Senufo maternity figure, Ivory Coast
9.5" tall
wood, pigment
SOLD
"The importance of women is explicitly acknowledged in statues of a personage known as Ancient Mother who is typically depicted
holding a small child on her lap. Ancient Mother is considered the head of Poro, as exemplified by the saying "Poro is a woman."
The sacred grove considered to be her ward, or compound. She represents the female aspect of creation and is the founder and
guardian of the matrilineage. She is the spiritual mother of all Senufo males who pass through Poro, and, metaphorically, the
mother of the community itself.
According to some scholars, carvings of Ancient Mother are deliberately non-naturalistic so as to emphasize her symbolic rather
than her biological role in Senufo culture.
A statue of Ancient Mother is shown to novices during the Poro learning process, in part as an indication that beyond the obvious
lies the hidden, an idea also exemplified by the secret language learned by novices. Initiation begins with boys being taken from
their biological mothers to enter a period of dislocation in the compound of Ancient Mother and under her care. Ancient Mother
absorbs the young novices, who are not yet seen as human. She will symbolically give birth to them many years later, after their
initiation is complete. New initiates undergo a symbolic death through such rituals as crawling through a muddy tunnel. They are
reduced to a kind of emptiness, a liminal or in-between status. Over the long course of their initiation, they confess their breaches
of acceptable behavior, and undergo intensive instruction in the male arts of living and in the Poro language and other lore. They
submit to numerous ordeals and tests, including small cuts inflicted by Ancient Mother's "leopard." At one point, they pass
through a narrow opening called "the old woman's vagina" to enter a symbolic womb. At the end of the process, tutors lead
graduating initiates out through an actual door, signaling their rebirth as issues of Ancient Mother. Now fully socialized men and
complete human beings, they have been nourished by the "milk of knowledge" at their Mother's breast, as is keyed in the
carving's iconography. Only superficially a biological nursing mother, then, an image of Ancient Mother is a veiled and rather
abstract sign of the systematic body of knowledge acquired by Poro initiates." Source - A History of Art in Africa
Despite its appearance, I believe that this wonderfully carved and beautiful figure was made specifically for the collecting market.
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