African Minkisi and American Culture Essay -- essays research papers

Afri brush aside Minkisi and American CultureI. Introduction     African Minkisi have been used for hundreds of years in West Central Africa, This theatre where they be traditionally from was once known as the kingdom of Kongo, when Europeans started settling and trading with the BaKongo people. Kongo was a well-known state throughout much of the ball by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The BaKongo, however, had probably long used minkisi onward ethnographers and anthropologists ever recorded them. Minkisi ar complex items that are used to reanimate and to harm people, and there is no equivalent term for nkisi in whatever European language. A seventeenth century Dutch geographer first wrote of the nkisi, and verbalise that, These Ethiopians that is, the BaKongo call moquisie minkisi everything in which fills, in their opinion, a secret and incomprehensible justness to do them good or ill, and to reveal event of past and upcoming (Williams, 13). The term illness, in this context, is quite different than what we refer to illness. Illness, to the BaKongo, meant anything from sickness, to loss of property, and the inability to succeed in things like school and work. . The perpetual struggle with the undetected forces that cause illness and misfortunes was (and is) called war in Kongo (MacGaffey, 98). A war is terminate when one side of the struggle proves that they have better magic. The objects themselves are super complex, and most of them require hours of, painstaking labor to construct (MacGaffey, 33). All minkisi, whether in the form of wooden figures, snail shells, raffia bags, or clay pots, are containers for medicines that empowers them (MacGaffey, 43). The usual containers included the shells of large snails, antelope horns, cloth bags, gourds, and clay pots. Although minkisi in museums are usually wooden figurines and statues, containers of this kind may well have been the nonage (MacGaffey, 63). Without medicin es, the minkisi are nothing, they are not alive, nor can they perform their functions. To BaKongo, all transcendent powers result from some sort of communication with the dead (MacGaffey, 59). Chiefs, witches, diviners/prophets, and magicians could all do this, especially through and with the help of the minkisi. There are rules and ways of doing things with them, to them, that defend so many aspects of Kongo cultu... ...t, with a mirror-stoppered cow horn of clairvoyance (vititi mensu), musical comedy instruments used in sacred ritual, and elaborate beaded artwork. A red flag with protective signs hangs on the wall behind the nkisi to protect the altar, its proprietor and his family from harm.The basic Kongo cosmogram is a cross within a circle, dikenga, that is a typic chart of the voyage of the soul. As a miniature of the sun, the soul is musical theme to have four moments -- birth, efflorescence, fading and the return in the dawn of a coming day. Triangles, diamonds, spira ls, or crisscrosses denote this cyclical movement. The soul, which is thought by the Bakongo to reside in the forehead, is often represented in diamond form and can be seen on many African masks. The exhibition includes such masks -- nineteenth century Punu, Teke (Tsaaye), and Chokwe masks, and a 20th century Vili mask ringed with feathers. In addition, a fully feathered Mardi gras "Wild Man" costume from peeled Orleans, reminiscent of Kongo feather masks and headdresses worn by healers, is a living archetype of the creolized Kongo traditions found in the United States.http//www.art3st.com/various_pages/faceofthegods.html