Imagination behind Shape: The Invisible Content of Asmat Artefacts

Abstract

For the Asmat people in West Papua, artefacts and body decoration are created for both aesthetic and spiritual purposes. Craftspeople add sacred components to comply with their ancestors' expectations, which are perceptible to their descendants. Body decoration acts on the self, affecting mood and health. My Asmat informants expressed their surprise when they saw some ‘tribal’¹ art collectors avidly gathering ‘pieces’,² as if they hoped to capture the aura of the pre-contact Asmat. The most sought-after objects bear an ancestor's name and were involved in head-hunting or cannibalism. This article concerns some of the imagined contents of Asmat artefacts and how their status changes from the time they are made until their integration into Western collections, particularly those of Dutch and German collectors I interviewed in 2003 and 2004.

Keywords:

• Asmat
• Art Collectors
• Tribal Art
• Head-hunting
• Invisible Beings

Notes

[1] Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Roger Lohmann for his systematic and patient remarks, Joel Robbins for his brilliant ideas and analysis, and Kevin Flynn for his helpful review of the text.

[2] There has been ongoing debate as to the appropriate term to use to designate ethnographic art. This debate aims to avoid the pejorative connotations of such words as ‘primitive’, ‘ethnic’, or ‘tribal’, which might relegate non-European art to the category of artefacts seen as inferior to masterpieces like those in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The French ‘arts premiers’ is another enlightening example suggesting an evolutionist scale in art.

[3] The missionaries are mostly Sacred-Heart (Dutch, arrived in the area in 1953), Crosier (American, arrived in 1958) and Maryknoll (American, arrived in 1978).

[4] The Evangelical Alliance Mission, created in the US in 1890 by Frederic Franson. Their first missionaries in the Asmat area began work in 1955.

[5] Various Indonesian attitudes and discourses facing this cultural gap have been studied in a previous article (de Hontheim 2003).

[6] This word is typically used by collectors and museum professionals. It tends to deny the spiritual value of the object and its ethnographic context by pointing up its commercial value and limiting it to a number in a series.