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Abstraction, accumulation, obscurity, omission, and containment are some of the principles of secrecy's visual language in many African cultures. The arts associated with secrecy are often points of ritual and ceremony, mythology, and mystical belief, yet the aesthetics of secrecy operate at every level of human discourse and interaction. The artworks used to announce a secret are often ornate, while the objects constituting the secret me be ordinary looking.
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Mary H. Nooter (1993) studied this question.
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