Female Figure Giving Birth

Label

This female figure represents a mythic ancestor of one of the many Abelam clans, and here is symbolically represented giving birth to another clan member. It would have been mounted over the entrance to the Abelam men’s cult house or haus tambaran. In the Middle Sepik villages, every haus tambaran has one or two of these figures above the ladders at the entrance to the house from the ground. These houses possess a tall, brightly painted front gable, the roof of which tapers toward the back. When men enter the haus tambaran, they must crawl through a passageway into the darkness of the house, passing between the splayed legs of their mythic ancestress, to join the world of men.

This figure is unusual (and rare in museum collections) because few of these haus tambaran entrance figures are so direct in symbolizing being (re)born into the life of the clan and the world of men. (Most such figures merely show a female with her legs splayed, revealing her genitals.) Both styles of splayed figures offer a symbolic statement that the interior of the structure is for men, not boys. Women are excluded from these structures, as it is thought that female menstrual blood taints and saps men’s potency, and everything about the men’s house and its carvings aims to promote masculine power and strength.

From the 2019 exhibition Melanesian Art: The Sepik River and Abelam Hill Country, curated by Robert Welsch, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Franklin Pierce University

Course History

ARTH 7, Learning from Dartmouth: Lessons in Visual Culture, Marlene Heck, Winter 2013

ANTH 50.17, Rites of Passage, Sienna Craig, Spring 2020

Exhibition History

Ancestors, Spirits, and Families: Expressing Relationships in Melanesian Art, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Anthropology 47, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, May 11-June 30, 1996.

Anthropology of Religion, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Anthropology 48, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 30-May 2, 2004.

Faces/Voices: The Harry A. Franklin Family Collection of Oceanic Art at Dartmouth College, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18-March 15, 1992.

Melanesian Art: The Sepik River and Abelam Hill Country, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-December 8, 2019.

Religious Symbols in the Art of New Guinea, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Anthropology 47 & 53, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 17-May 16, 1999.

Provenance

Acquired by Harry A. Franklin (1903-1983), Los Angeles, California, in the 1950s; bequeathed to the Harry A. Franklin Family Collection, Los Angeles, California, 1983; given to present collection, 1990.

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