Autor(en)

Secretan, Thierry:

Verlag / Jahr

Thames & Hudson; London, 1995.

Format / Einband

127 Seiten; mit zahlr., meist farb. Illustrationen;

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 1300 g

ISBN

0500278393

EAN

9780500278390

Bestell-Nr

1230707

Bemerkungen

Gutes Exemplar. - Englisch. - Mit BEILAGE: A4-Mappe ("Fantasy coffins from Africa") mit priv. zusammengestellten Texten (englisch) u. Fotografien; mit vielen farbigen Abbildungen (von afrikanischen Särgen). - Aus der Afrika-Bibliothek von Dr. Hans-Joachim Koloß, vormals Völkerkundemuseum Berlin. - With 152 illustrations, 132 in colour ... / It is a Saturday afternoon in a small farming community on the coastal plain near Accra, Ghana's capital. A fearsome lion is carried above the heads of a colourful, jostling throng. With bristling mane and tail erect, it is an object both symbolic and functional; for this is the coffin of a renowned hunter being taken for burial. Funerary art has many expressions, but seldom is it as eye-catching and surprising as among the Ga, the dominant people of Accra and the surrounding region. Here a remarkable folk art of coffin-building has developed, combining remembrance, respect, humour and celebration. The coffin may take almost any form or shape, from eagle to Mercedes Benz, reflecting the occupation, status or character of the deceased. Photographer and reporter Thierry Secretan's superb colour photographs record a wide variety of these sculptural masterpieces. He shows the making of the coffins, the funeral rites, the burial - quite literally from creation to the grave - while lively accompanying texts explain the history and background of the subject and introduce the main protagonists: the artist-craftsmen, the mourners and, not least, the central characters whose souls are going to join their ancestors in such an apt and splendid fashion. (Verlagstext) // The Celestial Family In 1987, on the second Saturday in August, the fishing community of Botianaw in Ghana buried the oldest member of the village, Tse Obaneh, in a gigantic wooden onion. The onion, complete with roots, measured three metres (ten feet) overall and was painted the colours of a real onion. On top was the figure of a man planting his spade in a bed of six little onions. The village of Botianaw, which lies beside the Gulf of Guinea, is surrounded by onion fields, and these fields had been the property of Tse Obaneh. At eighty-three the richest man in the village had earned the title of ancestor, abandoning his earthly existence, but not his earthly relations. It was now incumbent on the living to glorify his success. In Ghana, like most of the rest of Africa, there are no formalized funeral services. The burial of an old person in animist, Moslem and Christian traditions is closely associated with ancestor worship and is the single most important community activity, taking place every Friday and Saturday of the year. It is the ultimate manifestation of deep-rooted tradition. Tse Obaneh's onion had been made in the workshop of Kane Kwei, a carpenter who manufactured coffins in a whole variety of shapes for the hundred or so burials that take place each year among the Ga community, the dominant ethnic group in the region surrounding the capital, Accra. The dead are constantly present in the daily life of the Ga and no one eats or drinks without first making offerings to their ancestors. Respect for the ancient customs is a matter of life and death; a person's whole well-being depends on them, and these customs are a permanent link with the people who first established them. The Ga believe in reincarnation within the family, regarding sterility, which disrupts this process, as the ultimate misfortune. Nor can a person's spirit rejoin its celestial family or become an ancestor capable of reincarnation unless it has undergone the appropriate burial rites.1 For a Ga it is better to incur lifelong debts than to cut back on funeral expenses. It took five days to make Tse Obaneh's onion and twenty-four hours to bury him in this masterpiece of funerary art. (Seite 7) ISBN 0500278393

Schlagworte

Afrika; Geschichte; Bildende Kunst; Sarg; Coffin; Särge; Bestattung; Totenkult; Kulturgeschichte; Ethnologie; Völkerkunde; Kunsthandwerk; Design

Unser Preis

EUR 155,00

(inkl. MwSt.)

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