Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 44

De Léry was a Protestant missionary who was part of a short‐lived French mission to establish a colony in Brazil from 1555 to 1560, when it fell to the Portuguese. Along with Harriot’s description of Virginia (cf. IB8), De Léry’s account of the Tupinamba of Brazil is one of the most important proto‐anthropological texts to have come down from the sixteenth century. It was directly influential on Montaigne (cf. IC4), and nearly four hundred years later a copy of it was in the possession of Claude Lévi‐Strauss when he arrived in Brazil to begin the research that led to Tristes Tropiques (cf. VIIA2). De Léry’s text is, however, not easy to extract for purposes of the present anthology. Needless to say, there is nothing relevant to ‘art theory’ in a European sense; much of what he writes concerns the animals and plants of the region, and much of what he writes about the people concerns issues such as religion, sexual relations and cannibalism. However, at various points in his account he does address topics of relevance to material culture, and does so in a remarkably open‐minded way for the period. For reasons of space, we have had to omit his descriptions of ceremonial dancing and music, and of craft work. Instead we have selected his observations on body painting and personal adornment. First drafted in 1563, De Léry’s History was lost in the confusion of the religious wars in France – which, as with Montaigne, became a point of comparison for his account of the ‘savages’ of Brazil – then subsequently found again and rewritten in the 1570s. It was first published in 1578, then again in an expanded second edition in 1580. That edition is the source of the modern translation from which the present extracts are taken: History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, translation and introduction by Janet Whatley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. The extracts are from pp. 56 and 58–61.

In the first place then (so that I begin with the chief subject, and take things in order), the savages of America who live in Brazil, called the Tupinamba, whom I lived among and came to know for about a year, are not taller, fatter, or smaller in stature than we Europeans are; their bodies are neither monstrous nor prodigious with respect to ours. In fact, they are stronger, more robust and well filled‐out, more nimble, less subject to disease; there are almost none among them who are lame, one‐eyed, deformed, or disfigured. […]

They have the custom, which begins in the childhood of all the boys, of piercing the lower lip just above the chin; each of them usually wears in the hole a certain well‐polished bone, as white as ivory, shaped like one of those little pegs that we play with over here, that we use as tops to spin on a table. The pointed end sticks out about an inch, or two fingers’ width, and is held in place by a stop between the gums and the lip; they can remove it and put it back whenever they please. But they only wear this bodkin of white bone during their adolescence; when they are grown, and are called conomi‐ouassou (that is, big or tall boy), they replace it by mounting in the lip‐hole a green stone (a kind of false emerald), also held in place inside by a stop, which appears on the outside to be of the roundness and width of a testoon, with twice its thickness. There are some who wear a stone as long and round as a finger (I brought one such stone back to France) … What is more, I have seen men who, not content with merely wearing these green stones in their lips, also wore them in both cheeks, which they had likewise had pierced for the purpose. […]

Our Brazilians often paint their bodies in motley hues; but it is especially their custom to blacken their thighs and legs so thoroughly with the juice of a certain fruit, which they call genipap, that seeing them from a little distance, you would think they had donned the hose of a priest….

They also have crescent shaped pendants, more than half a foot long, made of very even‐textured bone, white as alabaster, which they name y‐aci, from their name for the moon; they wear them hung from the neck by a little cord made of cotton thread, swinging flat against the chest.

Similarly, they take innumerable little pieces of a seashell called vignol, and polish them for a long time on a piece of sandstone, until they are as thin, round, and smooth as a penny; these they pierce through the center and string onto cotton threads to make necklaces that they call boüre, which they like to wear twisted around their necks, as we do over here with gold chains … The savages also make these boüre of a certain kind of black wood, which is very well suited to this since it is almost as heavy and shiny as jet.

As for the head ornaments of our Tupinenquins, aside from the tonsure in the front and the hair hanging down in back, which I have mentioned, they bind and arrange wing feathers of rosy or red hues, or other colors, to make adornments for their foreheads somewhat resembling the real or false hair, called ‘rackets’ or ‘batwings,’ with which the ladies and young girls of France and of other countries over here have been decorating their heads. […]

If our Brazilians go off to war, or if … they ceremonially kill a prisoner in order to eat him, they want to be more gallantly adorned and to look more bold and valiant, and so they put on robes, headdresses, bracelets, and other ornaments of green, red and blue feathers, and of other various true and natural colors of extreme beauty. When these feathers have been mixed and combined, and neatly bound to each other with very small pieces of cane and cotton thread (there is no featherworker in France who could handle them better, nor arrange them more skillfully), you would judge that the clothes made of them were of a deep‐napped velvet. With the same workmanship they make the ornaments for their wooden swords and clubs, which, decorated and adorned with these feathers so well suited and fashioned to this use, are a marvelous sight.