a community, containing at least one enactment of an artistic genre. It is divisible into shorter time segments. Examples: festival, church service, birthday party, rite of passage. See Artistic genre enactment.

Artistic genre: 1. A community’s internal category of language enacted in a particular social, temporal, and physical context, and marked by artistic features (probably from more than one abstract artistic category, e.g., music, theater, dance, poetry, visual arts, etc.) that people in the community can identify and talk about, and often has a name. Examples include olonkho (Siberia), Broadway musical (New York City), kanoon (Cameroon), huayno (Peru), haiku (Japan), praise and worship (Euroamerica), qawwali (South Asia), graphic novel (international), Bollywood film (India), jebwa (Australia), güipil (Guatemala). Examples perhaps less formally integrated into people’s lives include a father speaking proverb to his daughter; a bucket painted with tole; food arranged or crafted aesthetically; a lullaby; auctioneering; prayer; crocheting; a birthday cake; buildings; posters; flyers; commercials; radio announcing. 2. a system of spoken, written, gestured, and otherwise emitted signs and symbols (i.e., a type of language) through which human beings express themselves in a particular social, temporal, and physical context.  See Genre, Artistic genre enactment, Local artistic genre.

Artistic genre enactment: an instantiation of an artistic genre during an event; artistry that people produce from within a genre. Sometimes we refer to a genre enactment as artistry, or bits of artistry. 

Art of Wider Communication: a genre that provides a mutually intelligible medium for members of multiple cultural societies.

Arts: A general term that refers to forms of communication marked by patterns that differ from a community’s everyday communication. 

Arts acquisition development activities add to the number of participants using local genres by increasing the motivation to learn, perform, experience, or use local works and by instructing the next generation in the use of local works.

Arts corpus development activities include creation and preservation of a body of works, graphization, standardization, and modernization.

Arts advocate: Anyone who advocates the use of local arts for a community’s benefit. Also sometimes referred to as an ethnoarts advocate.

Arts consultant (Christian): A specialist who researches and encourages Scripture-infused creativity in local artistic forms of communities around the world. Sometimes referred to as an ethnoarts consultant, ethnoarts specialist, or ethnoarts worker.

Arts development considers how local artistic genres may gain more functions for more people in a community.

Arts status development activities a) extend the current uses of genres to new functions and new domains, and b) increase the level of approval and respect that gatekeepers and communities accord the genres for these uses.

Autogenic research: Investigation performed and often initiated by community members on their own communities. Related terms include auto-ethnographic research, community-based ethnography, self-research, research with auto-actionary outcomes.

Catalyst: Someone or something that starts an action that keeps going on its own. Metaphorical use of a particular kind of chemical reaction. 

CLAT: The acronym for the Creating Local Arts Together process.

Cocreation: A way of thinking about the Creating Local Arts Together (CLAT) process. It emphasizes Father|Son|Spirit’s intimate involvement in and the the multiple roles people play in purposeful artistic production.

Community: We define a community as a social group of any size whose members share a story, identity, and ongoing patterns of interaction. They are internally complex and constantly changing. 

Contextualization: Adapting an outside cultural form or idea into a society or culture. Often used in terms of the adoption of Christianity.

Creation is innovating an emergent body of works for use in all domains which are the focus of development  

Cultural domain: A broad category of cultural meanings or phenomena that includes smaller categories. Examples include emotions and aesthetics.

Cultural theme: Any principle that recurs in several cultural domains and defines relationships among sets of cultural meanings.

Distilled forms: Genres whose enactments are relatively short and inflexible. Examples include proverbs, riddles, aphorisms, sayings, greetings, clichés (melodic, rhythmic, movement, etc.). They are often woven or inserted into larger communication contexts like court proceedings, games, or informal conversation.

Domain of use: a communication context in which people make choices about which languages and genres to use.

Effects (of artistry): Changes in a person or group tied to meaning(s) they attribute to creating, enacting, experiencing, participating in, remembering, or otherwise engaging with particular types of artistry. These changes could include the way people feel, act, understand, remember, pray, talk, think, relate to others, and so on.

Emic: A viewpoint from inside a community being studied.

Enactment: An event whose characteristics reflect a particular conceptual or experiential framework. Ideas made concrete. Examples include performance, display of objects, showing a film, engaging with a video game or virtual reality world, and a process of creation. 

Ethnoarts: Study of the artistic communication in a group which strongly identifies itself as an ethnolinguistic community. 

Ethnocentrism: An attitude in which one evaluates aspects of a different culture based on values and assumptions from his/her own.

Ethnodoxology: The interdisciplinary study of how Christians in every culture engage with God and the world through their own artistic expressions.

Ethnography: A description of a community based on observation of and interaction with living people over a prolonged period. A performance or enactment ethnography relates how sounds, movements, dramatizations, and other artistic products are conceived, made, appreciated and influence other individuals, groups, and social and artistic processes. 

Ethnochoreology: The study of dance in and as culture.

Ethnomusicology: The study of music in and as culture.

Etic: A viewpoint from outside a community being studied.

Gatekeeper: A person who exerts significant influence on whether a community accepts an innovation or not, who has a personal or social stake in its success or failure.

Genre: A community’s category of communication characterized by a unique set of formal characteristics, performance or enactment practices, and social meanings. Alternatively, a system of spoken, written, gestured, or otherwise emitted signs and symbols by means of which human beings express themselves in a particular social, temporal, and physical context. 

Graphization: describing and documenting a genre’s forms.

Integral performance context: An environment that has many social and artistic components that are familiar to the performers. 

Kingdom goals: Objectives that are consistent with the kingdom of Heaven as described primarily in the New Testament. They are incomplete manifestations of Heaven on Earth.

Labanotation: A system for transcribing dance movements.

Language or Language-based development: The series of ongoing, planned actions that a language community takes to ensure that their language continues to serve their changing social, cultural, political, economic, and spiritual needs and goals.

Local artistic genre: An artistic form of communication that a community can create, enact, teach, and understand from within, including its forms, meanings, language(s), and social context(s).

Meaning: Ideas and emotions a community or individual attaches to elements of their internal or external experiences.

Meristem: The region in a plant in which new cells are created; the growth point.

Modernization: adapting malleable elements of current genres to new functions and developing new symbols for new concepts.

Music: Humanly organized and heightened sound.

Orality: A way of accessing and passing on information by nonliterate means.

Orature: A body of works communicated orally, such as stories, myths, and folklore. 

Organology: The study of musical instruments.

Participant observation: An investigative practice used in ethnographic research in which the researcher engages in life activities with the participants of the study.

Performance event: An enactment of a genre at a particular place and time.

Polysemy: The ability of one form or symbol to hold multiple meanings.

Qualitative research: An approach in which the researcher collects open-ended, emerging, and evolving data with the primary intent of developing themes from the data. The results tend to focus on meanings and experiences. 

Quantitative research: An approach that focuses on specific variables and the testing of specific hypotheses, that employs strategies such as experiments and surveys, and that yields statistical data. The results tend to focus on numbers and frequencies. 

Reflexivity: The acknowledgment that representations of reality are constructions of a person and informed by his/her own choices and viewpoints. Especially important for those performing ethnographic research.

Revitalization / Cultural revitalization: Bringing something back to life again, through research, creation, and use of indigenous resources.

Rule of thirds: In photography, a frame can be divided into three vertical and three horizontal sections. Many people believe that an object becomes more prominent if it is not in the center of the frame.

Scripture engagement: A process where Scripture translated in the language of the users is intentionally integrated in their individual and community life.

Sparking: anything anybody does that results in the creation of new artistry. See Catalyst.

Stakeholders: all parties with interests in the linguistic and artistic decisions made in any domain.

Standardization: determining the stable forms of a genre and prototypes of known works.

Sustainability: Usually used for development projects, a desired characteristic where what is initiated in a community will be continued or further developed. 

Syncretism: Combining Christian beliefs with those of another religion or worldview that leads people away from the truth. 

Tacit knowledge: Information held by culture-bearers (community insiders) that is not easily expressed.

Taxonomy: A set of categories organized on the basis of a single semantic relationship which shows the relationships of all the terms in a domain.

Transcription: Graphic representation of aspects of artistic communication.

Vitality of an artistic genre is stronger when it has more participants, prestige, works, and domains of use. The more people using an art form and the more functions for which they use it, the more vital the genre.