Female Diety
Rarotonga, Cook Islands, central Polynesia. Late 18th to early 19th century C.E. Wood, tapa, fiber, and feathers
A standing semihuman figure having claws, a feline face with crossed fangs, and a staff in each hand. Above his head, occupying two-thirds of the stone, is a towering, pillarlike structure
- Form
- sculpture. wooden. 40 cm.
- Made from the Bread Fruit Tree (Artocarpus Altilis)
- Either carved using an adze with clamshell blades or traditional European tools.
- Figures all had ovoid heads, discrete or missing facial features, flat buttocks, and flexed legs.
- Function
- Religious purposes
- Each sculpture represents a specific deity.
- Were all labeled with names. Also, every deity was related to a different extended family group, a priest, and a specific temple.
- Used for a special annual harvest ritual
- They were given food offerings during this festival
- Old and rotting wooden figures were replaced during this time
- The people believed that the spirit of the deity resided inside of the wooden figurine for the duration of the festival.
- Content
Nukuoro deities were believed to inhabit animals, pieces of wood, and wood figures called tino aitu.
Sacrifices to the figurine occured each year during the harvest of coconuts, arrowroot, taro, banana, sugarcane, breadfruit, and pandanus (a fibrous fruit).
Perhaps the lack of facial detail and the flexed legs provide a "blank canvas" ready to take on a deity's vital force during each festival.
In addition to representing deities, the figures sometimes symbolized ancestors.
Nails attached to the figures allowed clothing to be added when they took on deities' identities at the festivals.
For the female figures, the triangular shape of the pelvis indicates a mandatory tattoo there (te mata) for elite women.
- Context
Nukuoro is a Micronesian atoll (a ring-shaped coral reef) in the Western Pacific. According to archaeological records and oral history, it was settled in the 8th Century C.E. by Polynesians traveling in canoes from Samoa.
Nukuoro’s culture retains Polynesian influences such as social structures and the practice of carving human figures, even though it is geographically located in Micronesia.
Europeans started trading with the island's population of about 400 during the 1830s, and most of the islanders had given up their religion for Protestantism by the early 20th Century; similarly, most of their distinctive wooden sculptures had been traded off.
Nukuoro was ruled by a religious and a secular chief; the secular chief was passed down hereditarily within a family without regard for gender.
These smaller deities were worshipped along with a primary figure, which was likely offered human sacrifices annually.
- Themes
- Ritual Objects of Belief
- Images of Power/Authority/Divine
- Sacred Space
- Funerary (ancestors)
- History/Memory
- Cross-Cultural connections
- Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), Alberto Giacometti—heavily influenced by wooden Nukuoro figures.
- Ikenga Male Figures (Igbo people, Nigeria).
- vocabulary
- Tino Aitu- what these figures were called by the Nukuoro people.
- Adze- a tool similar to an ax with an arched blade at right angles to the handle, used for cutting or shaping large pieces of wood.
- Te mata: a pelvic tattoo associated with elite women that had a religious function.
- Sources
- https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/the-pacific/a/nukuoro-micronesia
- https://www.georgeortiz.com/objects/pacific/280-deity-dinonga-eidu/
