Doll

Item number 2738/94 from the MOA: University of British Columbia.

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Description

Carved light wooden male doll. The basic-outline-shaped figure with carved ears, nose, and slit eyes and mouth has black body tattooing covering the front of the face and body; the rest of the body is plain.

History Of Use

In Shipibo worldview all things bear specific designs. In the clear-cut gender division of their groups, the knowledge of rendering those designs (kené) visible to all is a women’s knowledge, laborious learned from their mothers, their elders and peers for all their lives. These dolls are part of such learning process. At one level, the dolls help children to socialize along gender divisions, in that girls play with these dolls and experiment and debate these designs. At another level, by making explicit that human bodies have designs, they juxtapose to beauty the notion of health, in the sense that healthy bodies have perfectly organized designs. In a practical, everyday sense, Shipibo do not paint the whole body. Usually they only paint their face and the arms and legs. However, if one is ill, a healing session is nothing else than the redrawing of one’s personal designs, conducted by the shaman under the guidance of the powers of the forest’s plants.

Specific Techniques

Shipibo women use strips of bamboo for a brush and personal mixes of vegetable and earth pigments as dyes, washes and fixatives.

Iconographic Meaning

Design (kené) makes explicit that human bodies have designs, and juxtapose to beauty the notion of health, in the sense that healthy bodies have perfectly organized designs. It is considered that beauty and health are one and the same thing. Both are likely to be obtained and maintained by the morals of a good life: a life based in communication, in sharing, and in opening oneself to others; a life anchored in a general attitude of generosity and, as well, of self-control and self-reliance, where the realization of one person and her fulfillment is also the fulfillment of each and everyone in the community.