Body painting and visual practice. The creation of social identities through image making and display in Tierra del Fuego (Southern South America).

FIORE, D.

Archaeologies of art. Time, place and identity.

Left Coast Press

Lugar: Walnut Creek, California; Año: 2008; p. 243 - 266

This paper presents the analysis of body painting production and display by two aboriginal societies of Tierra del Fuego, the Selk’nam and the Yámana, with the main goal of discussing how visual practices were actively involved in the construction of social roles, relationships and identities in these societies.This ephemeral material culture product has a low visibility in the archaeological record; therefore it has been mainly studied using historic-ethnographic records, both visual (around 200 photographs and drawings) and written (more than 70 books and articles written by 52 first-hand observers). These sources, which have been assessed in terms of their scopes and biases, range from the XVI to the early XX century, that is, from the first contacts with European populations to the time when the Fuegian aborigines became almost extinct.The paper aims to discuss the involvement of body painting in the construction of social identities at two different levels. At an inter-society level, body painting can function as an indicator of social ascription which allows an observer to identify a person as Selk’nam or Yamana due to his/her body painting. Various factors involved in such identification process are presented, including self-awareness and intentional construction of an identity through visual means, and the persistence of social identities through the biased records produced by western observers.At an intra-society level, the paper shows how body painting was manipulated by its producers and its wearers as a means to create social roles and relationships. This gave some of the wearers certain power to do things and/or power over people (e.g. some viewers of the painted persons). Such process happened particularly in the initiation ceremonies, during which, for example, Selk’nam and Yamana men initiated male youngsters to a ‘secret’ that involved painting and masking themselves as mythical spirits inside the ceremonial hut, to then go out and perform a number of acts, including scaring the women, who were basically excluded from the ceremonial hut. Two identity processes are identified here: one related to the transformation of young males into adults, and the other one related to the transformation of the men into spirits and their subsequent manipulation of the spirits roles in order to create mechanisms of social control and of social cohesion. These kinds of manipulation are shown to have been a source of gender and age divisions and of kinship integration, and hence of intra-society group identities. Therefore, it is argued that although technical knowledge was essential to the creation of body painting images, the differential access to the ‘secret knowledge’ about the many uses of body painting images was a key factor in the construction of female, male, adult and youngster social identities.