Linares Family, The Atomic Apocalypse, Mexico City, detail, AD 1983. |
Coming to Terms with Living and Dying in This World |
Diablada (dance mask), From Oruro, Bolivia, 1985.
Painted wood model of the Bear or Goose House, Haida, AD 1890s, From Kayang, British Columbia, North America.
Wooden henta board, From the Nicobar Islands, Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean
Boy's tunic, Ersari Turkmen people, early 20th century, From Afghanistan.
Koh Ah Bah, Paper effigies, From Penang, Malaysia, 20th century AD.
Carved wooden headrest, Shona, 19th century AD, From Zimbabwe.
Cast gold pendant of a winged shaman, Popayán, Colombia, AD 100-1500.
Wooden figure of a water spirit, Melanau, late 19th-early 20th century AD,
Kolam dancer's mask, From Sri Lanka, 19th century AD.
Hoa Hakananai'a, From Orongo, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Polynesia, around AD 1000.
Hohao (spirit board), Elema people, late 19th/early 20th century, From the Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea. |
The British Museum How do people around the world deal with life's everyday challenges, achieve wellbeing for themselves and their communities, and come to terms with death? The next step in the return of the Museum's magnificent ethnographic collections to Bloomsbury, this major new gallery of world cultures presents an anthropological understanding of the diverse ways people seek to minimise life's adversities — challenges we all face but deal with in what can be radically different ways. Generously sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the biomedical research charity, and situated right at the heart of the Museum in the imposing space above the African Galleries, the new £5.5m gallery forms the centrepiece of the Museum's permanent ethnography displays presenting a distinctive approach to the interpretation and understanding of material culture from all parts of the world. In the developed world, wellbeing is often understood in terms of the individual, and especially the individual human body. In many parts of the world, however, there is recognition of the importance of relationships for sustaining the community as a whole. At the centre of this exhibition four case studies focus on ways in which communities ensure wellbeing by maintaining important relationships with their world and environment - with other people at festivals in the Pacific islands, with the animal world in Native North America, with spirits in the Nicobar Islands (Bay of Bengal) and with the earth and landscape in the Bolivian Andes. The exhibition also investigates some of the diverse ways in which people protect themselves from anticipated harm, diagnose the causes of their illness and trouble, and treat their problems. It considers how people deal with death through burial and mourning, how they provide for the dead in their afterlife with goods and with festivals to cheer them, and how in some places people draw on the power of the ancestors to assist them in the world of the living. Displays in these sections include tarot cards, contemporary devotional objects from Germany and Italy, amulets from Iran and India to protect babies from harm, replicas of luxury consumer items from Malaysia burned as gifts to the dead and materials from Tanzania for treating and comforting those suffering from AIDS. Western biomedical approaches to illness are investigated through an installation by Susie Freeman, David Critchley and Liz Lee, Cradle to Grave, which presents the life histories of a man and a woman living in the UK by means of a spectacular display of the thousands of pills and medicines they consume in their respective lifetimes. Living and Dying also presents some of the star objects of the Museum's ethnographic collections such as the Easter Island statue, Apocalypse figures from the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations and gold masterpieces from ancient Colombia and Peru. Many of the objects on display were made to be used or performed — to be worn, given, swallowed or interpreted — rather than to be simply looked at or admired and the exhibition uses both images and text to indicate something of the life and movement that would normally surround these objects. If the displays challenge the notion that art and artefacts, especially as they are presented in a museum context, are self-contained objects to be contemplated quietly on their own visual terms, visitors will also be challenged to reconsider how objects and received notions in their own lives contribute to their personal sense of health and wellbeing as well as the strategies employed to bring illness and misfortune under control. Exhibition Highlights Each length contains over 14,000 drugs, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. This does not include pills we might buy over the counter, which would require about 40,000 pills each. Some of the treatments are common to both: each starts at birth with an injection of vitamin K and immunizations, and both take antibiotics and painkillers at various times. Other treatments are more specific. The woman takes contraceptive pills, and hormone replacement therapy in middle age. The man has asthma and hay fever when young, but enjoys good health until his fifties. He finally stops smoking after a bad chest infection when he is seventy. He is treated for high blood pressure for the last ten years of his life and has a heart attack and dies of a stroke in his seventies. He takes as many pills in the last ten years of his life as in the first sixty-six. Cradle to Grave also contains family photographs and other personal objects and documents. The captions, written by the owners, trace typical events in people's lives. These show that maintaining a sense of well-being is more complex than just treating episodes of illness. Pharmacopoeia are Susie Freeman, Dr Liz Lee and David Critchley. Hohao (spirit board) Elema people, late 19th/early 20th century Elema men carved boards like this, called hohao, and kept them inside a men's ceremonial house. Although some hohao were merely decorative, others were made as a home for a forest spirit with which the maker had developed a particular relationship. Personal spirits helped the men have success in hunting. Hohao like this one, depicting a whole human figure, are rare. This board almost certainly housed a spirit and would have had a personal name. The Elema considered the principal hohao in a men's ceremonial house to be highly sacred. They sometimes repainted the boards and presented them with offerings in order to keep the spirits in a good humor. Diablada dance mask From Oruro, Bolivia, 1985 The Diablada was probably inspired by native Bolivian tales of the tio (devil) in the mine, who embodied the life-giving but dangerous power of the inner earth. After the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, the local inhabitants were forced by their conquerors to work in the silver and tin mines where they faced great hardship and danger. The miners made offerings to the tio to avoid accidents and to help them find rich veins of precious metals. Miners dressed as diablos (devils) first appeared in the Oruro carnival in the 1790s. This devil mask was commissioned from Felix (Freddy) Aguilar in 1985. It is a copy of one that was designed, commissioned and danced by Jorge Vargas in 1984. In creating the mask, Vargas drew on a long history, during which makers created ever more elaborate masks, culminating in fantastically ornate examples like his. The writhing reptiles, toads, snakes and lizards on the masks derive from traditional healing practices connected with earthly fertility. Painted wood model of the Bear or Goose House Haida, AD 1890s Such a house was both a practical dwelling and the spiritual centre for the lineage. This house is the ancestral home of a lineage of the Eagle moiety. This was symbolized particularly by the pole carved at the entrance of the house. Such poles are misleadingly called 'totem' poles, even though they have nothing to do with totems, the guardian spirits from the natural world, obtained by individuals during spirit quests in the Algonquian-speaking north-east of the continent. This pole recounts the story of a hunter who brought in a whale, after complaints from his mother-in-law about his abilities. This scene is shown in the middle of the pole. The British Museum later purchased the original pole from Chief Wiyah of Mussett. Daily life and sickness in the Nicobar Islands Boards made of areca such as this nineteenth-century example were made in times of sickness. The engraved and painted details helped the ritual specialist to find the evil spirits. The boats, for example, enabled him to 'travel' along the coast and to other islands. The board would also serve to enlist the help of good spirits: fish, animals, and creatures such as mermaids. If the ritual was successful it was hung in the house to ensure the ailing person's future health. A hentakoi was invoked every new moon in order to retain its healing effect or (in some cases) its power to ward off malevolent spirits. The board was collected by E.H. Man, who worked for the colonial administration in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the 1880s and was interested in local life. Details on the board also provide us with information about life in the Nicobar Islands at this time: the different boats are reminders of the importance of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean; the houses depicted are the traditional beehive huts built on thick pillars, now increasingly replaced by flat-roofed concrete architecture. The economic life of the islanders in the nineteenth century relied on horticulture, animal husbandry, fishing and some hunting, all illustrated here in different ways. The Mexican Day of the Dead Among the most notable heirs to this tradition are the Linares family of Mexico City, who specialize in the production of elaborate and sometimes large-scale papier mâché figures, their imagery often inspired by Posada's prints. The Atomic Apocalypse is composed of 132 pieces which includes specific references to actual events and areas of ongoing political conflict, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Biafran War (1966-70) and the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1901-89) in Iran. It was acquired in 1989 by the British Museum's Department of Ethnography, and included as part of The Skeleton at the Feast, an exhibition devoted to the Day of the Dead at the Museum of Mankind from 1991 to 1994. Boy's tunic Ersari Turkmen people, early 20th century Young boys wear a tunic or overshirt (kirlik or krte) until they are four or five. It is made of seven pieces from seven tents and sewn by three or four fortunate women. They embroider it with motifs and use colours such as red that symbolize life and fertility. The borders often have hook patterns representing scorpions for protection. The women also attach a whole range of items to the shoulders and back: bells, beads, amulets, coins, feathers, cowrie shells or white buttons, tufts of hair, black-and-white cords, models of sharp tools and weapons, tubes or roundels containing texts or prayers from the Qur'an and snakes modelled in cloth. Caps and bibs use the same elements, which are intended to frighten away evil spirits and either catch the attention of the 'evil eye' or deflect it from causing harm. Koh Ah Bah, Paper effigies From Penang, Malaysia The ensemble was acquired from the Birch and Conran Gallery in London, comprising a mixture of pieces already owned by the dealers and others, such as the man with the motorbike, which were specially commissioned. Wooden pillow The decorative motifs of the headrests and female scarification carry the same name, nyora, which refers to the ancestors, suggesting a connection between the spirit world of ancestors and women's fertility. Headrests are used mainly by men, who are said to be visiting their ancestors during sleep. They are thus seen as a source of knowledge and prosperity. Headrests are buried along with the deceased or passed on to his descendants. They are sometimes used by Shona diviners as a spiritual bridge that links them to the world of the ancestors. Cast gold pendant of a winged shaman The Spanish chronicles and documents of the colonial period record the use of hallucinogenic drugs by the people inhabiting the northern Andes including Colombia. This pendant was cast in tumbaga, an alloy of gold and copper, using the lost-wax technique. In the lost-wax technique, an exact model of the item to be cast in metal is first made in wax, which is soft and easily modelled. The wax model is carefully enclosed in clay and baked to harden it. The melted wax is poured out through a hole in the mould. Molten metal is then poured through the hole into the cavity. Once the metal has cooled and hardened the clay mould is broken open and the casting removed and cleaned. A powerful spirit According to Hose's catalogue, this figure is a durik (or durhig) and belongs to a category of belum carvings in which the spirit has a particularly vicious character. In 1949 and 1950, Dr H. Stephen Morris recorded detailed information on Melanau beliefs. One of his informants, Satim bin Resa, explained 'that a durhig is very big and wants to exchange its body with a corpse. As a result a corpse will become bloated, and not fit into its coffin. A male durhig can make the eyes of a corpse open.' The Serpent Demon The Serpent Demon is a fierce character representing the evil power of snake poisons that can destroy human and animal life. The figure can be recognized partly by the presence of the cobras coiling to form a crown around its head and the snakes that emerge from its nostrils. There are several species of poisonous snakes in Sri Lanka; the cobra in particular is often depicted on demon masks that are used by dancers in rituals to expel evil from the body of a patient. Stolen or Hidden Friend When Captain Cook's crew visited Easter Island in 1774, William Hodges, Cook's artist, produced an oil painting of the island showing a number of moai, some of them with hat-shaped stone 'topknots'. Hodges depicted most of the moai standing upright on stone platforms, known as ahu. With the adoption of Christianity in the 1860s, the remaining standing moai were toppled. This example was probably first displayed outside on a stone platform, before being moved into a stone house at the ritual centre of Orongo. It was collected by the crew of the English ship HMS Topaze, under the command of Richard Ashmore Powell, on their visit to Easter Island in 1868 to carry out surveying work. Islanders helped the crew to move the statue, which has been estimated to weigh around four tons. It was moved to the beach and then taken to the Topaze by raft. The figure was originally painted red and white, though the pigment washed off in the sea. The crew recorded the islanders' name for the statue, which is thought to mean 'stolen or hidden friend'. They also acquired another, smaller basalt statue, known as Moai Hava, which is also in the collections of the British Museum. Hoa Hakananai'a is similar in appearance to a number of Easter Island moai. It has a heavy eyebrow ridge, elongated ears and oval nostrils. The clavicle is emphasized, and the nipples protrude. The arms are thin and lie tightly against the body; the hands are hardly indicated. The back of the figure is carved with designs, believed to have been added at a later date. The back of the head shows a bird flanked by ceremonial paddles. The centre of the back is carved with a 'ring and girdle' motif, as carved on many wooden figures from Easter Island. |
Pharmacopoeia, Cradle to Grave, Pill sampler, detail, 2003. |
