Wood, boar tusks, bark cloth, spider web, natural pigments, modeled clay.
Early 20th Century
Height: 14 ½ inches
Max width: 9 inches
Provenance: Private Collection, New York.
Originally atop a long pole, this stave was carried by a dancer during a ceremony or special event. According to Felix Speiser (1923, 384) the caricature of human features on the stave was meant to be humorous and entertaining. A later theory was that the staves were not caricatures but ‘false images’ used at initiation ceremonies for young boys and other ceremonies, which initiated the spirit of the deceased into death. They assigned importance to the fact that the temes have exaggerated human features and that their nonorganic appearance is heightened by the accentuation of certain function-related organs such as protruding eyes.
(Hurst, pg 45)
Price on request
