New Guinea Tarawai Mask
The Thrill of the Unknown
A Tarawai Mask
By Klaus Maaz
North Coast Mask-Taraway Island-Heinrich Collection
First a few words on the function of the masks: they were used in ceremonies as representations of the ancestors and of mythical beings. Unlike the sculpted ancestor figures, they embody “the dynamic principle that dance brings out, which enables them to transcend their mystical rigidity”.i This does not however apply to the Tarawai Island mask under consideration here. Its incisive carved round eyes are not pierced and it was never actually used for dancing. Is it even correct to be thinking of this object a mask?
A.B. Meyer described and presented many examples of this type of mask to the ethnological world 135 years ago! They are seen illustrated on three large plates.ii
It would not be until 1900 that Heinrich Schurtz presented a similar mask with the same round but unpierced eyes from the Übersee Museum in Bremen on
page 503 of his work titled Urgeschichte der Kultur (The History of Culture). The masks in the museum then lay forgotten in its reserves for nearly a century. Even the most important publications of the 20th and 21st centuries on the art of New Guinea failed to make mention of them.iii
Mask from Dallmannhafen, German New Guinea, Bremen Museum
They were not openly shown to the public until 2000 when Frank Tiesler included them in a major New Guinea exhibition celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Staatlichen Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden (see the photograph here of the masks side-by-side in a row).
Tiesler calls them “mask-like carvings that were arranged as a kind of frieze on the gable of the men’s house”.iv He moreover illustrates ten of these “mask-like carvings” in Volume 1 of his monumental publication (Plates 378-386) and writes: “The islands of Tarawai, Walis, and the western portion of Muschu are part of the Boiken settlement area [...] The men’s ceremonial houses (horombo) are centers for the people’s social and religious lives in these places, as well as for the artistic activities associated with them. The houses are relatively crude rectangular structures with protruding and forward-projecting gable fronts (illustration 292). The walls and the sides of the gables are decorated with pangal palm spathe paintings that are called hori. There is an eponymous dance for which the dancers wear these paintings [...] Every village generally has two cult houses. The village dance ground is located between them, and women are forbidden to pass over it, just as they are forbidden from approaching or entering the ceremonial houses themselves […]
Two Tarawai Island masks illustrated by Tiesler, no. 378
The entire ritual compound, made up of the ceremonial house, the adjoining dance area and the houses with their forward-projecting gables, is a unique feature that has no connection or equivalent in any way with any of the ceremonial cult houses or platforms in other coastal regions. The houses do however display strong similarities to the frontal facades (korambo) of the houses of the Abelam whose contours and general forms they follow [...]
Unlike the korambo of the Abelam, the most important cult objects that the horombo in the coastal villages house are not figures or sculptures, but rather wooden masks. This can be considered typical of the coastal cultures and the delta region as well. The male and female masks are differentiated in both areas […] In contrast with the masks of the delta region however, those of the central north coastv can be identified by the distinctive red, white, black and sometimes yellow polychrome painting they display. This feature also points to a close connection with areas further inland.
While the masks from the islands display strong sculptural elaboration with their prominent rolled-up noses, powerfully articulated faces, and angular and offset foreheads,iv those from the coast are generally more concave and bulging with larger facial surfaces [...] The masks were formerly arranged in long rows to be shown in the ceremonial houses [...]
Tarawai Island masks illustrated by Tiesler, nos. 383-386
Just as the display of representations of heads in a row seen on the crossbeams of the korambo in the Abelam area, these masks (Plates 378-388) also appear to have been arranged in a frieze-like row on the lower parts of the gable surfaces of certain horombo. This way of decorating the sacred ceremonial houses, which is also observed in certain peripheral parts of the Abelam area, is clearly the expression of an even stronger individualization of the represented beings or spirits than the stereotypical groups of side-by-side heads seen on Abelam structures.”vii
North Coast Mask-Taraway Island-Heinrich Collection
The Tarawai mask that was formerly in the Heinrich collection and is being presented here is very similar in its manufacture, design and painting to certain examples in the Dresden and Bremen collections but has one unique particularity: a stylized figure of an animal that sits atop its head. The carver chose to add in relief what is most probably a representation of a lizard.
North Coast Masks at Steyl Mission Museum-Photo by Klaus Maaz 2013
i Hirschberg, Walter, et al.; Wörterbuch der Völkerkunde. Stuttgart, 1965, p. 272.
ii Meyer, A.B.; Masken von Neuguinea und dem Bismarck-Archipel. Publikationen aus dem Königlichen Ethnographischen Museum zu Dresden. Band VII. Dresden, 1889.
iii Schmitz, C.A.; Oceanic Art; New York, 1969 / Stöhr, W.; Kunst und Kultur aus der Südsee. Sammlung Clausmeyer. Melanesien. Cologne, 1987 / Art Papou. Austronésiens et Papous de Nouvelle- Guinée. Musées de Marseille, 2000 / Peltier, Philippe (ed.); Shadows of New Guinea. Geneva, 2006.
iv Tiesler, Frank; Die Kunst Neuguineas. Die voraustronesischen Kunstgebiete. Band 1. Dresden, 2023 (private edition), plate 378, p. 557. This two volume publication had originally been scheduled to appear over a decade ago but for a variety of reasons was not published until 2023. Only forty copies were printed.
v Plates 378-388. These are the masks in the Dresden exhibition that are arranged in a frieze-like display that were photographed in 2001, and the ones in the former Ernst Heinrich collection are among them as well. NB: This footnote is not a part of the Tiesler citation within which it appears.
vi See the superb collection of masks at the Steyl Mission Museum, which is on display there in an enormous showcase, but has gone completely unnoticed by scientific circles for decades. These masks were undoubtedly collected by Steyl missionaries around the beginning of the 20th century. The incomparable Parak houses and the objects in them disappeared unusually quickly when Christian beliefs began to take hold and spread. The masks in this collection were most probably collected by Father Erdweg or Father Heinrich Meyer, who published on the subject of Parak. NB: This footnote is not a part of the Tiesler citation within which it appears.
vii Tiesler, Frank; op. cit., p. 523-529.