Representations of Baja California Indians as ethnographic art

ABSTRACT

The few existing pictures of Indigenous peoples of Baja California before the age of photography offer a precious window into the peninsula’s past inhabitants. The synoptic analysis of the material culture depicted in this imagery, from both religious and secular sources, reveals that the credibility of the pictures is based on highly contingent notions of truth that emerge from contextual relationships between images and texts. The essay maintains that representational differences mirror distinct ways of thinking about the depiction of ethnographic subjects. Although variability in style may depend on artistic ability and skill, diversity in subject and mode of representation are as much the product of multiple intermedial entanglements as they are the result of implicit aims and purposes. This unprecedented comparative exercise, while eliciting questions about what counts as accuracy in distinctive artistic and literary genres, encourages a reflection on the nature and role of images whose lives straddle between art and anthropology.

KEYWORDS:

• art and anthropology
• visual anthropology
• ethnographic images
• accuracy
• Baja California Indians
• iconography
• historiography

Notes

1 To these ought to be added the largely derivative images published in later editions of these diaries, but they are not included in this study as they are not original prints. Such illustrations further prove the extent of borrowing between texts. An image reproduced in Thomas Andrews’s book on English privateers at Cabo San Lucas (1979) conflates into one picture two tables related to Baja California Indians published in Shelvocke (see Reygadas Dahl 2003a, 69, fig a; Andrews 1979).

2 ‘Entretexian con [perlas] unas pequeñas plumas, resultando de todo un adorno postizo, que visto de lexos pudiera passar por peluca’ [‘They wove small feathers with pearls, resulting in something artificial, which from far away could look like a wig’] (Venegas 1943, 81; my translation).

3 Illustrators’ academic art training was partially responsible for the standardised poses they used in the images of Native peoples contained in books about Baja California. Prints reproducing classical statues had been circulating in Europe from the Renaissance throughout the eighteenth century (Haskell and Penny 1981). While the Europeanisation of Indigenous faces may not have been consciously intentional, the incisive imprint of classical studies resulted in often jarring visual juxtapositions of European features and gestures with textual knowledge about different ethnic groups (Brewer-García 2021; Lugo-Ortiz 2021).

4 Two cartouches show the killing of missionaries Leonardo Carranco (1695–1734) and Nicolás Tamaral (1687–1734) at the hands of Pericu Indians during the rebellion of 1734. Both pictures show Indigenous individuals wearing feathered head bands, and one of them a feather skirt. These are entirely fictional (cf. Bustamante 2017; Carocci 2013). Consequently, these two illustrations are not included in the present analysis.

5 Several existing specimens are now in private hands, and in the collections of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Us in San Diego (formerly, San Diego Museum of Man).

6 ‘Estas tablitas eran los libros en que fingian leer la naturaleza de las enfermidades los remedios a ellas convenientes, las futuras mutaciones del aire y aun el destino de los hombres’ (Clavijero 2018, 30; my emphasis and translation).

7 ‘Retiraban para esto à los niños à algunas cuevas, ò parages apartados de los bosques’ [‘To do this, they [the priests] took the children to isolated caves, or secluded parts of the woods’] (Venegas 1943, 112; my translation).

8 Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s pictures of Baja California Indians eventually served as inspiration for the only illustration dedicated to this region’s inhabitants in the 1818 book that Jean Baptiste Auguste Hapde published for the Parisian educational press D’Alexis Eymery under the pseudonym ‘G’. In it the original characters are depicted with nets on their backs and wearing essentially the same ornaments as the figures in the first book by Grasset de Saint-Sauveur from 1788. Here, by contrast, they hold fishing rods and are surrounded by mother-of-pearl shells, undoubtedly in reference to the pearl fishing frequently mentioned in books about the peninsula (Hapde 1818, plate 206). Thanks go to Stephanie Pratt for directing me to this image.

9 The description reads: ‘L'habit des prêtres Californiens étoit entièrement distingué de celui des autres habitans. Il consistoit en une longue tunique qui les couvrait depuis le cou jus qu’aux pieds, et uniquement faite de cheveux d’hommes; ils avoient sur la tête un panache de plumes de faucon, et portoient à la main un grand évantail de plumes de diverses couleurs avec un tube de pierre pour sucer les moribons’ [‘Californian priests’ clothing sets him apart from other people. It consists of a long tunic, entirely made of human hair, that covers him from the neck to his feet. On his head he had a tuft of hawk feathers, and carried a large fan of coloured feathers, as well as a stone tube for sucking those about to die’] (Grasset de Saint-Sauveur 1796, 220; my translation).

10 Invented items such as feathered crowns and skirts, used in popular representations of American peoples until the Victorian era, were not part of Baja California’s clothing (Carocci 2013; Boone 2017; Bustamante 2017). In the northern part of the peninsula feathers were bunched together at the top of the head, whereas southern men used down feathers (Barco 1988, 183–84).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Max Carocci

Max Carocci is Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at the American International University in London, where he teaches Non-Western Visual Cultures and World Arts. Trained as anthropologist, he has conducted field research in North America. He has extensively written and researched indigenous American cultures and societies, with a particular focus on visual and material cultures. His latest book, co-edited with Native American art historian Stephanie Pratt is titled Art, observation, and an anthropology of illustration (2022). At present, he is writing a book with the same author on European and Native American representations of each other under the title ‘Reciprocal visions: Native North Americans and the arts of cultural and colonial encounter.’