Cabinet

“To the Spanish conquistadors, the behavior of the strangely lively objects used by the Aztec and the Maya to play their ritual ball game was magical. Early accounts reflect the onlookers’ amazement. Pedro Mártir de Anghiera, royal historian to Emperor Charles V and first European historian of the Americas, declared: “I don’t understand how when the balls hit the ground they are sent into the air with such incredible bounce.” Bernardino de Sahagún remarked that beyond the amazing dynamic capacities of the object, its “aural qualities were astonishing” as well. Diego Durán wrote: “Jumping and bouncing are its qualities, upward and downward, to and fro. It can exhaust the pursuer running after it before he can catch up with it.”

For Mesoamerican societies, rubber was etymologically bound up with its extraction form—and with the body, power, pain, and magic. The indigenous names—which translate as “blood,” “tears of the tree,” “milk of tree”—figure rubber as a bodily fluid, one that requires some rip in the body’s skin or psyche before it can pour forth. As well as using it to make balls for their ritual games, these societies burned it as incense, used it for waterproofing and hafting weapons, and, in its liquid form, to mark the bodies of those about to be sacrificed to the gods. For the Aztec, it was a tribute material, demanded as payment from conquered peoples. But the conquistadors had arrived with a clear idea of what materials they wanted to amass: silver, gold, and other precious metals. In their scheme of things, rubber was neither sacred nor especially economically valuable, and ball games were not the kind of activity that warranted serious cultural representation. In Europe, sport was not sport as we know it, quite yet.”

We are excited for the publication of Carlin Wing’s new book, “Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play,” next week. In the meantime, you can read her article, “Episodes in the Life of Bounce,” from issue 56. Link in bio and below.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/56/wing.php

NEW ARTICLE: James G. Harper and Philip W. Scher discuss German anthropologist Julius Lips’s groundbreaking treatise on African, Indigenous Australian, and Oceanic depictions of foreigners, “The Savage Hits Back, or, The White Man through Native Eyes.”

Link in bio and below.

Images:

1) Detail from a fragment of a sixteenth-century ivory saltcellar, from the Kingdom of Benin. It is one of the oldest artifacts included in “The Savage Hits Back.” The symbol of the cross was clearly familiar to the ivory carver, and yet he has carved it upside down, suggesting that the familiarity is nascent and incomplete.

2) Late nineteenth-century henta—an apotropaic image from the Nicobar Islands (Indian Ocean) that would originally have been installed in a house. The painted wood-and-spathe panel represents the moon and at its center is the Deuse, or “Chief of the Spirits.” In the pictorial tradition of Nicobar hentas, the power of the Deuse is represented through the things shown floating or orbiting around him. In this example, the artist has mingled native animals and indigenous objects with distinctly European items. This set of floating objects even includes a European at bottom left.

3) Detail from early twentieth-century door panels by Yoruba artist Olówè of Isè from the palace of the Ogoga (king) of Ikere in present-day Nigeria. Here we see Captain W. G. Ambrose, a British commissioner traveling in a hammock. The carvings offer an African perspective on British colonialism at the very moment that the British were consolidating authority in the region.

4) Early nineteenth-century Vili drum from the Loango Kingdom, whose territory lay in present-day Gabon and the Republic of the Congo. The base of the percussion instrument depicts a seated European sailor. As Lips wryly observes, “the most essential object is what the figure holds in his left hand, the whisky flask.” The bottle and its drinker’s red squinting eyes suggest drunkenness, a trait commonly associated with Europeans. When the drum was actually used, the drunken sailor took a beating from above, likely to the mirth of the audience.

https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/69/harper_scher.php

In Berlin? Or within one week’s hiking distance? Come visit Cabinet at the Miss Read art book fair next week hosted by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). We will be selling books, magazines, and posters, and would love to meet our readers!