| Ethnic Jewellery
Edited by John Mack.
Published by Lund Humphries, Burlington, Vermont, 2002. 81รป2" x 11".
120 color photos, 50 black and white, 4 maps. 208 pages. $29.95. ISBN: 0853318743
Reviewed by Nina Graci
 For
those of us who get our sustenance from books about jewelry, Ethnic Jewellery
is an excellent feed. Its 170 photos of delectable jewelry, commentaries, and
maps quickly wafted this reader into daydreams about the bejeweled tribes that
left us this priceless legacy. Editor John Mack, Senior Keeper at the British
Museum, tackled the daunting task of documenting the traditional jewelry of non-European
countries. He did this by inviting eight professors, curators, and trailblazer
Oppi Untracht to explain the materials, techniques, and themes characteristic
of the region in which the jewelry was made. Mack chose well. The book traces
ethnic jewelry from its origins in Africa to the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific,
and the Americas. Easily digested commentaries answer many provocative questions
while raising others. How did the Pre-Columbian jewelers who made the first important
jewelry in ancient America create their sophisticated and complex work 3,000 years
before Europeans discovered them? Why does some jewelry created in different corners
of the world share a certain indefinable similarity?
Untracht concludes that no matter how far their creators were separated in
time and place, they had one thing in common: technology. Technology and design
(the marriage of thought to process), are inseparable, and faced with the same
problems, craftspeople explore similar avenues in dealing with technical limitations
and possibilities presented by any given material. This explains how beaded collars
made by the Inuit of Greenland can resemble the necklaces of Oraon women on the
other side of the world in Bihar, India. And further, how silver filigree jewelry
made in Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Morocco, and India can resemble one another.
Ethnic Jewellery is not just a pretty book. Most of the jewelry was
chosen from the collections of the British Museum, as well as others, but is not
a guide to these collections. Rather, it is a chapter-by-chapter continuous dialogue
that hops from country to country describing how the pieces were worn, what the
relationship of the materials was to the culture, and how the manufacturing techniques
survived for centuries.
Ethnic jewelry has a profound significance that goes far beyond adornment.
It is many things to many people and a metaphor for language, ritual, art, beliefs,
and ideas. Anthropologists see it as a reflection of a culture’s state of
mind. Jewelry is movable wealth. Indian village women wear jewelry on every part
of the body that can possibly support it. Jewelry acts as both a dowry and the
family’s insurance against disasters, political upheaval, and war, as it
can quickly be converted into currency. It is also ritual. An Indian bride wears
a large thumb ring set with a circular mirror. With eyes cast down, as modesty
demands, she can see in it a reflection of her husband’s face, sometimes
for the first time.
Jewelry has great social significance in the Golden Triangle, the meeting points
of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. Farmers, fearing the inflationary tendencies of
currencies, put their faith in silver. In these societies, it is a woman’s
numerous silver ornaments that ascertain the family’s wealth.
The Fali women of northern Came-roon wear large lip-plugs that make them resemble
frogs. This pays homage to the female ancestor who was taught the “things
of woman” by a frog. These women are responsible for passing on this ancestral
wisdom to their daughters, and the impact of their instruction is enhanced both
by the attention to the mouth, the source of speech, through personal decoration,
and by the more remote allusion to the frog, the original source of the teaching
itself. This custom enhanced female attractiveness to the people of the village
and also served to protect women from slave traders who found this custom repellant.
Indeed, one culture’s ornaments are another’s magic amulets, which
protect against witchcraft and guard good health. Protection for the Berbers meant
combining silver with topaz for protection against jaundice, emerald to protect
against snake bites, and rubies to protect the heart.
This book is an inspirational reference for jewelers and collectors, and a
travelogue that begins with the oldest and the simplest forms of self-adornment:
an oval bone pendant (15,000 years old) and corn stalk, worn through holes in
the earlobes, unearthed in Africa. The journey ends with
Native North American jewelry. And what a trip it has been. One closes the
covers on a global journey, where jewelry is the signpost for lost civilizations,
with regret and gratitude to these sometimes anonymous photographers and impassioned
collectors, like Untracht. Fuelled by a steady diet of boiled eggs, Untracht spent
decades criss crossing India — his “al fresco” living museum —
photographing, collecting, and sometimes even rescuing Indian jewelry from the
melting pot.
Thanks to conservators like Untracht, ethnic jewelry continues to pass on its
message: with inspiration and a few hand tools, jewelers can create anything their
imaginations can conceive. Ethnic Jewellery is a declaration of love: for
the jewelry, the cultures that inspired it, the techniques that created it, and
the artisans that dreamed it.
Nina Graci is a freelance writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Cananda, and
a frequent contributor to Lapidary Journal.
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