Asmat's Head-Hunting Art Is Symbolic

Asmat's head-hunting art is symbolic

Asmat ancestral figures, on view through July 31 at Christopher Pawlik/Native Design, 108 S. Jackson St. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 624-9985.

-- Asmat carvings and ritual wear, on view through July 3 at the Lewis/Wara Gallery, 316 Occidental Ave. S. 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 623-4072.

One of the world's great tribal-art styles is born in the labyrinthine swamps of Irian Jaya, in western New Guinea. There, the Asmat people pole long canoes through the network of waters, and live in homes built on stilts. Their culture revolves around wood, mud, the sago palm, and headhunting.

``They are tender, kind, generous, sweet, loving people,'' says Tobias Schneebaum, a leading authority on Asmat art who was in Seattle recently to talk about the Asmat to members of the Seattle Art Museum's Ethnic Arts Council.

Schneebaum is a soft-spoken, almost shy man, who wouldn't seem to have much in common with headhunters. But he'd go back to live with them in a minute, he says with a faraway look in his eyes. He loves the Asmat.

Collectors are coming to love the shields and ancestor figures they carve - pieces which are on view this month in two Pioneer Square Galleries: giant shields and drums and costumes woven of grass and feathers at The Lewis/

Wara Gallery, 316 Occidental Ave. S., and canoe prows and ancestor figures at Christopher Pawlik/Native Design, 106 S. Jackson St.

All of the symbols that decorate Asmat carvings are headhunting symbols, Schneebaum says - even the animal figures. No, they don't take heads anymore. At least not very often.

Yes, they probably took Michael Rockefeller's head, back in 1961. Three years earlier, four Asmat war lords were killed by Dutch troops. The head of any member of the ``white'' tribe could avenge those deaths. Rockefeller was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In those days, the area still was called Dutch New Guinea. The Dutch left in 1963, when political power was transferred to Indonesia, and the area was renamed Irian Jaya.

For the Asmat, life went on much as usual. They are hunters and gatherers whose diet is 95 percent starchy sago, from the sago palm. They supplement it with fish, sago worms, small rats, and birds.

Schneebaum says everything is cooked the same way - put directly on the fire, since the Asmat have no cooking utensils.

``They have bowls,'' he recollects, ``but they use them mostly for pigments.''

Art is a central energy of Asmat life. Poles and figures are carved to honor ancestors - important figures to the Asmat, who routinely use the skull of an ancestor for a pillow, to prevent dreams. Tall shields are cut from mangrove wood, and deeply incised with designs like curling tusks, and shapes the Asmat call ainor, calculated to reduce the enemy to trembling paralysis.

Colors are painted on with their fingers, or with brushes made from shredded twigs. Only three colors are used: black made from charcoal, white of lime made from crushed mussel shells, and red ocher clay obtained by trade with tribes upstream.

When the shields are taken out to stand in the sun, ``It is as if the shields were alive and the spirits within impatient to strike out in vengeance for past wrongs,'' Schneebaum writes in ``Where the Spirits Dwell,'' his 1988 book on the Asmat, published by Grove Press.

Schneebaum was pulled to Indonesia by seeing Asmat art in a museum. ``I could feel the spirits coming right out of the wood, and saying, `There's where you're going,''' he recalled.

He even learned a little of the complex Asmat language, which has no past or future tense. Much of it is based on the river system.

The Asmat consider their land and themselves as one. They see 400 inches of rain a year. The muddy ground is too fluid to permit burials. Women who die in childbirth are put into the branches of the sacred banyan trees to decompose. So are babies. Other bodies are left on platforms in front of the house, to be attacked by maggots and birds. Children keep dogs and other animals away.

When the body has disintegrated, and the head falls away of its own accord, it is inherited by the oldest child. Painted, beautifully decorated with feathers and seeds, it becomes an intimate part of family life. The headman of the family uses it as a pillow. The spirit of the ancestor is in it, Asmat believe, and the skull protects him, and gives him power.

Enemy heads traditionally were taken in pay-back raids, to revenge a death. It was done only after an ancestor pole, called mbis, was carved. The poles resemble thin versions of totem poles, except that each figure represents an unavenged death. Each pole could have as many as 30 figures, or as few as two; there's no prescribed number, Schneebaum says. A big phallic wing, formed of a buttress root of the sago palm, emerges from the groin of the uppermost figure.

Until recently, when the blood of a victim anointed a pole, it was taken into the sago fields and broken to release the spirits, and left to decay. These days, when revenge is no longer practiced, the poles are sold for money or trade goods.

``Now, they may have two-hour feasts in place of the old month-long events. And now they're making big body masks for church feasts,'' Schneebaum says. They eat canned peaches, when they can get them, but their favorite ``chic'' food is herring in tomato sauce, heated in the can.

Schneebaum could find a few old friends when he revisits the Asmat next October, accompanying a Society Expeditions cruise.

Schneebaum is curating a show of Asmat art, titled ``Embodied Spirits,'' for the Peabody Museum, in Salem, Mass. It will travel to Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, and to Pasadena, Cal. That's as close to Seattle as it comes. Better catch the gallery shows.