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August 3, 2005
Don't Trust Museum Labels
Prof. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revoltuion trusts a label at the National Museum of Archeology in Lima. He shows a photograph of a jug made in the shape of a Llama and a man and thinks that the man is riding the llama for transportation purposes. The label assured him "Llama usado como transporte." I think the label is wrong.
disclaimer: I am a specialist in Europe around the year 800, not pre-Columbian art. However, I know some specialists in pre-Columbian art and even once edited a masters thesis on a Peruvian weaving pattern showing jaguars where I learned some of the iconographical tricks for the woven versions of bodies. What's more, I know a lot about the awkward miscues caused by the assumption that naturalistic rendering is equivalent to Realism (with all the horrid assumptions with which that word has been burdened since 1850).
The photograph isn't quite complete - click and see - Prof. Tabarrok seems to have clipped the llama head out of the right side. The naked man is riding on the llama's back with his feet at the neck and his head over the tail. The modelling is lovely and rather convincing (other than the man's stocky neck, perhaps, which both works well in clay and echos the llama neck).
What's going on here, though, isn't "transportation" or accomodation to the llama's rather feeble frame. What we see here is a shaman and his animal spirit. Needless to say there's nothing I can find by googling that isn't by a contemporary practitioner of "shamanism" (which may be marginally more authentic than modern self-styled druids, given that there actually are shamans to go talk to in the 21st century, but these links all look shaky). Still, what we see in lots of Central and South American art shows us the transformative process between human and animal. Lots of the gold objects in the shape of animals were, we think, worn by shamans who intended to become those animals. This little jug might well have been used in the necessary ritual.
O.K. I'm making this up, but it's exactly why you take me and people like me with you to museums -- we know more than those horrid little labels. And unless Lauren Bacall is doing the audioguide, you'd be better off listening to me.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 3, 2005 6:24 PM