The Anthropology of the Body

Amish people

2013-01-20T16:03:00.001-08:00

Amish boy

The Amish (pron.: /ˈɑːmɪʃ/ ah-mish; Pennsylvania Dutch: Amisch, German: Amische), sometimes referred to as Amish Mennonites, are a group of traditionalist Christian church fellowships that form a subgroup of the Mennonite churches. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt many conveniences of modern technology. The history of the Amish church began with a schism in Switzerland within a group of Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists in 1693 led by Jakob Ammann. Those who followed Ammann became known as Amish.

In the early 18th century, many Amish and Mennonites emigrated to Pennsylvania for a variety of reasons. Today, the most traditional descendants of the Amish continue to speak Pennsylvania German, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch. However, a dialect of Swiss German predominates in some Old Order Amish communities, especially in the American state of Indiana. As of 2000, over 165,000 Old Order Amish live in the United States and approximately 1500 live in Canada. A 2008 study suggested their numbers have increased to 227,000, and in 2010 a study suggested their population had grown by 10% in the past two years to 249,000, with increasing movement to the West.

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Jordanian Armed Forces with shemag and agal

2013-01-19T08:28:00.001-08:00

Red and white shemag with black agal

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Agal

2013-01-18T14:05:00.001-08:00

Agal

The agal (Arabic: عقال, ‘iqāl: "bond" or "rope"), also spelled iqal, egal or igal, is an accessory worn usually by Arab men. It is a black cord, worn doubled, used to keep the keffiyeh in place on the wearer's head.

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Banna hair

2013-01-17T15:13:00.001-08:00

The men often have their hair dressed up with a colorful clay cap that is decorated with feathers. Both the men and women wear long garments and paint their bodies with white chalk. Women of the tribe wear beads in their hair that is held together with butter.

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Banna women helmet

2013-01-16T12:44:00.001-08:00

Banna women

Banna women have the habit to wear the halved calabash they use for drinking as a kind of helmet when not needed.

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Banna pastoral tribe

2013-01-13T04:52:00.000-08:00

Banna family

The Banna are a pastoral tribe whose culture revolves around cattle. Their harsh environment forces them to be semi-nomadic. During the dry season, the men walk long distances with their herds looking for water and grass, and to harvest wild honey.

Banna people

2013-01-10T13:09:00.001-08:00

The people Bana, around Key Afar and to the banks of the River Weyto has about 40,000 individuals. They practice agriculture and supplement their food needs by hunting.
The Banna have glaring similarities to Hamer cousins with whom they share their language (only the accent is different), their customs and their beliefs. They thus engage in dances and ritual songs and celebrate the Ukuli ceremony or "cow jump".
Bana men adorn themselves often a clay decorated with feather headdress. As women, they coat their butter hair and adorn them with beads. Ritual feasts, men and women adorn their bodies in clay or lime paint.

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Samburu men cloth

2013-01-07T10:14:00.002-08:00

Samburu men making fire

Samburu men wear a cloth which is often pink or black and is wrapped around their waist in a manner similar to a Scottish Kilt

Samburu house

2013-01-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

Samburu house

Samburu practice polygynous marriage, and a man may have multiple wives. A Samburu settlement is known as a nkang (Maa) or manyatta (Kiswahili). It may consist of only one family, composed of a man and his wife/wives. Each woman has her own house, which she builds with the help of other women out of local materials, such as sticks, mud and cow dung. Large ritual settlements, known as lorora may consist of 20 or more families. However, settlements tend towards housing two or three families, with perhaps 5-6 houses built in a rough circle with an open space in the centre. The circle of houses is surrounded by an acacia thorn bush fence and the center of the village has the animal pens away from predators.

Samburu women

Samburu gerontocracy

2013-01-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

Samburu young women. Gail Beerman

The Samburu are a gerontocracy. The power of elders is linked to the belief in their curse, underpinning their monopoly over arranging marriages and taking on further wives. This is at the expense of unmarried younger men, whose development up to the age of thirty is in a state of social suspension, prolonging their adolescent status. The paradox of Samburu gerontocracy is that popular attention focuses on the glamour and deviant activities of these footloose bachelors, which extend to a form of gang feuding between clans, widespread suspicions of covert adultery with the wives of older men, and theft of their stock.

Samburu people

2012-12-23T04:21:00.004-08:00

Samburu

The Samburu are a Nilotic people of north-central Kenya that are related to but distinct from the Maasai. The Samburu are semi-nomadic pastoralists who herd mainly cattle but also keep sheep, goats and camels. The name they use for themselves is Lokop or Loikop, a term which may have a variety of meanings which Samburu themselves do not agree on. Many assert that it refers to them as "owners of the land" ("lo" refers to ownership, "nkop" is land) though others present a very different interpretation of the term. The Samburu speakSamburu, which is a Nilo-Saharan language. There are many game parks in the area, one of the most well known is Samburu National Reserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samburu_people

Samburu

Venus and Adonis.

2012-12-20T09:57:00.001-08:00

Titian. Venus and Adonis. 1550s. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. Rome.

The time before the death of Adonis, was well represented during the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque. Venus, helped by Cupid, crazy love, attempts to retain Adonis (who find death in hunting which came) with her beautiful body lascivious.

Dogs that painters included in the scene, symbolize fidelity. The doves and cupids, love.

Titian. Venus and Adonis. 1554. Museo del Prado. Madrid.

Paolo Veronese. Venus and Adonis. 1562. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. Augsburg.

Bartholomaeus Spranger. Venus and Adonis. 1587. Rijkmuseum. Amsterdam.

Annibale Carracci. Venus and Adonis. 1595. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna.

Annibale Carracci. Venus, Adonis and Cupid. 1595. Museo del Prado. Madrid.

Bartholomaeus Spranger. Venus and Adonis. 1597. Kunsthistorisches Museum . Vienna.

Hendrick Goltzius. Venus and Adonis. Alte Pinakothek. Munich.

Peter Paul Rubens. Venus and Adonis. 1614. Hermitage Museum. St. Petersburg.

Peter Paul Rubens. Venus and Adonis. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York.

Ferdinand Bol. Venus and Adonis. 1658. Rijkmuseum. Amsterdam.

Johannes Verkolje. Venus and Adonis. 1680s. Rijkmusum,, Amsterdam.

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John William Waterhouse. The Awakening of Adonis.

2012-12-17T09:47:00.001-08:00

John William Waterhouse. The Awakening of Adonis. (1900)

Aphrodite was the wife of Apollo and Adonis lover. Hippolytus Aphrodite hated, and worshiped Artemis, goddess of hunting. Hippolytus Aphrodite punished, and indirectly caused his death. In revenge, Artemis sent a wild animal (for some Apollo himself transformed into a bear or boar) that killed Adonis. Aphrodite sprinkled nectar on his body so that every drop of his blood became an anemone. Aphrodite also bled, wounded by the brambles, and their blood drops adonis born, some flowers like roses.
In later versions the beginning of Christianity, perhaps under the influence of the myth of Christ resurrects Adonis.

Greek women prostituting annually celebrated this myth, bolstered life against death through sexual practice. The money raised will be offered to the god. For Frazer, the annual celebration of the death and resurrection of Adonis was a personification of the annual agricultural cycle while for Ribichini was a veneration of ancestral kings deified after his death.

http://gramena.blogspot.com/2007/05/adonis-muerte-y-resurreccion.html

The Adonis Myth.

2012-12-14T02:04:00.000-08:00

Adonis. Marbre, torse antique restauré et complété par François Duquesnoy. Louvre Museum.

One day, the wife of King Cinyras the Cyprian—but some call him King Phoenix of Byblus, and some King Theias the Assyrian—foolishly boasted that her daughter Smyrna was more beautiful even than Aphrodite. The goddess avenged this insult by making Smyrna fall in love with her father and climb into his bed one dark night, when her nurse had made him too drunk to realize what he was doing. Later, Cinyras discovered that he was both the father and grandfather of Smyrna’s unborn child and, wild with wrath, seized a sword and chased
her from the palace. He overtook her on the brow of a hill, but Aphrodite hurriedly changed Smyrna into a myrrh-tree, which the descending sword split in halves. Out tumbled the infant Adonis. Aphrodite, already repenting of the mischief that the had made, concealed Adonis in a chest, which she entrusted to Persephone, Queen of the Dead, asking her to stow it away in a dark place.

Persephone had the curiosity to open the chest, and found Adonis inside. He was so lovely that she lifted him out and brought him up in her own palace. The news reached Aphrodite, who at once visited Tartarus to claim Adonis; and when Persephone would not assent, having by now made him her lover, she appealed to Zeus. Zeus, well aware that Aphrodite also wanted to lie with Adonis, refused to judge so unsavoury a dispute; and transferred it to a lower court, presided over by the Muse Calliope. Calliope’s verdict was that Persephone and Aphrodite had equal claims on Adonis—Aphrodite for arranging his birth, Persephone for rescuing him from the chest—but that he should be allowed a brief annual holiday from the amorous demands of both these insatiable goddesses. She therefore divided the year into three equal parts, of which he was to spend one with Persephone, one with Aphrodite, and the third by himself. Aphrodite did not play fair: by wearing her magic girdle all the time, she persuaded Adonis to give her his own share of the year, grudge the share due to Persephone, and disobey the court-order.

Persephone, justly aggrieved, went to Thrace, where she told her benefactor Ares that Aphrodite now preferred Adonis to himself. ‘A mere mortal,’ she cried, ‘and effeminate at that!’ Ares grew jealous and, disguised as a wild boar, rushed at Adonis who was out hunting on Mount Lebanon, and gored him to death before Aphrodite’s eyes. Anemones sprang from his blood, and his soul descended to Tartarus. Aphrodite went tearfully to Zeus, and pleaded that Adonis should not have to spend more than the gloomier half of the year with Persephone, but might be her companion for the summer months. This Zeus magnanimously granted. But some say that Apollo was the boar, and revenged himself for an injury Aphrodite had done him.

Robert Graves. The Greek Myths.

Adonis. 19th-century copy of a Greek bronze found at Pompeii, from the Museum of Naples.

Rubens. Adam and Eve. The canon of the human body.

2012-12-12T09:21:00.001-08:00

Rubens. Adam and Eve. 1628-1629. Museo del Prado.

In treating the body, Rubens applies the classical canon, but especially in women highlights obesity. The perfect body of Rubens, is a fat body. On the other hand, are always moving bodies.

Rubens. The garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. Mauritshuis. The Hague.

Rubens. Adam and Eve. 1599. Rubenshuis. Antwerp.

Hans Baldung Grien. Adam and Eve. The canon of the human body.

2012-12-09T01:35:00.001-08:00

Hans Baldung Grien. Adam and Eve. 1531. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid.

Hans Baldung Grien was a pupil of Dürer.

In its body treatment highlights the precision and strength plastic.

Table Thyssen Museum, highlights the look of Adam, challenging and provocative, and his attitude, holding Eva so lewd and possessive.

In this new way of representing the first parents, also highlights the pubis of Eva, graced by the veil.

Hans Baldung Grien. Adam and Eve. 1524. Museum of Fine Arts. Budapest.

Hans Baldung Grien. Adam and Eve. Uffizi Gallery. Firenze.

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Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. The canon of the body.

2012-12-07T11:01:00.001-08:00

Lucas Cranach the Eleder. Adam and Eve. 1528. Uffizi Gallery. Firenze.

God made Adam and Eve perfect and so his body representation is canonical.

Lucas Cranach the Elder did not travel to Italy and was not influenced by Italian art and classical art. Hence the contrast of Cranach's naked bodies and the bodies of the paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

Cranach's bodies are not naturalists, are stylized, with almond and large eyes, women with small breasts.

These bodies transformed remind Gothic. Furthermore, anticipated deformations typical of modern art.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. 1533. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. 1512. National Museum, Warsaw, Poland.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. 1531.

Lucas Cranach the Eleder. Adam and Eve. 1531. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berllin.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. Národni Galerie, Prague, Czech Republic.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Adam and Eve. Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium.

Albrecht Dürer and Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Adam and Eve, The canon of the human body.

2012-12-05T09:22:00.001-08:00

Albrecht Dürer. Adam and Eve. 1507. Museo del Prado. Madrid.

On the trip to Italy in 1494-1495, Durer became concerned about the representation of the human body. His study of the body led him to Vitruvius and the classical canon body. Eight heads is the height of the body of Adam and Eve, biblical pretext necessary to show the naked bodies that could have been attributed to Apollo and Venus.

Abrecht Dürer. Adam and Eve. 1504. Rijkmuseum. Amsterdam.

Albrecht Dürer. Adam and Eve. 1504. Morgan Library and Museum. New York.

Like Dürer, Gossaert traveled to Italy in his youth and received classical influence there. Enter the nude in northern Europe. Initially inspired by Dürer, then goes emphasizing guilt and lujura.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Adam and Eve. 1505-1507. Museo Tyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Adam and Eve. 1525. Staatliche Museum. Berlin.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Adam and Eve. Royal Collection. Windsor Castle.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. The metamorphosis of Hermaphrodite and Salmacis.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Neptune and Anphitrite. 1516.

Jan (Mabuse) Gossaert. Hercules and Deianara. Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Birmingham.

Masaccio. Adam and Eve

2012-12-02T01:40:00.000-08:00

Masaccio. Cacciata dei progenitori dall'Eden. 1425. Cappella Brancacci. Chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine. Firenze.

The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Italian: Cacciata dei progenitori dall'Eden) is a fresco by the Italian Early Renaissance artist Masaccio. The fresco is a single scene from the cycle painted around 1425 by Masaccio, Masolino and others on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. It depicts the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, from the biblical Book of Genesis chapter 3, albeit with a few differences from the canonical account.

Cappella Brancacci. Masaccio. Cacciata dei progenitori dall'Eden. in its context.

Although Adam and Eve were frequently represented in the Romanesque and Gothic, becomes recurring theme during the Renaissance.
This painting of Masaccio became the model that inspired the later representations.
Renaissance artists and effort devoted attention to naturalistic representation of the body. Masaccio broke with the tradition of Gothic representations and was inspired by classical statues such as Venus pudica.
Although in Genesis God clothes Adam and Eve, Masaccio, like other artists before and after, took the opportunity to paint nudes and hang in a church.
Masaccio's merit is to have succeeded communicate plasticity, dynamism and expressiveness in the bodies of our first parents, desperate for expulsion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expulsion_from_the_Garden_of_Eden_(Masaccio)

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacciata_dei_progenitori_dall'Eden

Venus Pudica. Musei Capitolini.

Multiple trapeze

2012-11-28T10:07:00.000-08:00

Multiple trapeze

Multiple trapeze refers to a number of different shapes and sizes of trapeze, including double trapeze, triple trapeze and larger multiples designed for use by multiple simultaneous flyers. Shaped trapezes are apparatuses that can take virtually any shape imaginable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze

Dance trapeze

2012-11-27T10:17:00.002-08:00

Dance trapeze

Dance trapeze (also known as single-point trapeze) refers to a trapeze used by many modern dance companies in aerial dance. The ropes of the trapeze are often both attached to a single swivel, allowing the trapeze to spin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze

http://www.canopystudio.com/

Dance trapeze

Flying trapeze

2012-11-25T11:40:00.000-08:00

Añadir leyenda

Flying trapeze refers to a trapeze act where a performer, or "flyer," grabs the trapeze bar and jumps off a high platform, or pedestal board, so that gravity creates the swing. The swing's parts are the cast out at the far end of the first swing, the beat back and rise as the performer swings back above the pedestal board, and then the trick is thrown at the far end of the second swing. The performer often releases the bar and is caught by another performer, the "catcher," who hangs by his or her knees on another trapeze, or sometimes on a cradle, which can be either stationary or also swinging. People of any size are able to execute basic trapeze maneuvers. Flying trapeze is generally done over a net, or occasionally over water. The flying trapeze was invented in the mid 19th century in France by Jules Léotard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze

Swinging trapeze

2012-11-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

Swinging single trapeze

Swinging trapeze (or swinging single trapeze) refers to an act performed while the trapeze swings. The performer builds up swing from a still position, and uses the momentum of the swing to execute the tricks. Usually tricks on a swinging trapeze are thrown on the peaks of the swing and involve dynamic movements that require precise timing. Most of the tricks begin with the performer sitting or standing on the bar and end with the performer catching the bar in his/her hands or in an ankle hang (hanging by the ankles by bracing them between the rope and the bar). This act requires a great deal of strength, grace, and flexibility. The trapeze bar is weighted and often has cable inside the supporting ropes for extra strength to withstand the dynamic forces of the swing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze

Acrobat

2012-11-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Acrobat

The acrobat performs gymnastic exercises or sports great difficulty as a public spectacle, which usually require an extraordinary ability to balance on a tightrope, a bar or a trapeze.

The Suri people

2012-11-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

Suri girl

The Suri have some extremely painful rituals, including lip plates, scarification and dangerous stickfighting. Some anthropologists see these as a kind of controlled violence to get young Suris used to feeling pain and seeing blood. These are, after all, people who live in a volatile, hostile world, under constant threat from their enemies around them.

No one knows why lip plates were first used. One theory goes that it was meant to discourage slavers from taking the women. It's undoubtedly painful. Once a girl reaches a certain age, her lower incisors are knocked out and her bottom lip is pierced and stretched until it can hold the clay plate.

'We get a stick and make a hole, then we gradually make the hole bigger.... My lip was cut a long time ago. My brothers and father made me get it done. Without a lip plate I wouldn't get married, and they'd get no cattle. My lip is big, Dongaley's is smaller. My lip plate is worth 60 cattle. Hers is worth 40.' A few girls are beginning to refuse to have a lip plate.

As well as lip plates, the girls of the village mark their bodies permanently by scarification. The skin is lifted with a thorn then sliced with a razor blade, leaving a flap of skin which will eventually scar. The men, meanwhile, scar their bodies to show they've killed someone from an enemy tribe. There are particular meanings assigned to these scars. One group, for instance, cuts a horseshoe shape on their right arm to indicate they've killed a man, and on their left if for a woman.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/tribes/suri/

Suri boy

Suri women

Suri scarification

Suri shephers