Traditional Art Forms
Women play an important part in contributing with their skills in items of important cultural value including 'ie toga, finely woven mats used in ceremony and gift exchanges.
Other items include bark-cloth, siapo (equivalent to the Fijian tapa cloth), which is made from beaten mulberry bark. Patterns or pictures are painted on with a natural brown dye. These pictures typically depict fish, turtles, and hibiscus flowers. The siapo may be used for clothing, for wrapping objects and even simply for decorative reasons. Ornaments, jewellery and hair accessories are made from naturally occurring materials such as sea shells, coconut and coir. Traditional Samoan medicine is often practiced as a first-line before hospital medicine. This is a type of alternative medicine using plant leaves to massage the affected area.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Samoa
Famous quotes containing the words traditional, art and/or forms:
“The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“As always art is the pulse of a nation.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbisms does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.”
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)