Shelk?nam body paintings: ancient and recent uses of an ephemeral art form in Tierra del Fuego (southern South America).

FIORE, DANAE

Arctic & Antarctic - International Journal on Circumpolar Sociocultural Issues

IACSI

Año: 2016

1851-4685

This paper presents astudy of the traditional creation and use of body painting by the Shelk´nam, ahunter-gatherer society from Tierra del Fuego. We present the methods used tocarry out a systematic research on 43 historical-ethnographic texts and 130 visualsources (33 drawings and 97 photographs) which record information about suchartistic productions from the 16th to the 20th centuries.The research is completed with a study of the current uses of images of paintedShelk´nam persons and/or their body painting designs, on different materialculture media: crafts, fine arts, street art, jewellery, stickers, etc. Theforms in which the visual corpus of traditional body paintings hs beenselected, reproduced and manipulated creatively to produce new images with newuses are discussed.It is suggested that: a)the uses of this body ornamentation technique were related to its versatile andephemeral features, which facilitated the creation of different roles indifferent use contexts of Shelk´nam social life; b) the current reproduction ofimages of Shelk´nam painted persons has been oriented towards therepresentation of hain spirits (traditionally embodied during a maleinitiation ceremony) due to their appearance, which is esthetically originaland visually "exotic" for current Western observers. Thus, thecomparison developed here if followed by a reflection on the influence thatproduction and use contexts had over the artistic images and their plastic,aesthetic, technical and funcional qualities, both in the past and the present,in the Southernmost end of Southamerica.