Esther Pasztory

Hieratic Composition in West African Art

Group composition, that is, the arrangement of three or more human figures in a meaningful relationship, is rare in primitive art, which usually relies on masks or single figures to express its ideas. In Africa, group composition occurs occasionally throughout the sculpture—producing areas, but it is most highly concentrated in the Eastern Guinea Coast-in the modern states of Ghana, Dahomey, Nigeria and Cameroon (text fig. 1). One particular type of group composition, however, is found only in these four states. This type of composition consists of a dominant central figure flanked symmetrically by two or more attendants. Although the details of the figures vary from tribe to tribe, all such compositions project a fundamentally hierarchic and authoritarian character. For the sake of convenience, the term hieratic will be used to define such images.

A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock

As someone who, in 1983, gave a talk entitled ‘Presences and Absences in Inca Stonework’, but did not then pursue the subject any further, I was delighted by Carolyn Dean’s book, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, 2010. While a number of studies were made between 1983 and 2010 on Inka rocks and architecture, none of them have the broad scholarship, authority and even common sense that Dean’s book has. This book should stand as a classic for years to come, the best book on any Andean art artform. While the Spanish conquerors of the Counter-reformation were obsessing about ‘idols’, imagined in human or monstrous forms, to be destroyed in the name of Christianity, they were non-plussed by the Inka, who venerated natural uncarved or partly carved rocks. Because the Spanish focused on figures, most of the time they did not value the rocks either as serious religious threats or as works of art. As the rocks were ‘below their radar’, the information they recorded about them is uncomprehending. Dean combines the available sixteenth century sources with modern ethnography and finely honed visual analysis to put together an interpretation of what rocks meant to the Inka. She argues that while nature as a whole was animate for the Inka, rocks, and the earth in particular, embodied this animism to the greatest extent. Many stories, such as that of Manco Capac, the legendary founder of the Inka dynasty, tell of humans turning into rock as a form of sanctification. The process works the other way around, as rocks can turn into humans, as in the story of Pachacuti and the Pururaucas. Pachacuti was losing a war against the neighboring Chanca in a story of the foundation of the empire, when the stones of the battlefield turned into human warriors and helped to defeat them. After the battle the stones were taken to the Coricancha, the temple of the sun in Cuzco, and displayed there. Some of the stones traveled with the emperors on their trips. Natural stones were therefore the most sacred medium of the Inka and most, except for the bigger outcrops ,have disappeared as ‘just stones’. Dean categorizes stone works under Inka names, such as wank’a, petrified owners of places such as fields and villages, saywa, boundary Rethinking History Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2012, 459–463

Art of Aztec Mexico

“The greenstone jar once stank of blood. It now sits almost prettily in a case of plastic …” So begins the review in the Washington Post of the Art of Aztec Mexico: Treasures of Tenochtitlan exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (September 8, 1983–April 1, 1984). The article goes on to discuss in great detail human sacrifice and cannibalism, both of which it attributes to protein deficiency, based on ideas extensively popularized a few years ago by Michael Harner and Marvin Harris. Aztec art is compared to the art of the Assyrians, Romans, and Egyptians (“King Tutankhamens treasures caused us to imagine the softness of the Pharaohs clothes, the genius of his cooks”), to Goya, Caravaggio, recent German and New York painting, and horror movies (“But the darkest of Western art—because it is too passionate, angry, self-indulgent, dreamy, or amusing—pales in comparison”). The reviewer concludes with the observation that the cult of death continues in modern Mexican culture in all the grinning skulls made...