Artistry of the Everyday: Beauty and Craftsmanship in Berber Art

Abstract

[...] the collection reflects the idiosyncratic tastes and experiences of the donors, Americans who visited the mountainous Kabylia region of Algeria in the late nineteenth century, the RJf Mountains of Morocco from 1926 to the 19405, and the Sahara Desert from 1947 to 1962. Travelers with names like Algernon Coolidge probably hung New England portraits and British landscapes on the walls of their homes, but they were capable of being moved by popular art from societies at the time little known in North America and only slightly better known in Europe.

Artistry of the Everyday: Beauty and Craftsmanship in Berber Art by Lisa Bernasek Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum Press, Harvard University, 2008. 125 pages, 10 b/w photographs, 25 color plates. $21. 95 paper

reviewed by Diana Wylie

Charm-like disks and beads dangle from a necklace made of coral and, oddly enough, cloves. Stone bracelets are engraved with an ancient script. Milk pots, the color of café au lait, bear geometric designs as if their makers had doodled on them with brown paint. These are some of the visual delights on display in Lisa Bernasek's Artistry of the Everyday. The catalogue builds upon objects displayed between 2004 and 2006 at Harvard University's Peabody Museum: the show was titled "Imazighen! Beauty and Artisanship in Berber Life," to which Bernasek has added five short explanatory essays, page-long discussions of twentyfive objects, and ten photographs dating from the late nineteenth century to 1953, the period she focuses on. The book is beautifully designed and produced: Its size, quality of image as well as text, and even its shape are close to ideal.

One indicator of the book's integrity is that it is modest. It doesn't claim to offer a survey of Berber art across North Africa or throughout time. None of the original Boston-based collectors was in any way systematic. As a result, the Peabody Museum collection is neither "complete" nor "consistent," as Bernasek readily acknowledges. Instead, the collection reflects the idiosyncratic tastes and experiences of the donors, Americans who visited the mountainous Kabylia region of Algeria in the late nineteenth century, the RJf Mountains of Morocco from 1926 to the 19405, and the Sahara Desert from 1947 to 1962. These three sites are quite diverse, reflecting the tough exigencies of life in the mountains and the desert, as are the objects themselves.

What the pieces share is their everyday nature, or so Bernasek argues. It is true that the jewelry, capes, leather bags, vessels, and tent poles are not the accoutrements of high culture. They look rural and useful, and so they were. Yet many of the objects are in fact the "fine art" of the countryside. It is unlikely, for example, that any Rifi woman would have worn a lovely yellow shirt, delicately embroidered by students at a village mosque, when laboring in the fields. (The women shown trudging from a spring in one of the late nineteenth century photographs, amphorae slung over their backs, are dressed in rough-andready work clotbes.) Further, when exactly did Kabyle women wear metal head ornaments? Surely not "everyday."

The wonderful photographs, also from the Peabody collection, raise provocative questions. Why does a Kabyle family adorn the heads of all their female children, but not the oldest lady? For the photographer, of course, but is there some way of postulating why the photo was set up in this way? Would prepubescent girls ever have worn those decorations? One of the two proud men standing at the back holds a book which is surely the Koran; the other wears medals which are equally sure to be French. Was the latter man likely to have been an interpreter and were the jewels perhaps the fruit of his earnings? Which fabrics worn by the women were probably bought from France and which were woven locally? Why are the amphorae black, unlike all the others in the volume? Playing the objects against the photographs provokes intriguing new questions.

People embellished their objects with designs both decorative and prophylactic. The geometric symbols- frequently based on the five-fingered Hand of Fatima - were meant to repulse the evil eye. They were intended to protect the wearer or user from envy.

These abstract designs - as on cross-hatched and polka-dotted water jars - captivated the Boston Brahmins who began visiting North Africa in the late nineteenth century. Travelers with names like Algernon Coolidge probably hung New England portraits and British landscapes on the walls of their homes, but they were capable of being moved by popular art from societies at the time little known in North America and only slightly better known in Europe. Surprisingly, one such visitor held a bulbous pot in so high esteem that he donated it to Bostons Museum of Fine Arts. (The MFA thought differently and in 1904 transferred the pot to the Peabody's archaeological and ethnographic collection.) Some early visitors strained to define the appeal of the objects by noting their "Biblical" style.

Brahmins with a keen and adventurous sense of aesthetics were not the only collectors who found the objects appealing. So did visitors who were better informed about where they were, like Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. During research trips to the Rif Mountains beginning in 1926, Coon and his wife bought goods like embroidered jellabos hooded cloaks), even using them to keep warm in the Atlas Mountains before donating them to the Peabody. Lloyd Cabot Briggs was a Harvard research anthropologist who became a serious collector of Tuareg objects when he lived in Algeria off and on between World War II and 1962, buying anything from wooden bowls to ceremonial saddles whenever he visited the Sahara, though he also bought from other collectors. Bernasek has used the memoirs, papers, and published works of these visitors to good effect: they fill out the context and make the act of collecting come alive.

The works cannot be precisely dated because the former owners rarely left detailed notes on where they got them. Some may not have known exactly what they were buying.) In any case, the objects were produced by people who were changing their styles as they came under the influence of French and Spanish colonial rulers. Important aspects of these changes may be glimpsed through Bernaseks writing as well as in the objects themselves.

In addition to her five contextual essays, mainly about the collectors, Bernasek has written a short essay about twenty-five pieces. Clearly written and well informed, ail these texts are instructive about values in Berber society and how they have been changing. She discusses the meaning of the evil eye and how people tried to gain protection from it: they used their craft to distract envious people from casting harmful glances on desirable things and people. We learn thai sword blades from Europe, dating here from the early seventeenth century, were popular among the Tuareg, who bought them via Mauritania or the trans-Saharan trade and then attached their own geometrically embossed hilts and sheaths. And what was the impact of the tourist trade itself? Bernasek observes that people in Kabylia continued to produce pottery to sell to tourists even as they were switching to use metal containers in their own daily lives. She notes that imported textiles and dresses ended women's practice of weaving cloaks and fastening them with heavy fibulae, though this transformation, like the others, is impossible to date precisely.

More recent developments are easier to trace. Bernasek tells the politically charged story of Trflnagh script, now emblematic of Berber cultural identity. She suggests that rising Berber ethnic consciousness today makes these pieces into objects lhat inspire cultural reverence. Formerly they would have been known by local or "tribal" names rather than by the expansive category of Berber. Berber or "Ama/igh" identity is now globally assertive, and, as this slim and lovely volume illustrales, the oddest people have played important roles in preserving vestiges of its past.