The Life History of Pots : Potsherds, Replicas, and Tactility(<Special Theme>Art and Anthropology)

Abstract

In this article, I would like to explore two cases of the revival of prehistoric pottery by adopting a "life history approach" to pots, which are considered as things with social lives, and extend that approach to the component material of the vessels. The life history of pots and their materials, along with the life history of potters, provides a basic framework for discussion. The findings are meant to contribute to a general anthropological discussion on pottery and pottery-making. This paper brings into focus two potters who are very different from each other in quite a few respects, but also share an extraordinary experience: each of them revived, almost single-handedly, a long-extinct prehistoric pottery in his/her own region and set a course for the revival of a tradition of pottery-making. One of them, Raimundo Saraiva Cardoso (Mestre Cardoso) (1930-2006), was born in a remote village in the State of Para, Brazil, and started his career as a potter in the middle of the 1960s in Icoaraci, an Amazonian town known for its tradition of manufacturing utilitarian vessels. However, the pottery he started to make was very distinct from the traditional pots made by other potters. Getting acquainted with the prehistoric pottery of the region (lower Brazilian Amazon), Marajoara pottery (4c-17c) and Santarem pottery (10c-16c) among others, and deeply impressed by their technique and beauty, he made up his mind to make their replicas. After an earnest effort to conduct research and experiments, he succeeded in manufacturing excellent replicas. Since the 1970s, other potters from the town tried to catch on to his success, but due to many unfavorable conditions, ended up producing a variety of vessels that only remotely resembled the authentic prehistoric models. Those inventions, however, became the new Icoaraci style of pottery. The other of the two potters, Nampeyo (ca. 1857-1942), a Hopi-Tewa woman from First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, Arizona, started to make pottery inspired by the prehistoric Pueblo pots found in or excavated from the nearby "ruins," especially the Sikyatki pottery (14c-17c), in the final decades of the 19th century. Owing to the excellent quality of her work and the synergy of various factors (the Santa Fe Railway, the Southwestern sightseeing industry, philanthropists and patrons, the growing demand of non-Indian collectors for Native American goods, and so on), she became the first Native American artist nationally known by name. After her, her descendants and other followers came to build up a new tradition of pottery-making and a new style of pottery among the Hopi Pueblo. One premise that forms the starting point for the argument of this paper is that every single thing (object) has its own life history or biography. Things may remain in one "regime of value" (Appadurai) for life or travel across various "regimes of value." A "regime of value," that of the art world, occupies a self-assumed privileged position to recognize certain things as works of art, which are claimed to deserve special social recognition. A thing comes to be evaluated according to the criteria of each "regime of value," through which it passes or finds itself, but it never ceases to be a thing endowed with inherently plural meanings or "multivocality." Things consecrated as works of art are no exceptions in that respect. This basic stance vis-a-vis the world of things or material culture is maintained throughout this paper. People from various sectors of society have been involved in the process of establishing those new pottery-making traditions, and there are many possible ways of interpreting that process: their relationship to archaeological investigations, museum collecting, their commercialization and the market, collectors' taste for and patronage of the pottery as works of art, the economic

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)