FIG. 18 (far left): Royal stool. Luba, DR Congo. Wood, glass beads. H: 46 cm. Galerie Ratton, Paris. FIG. 19 (left): Royal stool. Luba, DR Congo. Wood. H: 40.6 cm. New Orleans Museum of Art, bequest of Victor Kiam, inv. 77.140. FIG. 20 (below): Maternity fi gure. Luba, DR Congo. Wood. H: 15 cm. Furman Collection. 119 said to be the wives of the spirits who possess and empower the diviner, and the sculptures reinforce the idea of “woman as container.”31 The suckling child stresses the centrality of royal women as mothers responsible for future generations. These bowls held chalk, sometimes beads, plus other magical medicines, nkishi, that contributed to the bowl fi gure’s curative and oracular powers. Of course, these contents and the practices of diviners, spirit mediums, and chiefs—as well as the fi gurative bowls and stools—point to and recall the ritual processes of healing and governance. Elaborate keloidal scarifi cation patterns are featured attributes of the Luba royal forms discussed above and are also seen on the few known Luba headrests that show mothers with children (fi g. 22). As in the other images, the baby here suckles its mother’s breast enthusiastically. The Luba believe that breasts contain and protect royal secrets and spirits, so the suckling children on all the objects illustrated here might well recall the passing of such sacred ideas and powers from one generation to the next. Such a “pillow” was employed to protect a beautiful, sculptural, labor-intensive coiffure of the type worn by both Luba men and women in earlier times as emblems of prestige and status. The head is accentuated proportionately in all these carvings as the locus of power and wisdom, while a virtuoso hairstyle functions in life to enhance these same attributes. Analogous and even more complicated ideas and ideograms are encoded in scarifi cation designs and related patterns on other Luba royal forms—bow stands, staffs, spears, thrones, etc. These ideograms are found also in many beaded strands, such as those on the fi rst mother-andchild throne discussed above, and on sacred “memory boards,” lukasa. A deceptively small artifact, a lukasa is in fact a microcosm of Luba history and thought. Its patterned beads and carved designs—only apparently abstract and thus without meaning to outsiders—are a kind of symbolic shorthand of history and belief for Luba adepts, and analogous designs appear in decorative scarifi cation. Raised tactile patterns on the skin are both beautiful and erotic on living women while at the same time serving as inscriptions and encryptions of complex, often which is the summit of power and achievement. Thus a throne enshrines kitenta, the essence and spirit of ancestral kingship and dynastic succession.30 When the Luba say, “The king is a woman,” they are encoding many of these references, suggesting, probably especially in maternity images, that a woman, as king, is the mother of the Luba people. A second throne (fi g. 19), again a kneeling mother, holds her actively positioned child with her left arm and hand while she supports the round seat resting on her head with her right. The composition is asymmetrical, as is often the case with maternities: a dynamic rendering that alludes to the vital, transformative role of motherhood. Such thrones were also allusions to the succession of leaders in dynastic history. Luba royal power was gendered as both male and female, a reciprocity that is often embodied elsewhere in two separate fi gures. Luba bowls are commonly held by female fi gures but again are rare as maternities. These are spiritually charged containers for both chiefs and royal diviners who are spirit mediums (fi g. 21). The women holding these bowls are MATERNITIES
T84 EN Online
To see the actual publication please follow the link above