Letters to the Editor
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‘Rain Forest Couture’
It was with much astonishment that I read your review of the recently opened Met exhibition, “Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru” [Arts & Letters, “Rain Forest Couture,” March 6, 2008].
Your reviewer objects to the classification of the exhibited artworks as the product of high culture and persistently uses terms (tribesmen,” “savages”) that imply the opposite. In doing so she confuses the Stone Age culture of the Amazon Basin with that of the far more advanced civilizations of the Andes and the western coastal plain.
As the exhibition labels clearly state, although the raw material, i.e., the feathers themselves, were from the Amazonian rainforest, the people for whom these objects were made were not “savage” inhabitants of tribal regions.
On the contrary, they were the leaders of sophisticated state-level societies which, as elsewhere in the world, were highly stratified. The rulers controlled natural resources, long distance trade, work force, etc. and commissioned highly skilled craftspeople to produce items of “prestigious” materials including gold and silver, finely woven wool, semi-precious stones, and feathers.
These last were transported over huge distances and immense mountain ranges and their ultimate conversion into works such as those displayed in our show was an elite art that entailed the allocation of many man-hours on the part of court artisans. However uncomfortable your reviewer may find it, employing such words as “luxury,” “status,” and “power” to describe works made for the exclusive use of the upper ranks of society is entirely appropriate and anthropologically correct.
The reviewer also faults the show for neglecting the pietistic belief that “Feathers are charged with supernatural power.” She bases her critique on ethnographic studies of cultures distant in both time and place (20thcentury Amazonian groups) and concludes without any basis that the coastal and highland peoples of Peru 2,000 years earlier shared the same ideas.
Something appears to have gotten in the way of an objective appraisal of the contents of this innovative and beautiful show.
JOHANNA HECHT
Associate Curator
Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, N.Y.
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