Chilean women have large breasts for their height and weight. (Although, as Lucy says, “All women have bigger breasts that we do.”) And they display a lot of cleavage: daytime, nighttime, dressed up, dressed down, anytime. They carry their breasts proudly, without shame, as if they’re valuable jewels, which of course they are. It’s shocking to return to the United States in winter—where’s the cleavage that surrounded me? I feel deprived.
Also, in Chile, bodies, male AND female, are much more exposed on television, in ads, on book covers, in museum exhibitions. It’s easy to think of the United States as sex crazed and using sex to sell everything, which is true. But we remain a prudish culture at base, while many others, even a traditionally Catholic culture like Chile’s, display explicit visual body images much more calmly. We saw a photo of male genitals, for example, on the cover of a paperback standing up on a bookshelf in the Valdivia public library.
Mostly, I prefer this more relaxed attitude. At the same time, however, I was uncomfortable watching five violent Hollywood action movies on a daytime bus from Santiago to Valdivia with many young children on board. The sound was piped loudly throughout the bus, and the movies were not “edited for content.” One included a violent, drawn-out rape scene. I didn’t see any obvious discomfort among parents on the bus, although I’m also not sure I would know what that discomfort might look like.
At the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, we saw a very sexually explicit exhibit on Moche ceramics, “Morir para Gobernar: Sexo y Poder en la Sociedad Moche” (“To Die in order to Govern: Sex and Power in Moche Society”). The Moche lived in northern Peru from around the beginning of the common era to 750 or 800. They left behind elaborate ceramics showing men and women engaged in non-reproductive sex acts and body mutilation. This particular exhibit was based on one anthropologist’s attempt to make sense of the pottery. His take is that the Moche had to help their king—who was believed to be water/rain incarnate—return after death so the culture could continue to grow food effectively and survive in a very arid climate.
The people’s contribution toward his renewal involved two types of behavior: (1) non-reproductive sex—oral, anal, in all possible postures, carefully and explicitly represented in small ceramic water vessels and free-standing figures; and (2) body mutilation—decapitation, collection and drinking of the blood, and removing noses, ears, fingers, etc., from captives—to make them look more like skeletons and strengthen the culture’s identification with the dead. These practices were believed to facilitate the very difficult passage of the dead king from purgatory into heaven, from where he could begin to act powerfully again, aid the survivors he left behind, and be reborn as the new king.
Like all the special exhibits I’ve seen at the Precolombino, the pottery was presented in darkened rooms. I’ve assumed in the past this had to do with protecting fragile, ancient artifacts. However, in the case of the Moche ceramics, the darkened space also facilitated taking in their content. None of the other viewers spoke above a whisper while I was there, no one commented or snickered. The atmosphere invited quiet consideration.
What impressed me most about the Moche exhibit was not the ceramics themselves, which were stunning and strange and beautiful in muted terracotta colors, nor the theory, also fascinating, but the fact that such an explicit exhibition was shown so calmly and straightforwardly. No warnings about sexual explicitness or checking IDs at the door, no evangelicals protesting outside (though their presence in Chile is quite obvious), just the ceramics—“this is part of our history”—and one interpretation of their story. Just that.
Note: You can see some beautiful (and not sexually explicit) examples of Moche ceramics in a recent New York Times article, and in the accompanying slide show, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/design/05amer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
—Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment