Hello I'm Laura Osorio, and I am the curator for the Santo Domingo Centre of
excellence for Latin American research
and this is my corner.
So I have a series of tooth necklaces
that are all from the Amazon rainforest
from the Igaraparaná region
which is now the Columbia Amazon
but at some point was the Peruvian Amazon.
The reason I wanted to talk about them is because we've recently been visited
by two elders from the Murui-Muina or Witoto people from that area;
Oscar Jitdutjaaño and Alicia Sánchez, as well as a professor from the university there,
called Professor Juan Alvaro Echeverrí
and we've been spending some time looking at these necklaces.
The necklaces are sort of ritual items as ceremonial, important objects
that were used to harness the powers of the animals that they're taken from.
So these different necklaces have come from different animals
and so are associated with different strengths
so we have monkey, rodent, jaguar and this is the tooth necklace that I particularly want to talk about
because it's a necklace that came up as being important with our recent visitors
and this is a dolphin tooth necklace.
Dolphin tooth necklaces are associated with the powers of love magic
so you can actually scrape powder off dolphin teeth
in order to make love spells.
The reason for that is that dolphins are associated
with the ability to transform from dolphins into people.
They come out at night and they go to the bars and they dance
there are a number of different ways that these stories are described
some of the more charming aspects of the story is that
the Dolphins use different animals from the river as parts of their clothing so
they'll take an electric eel or a boa and convert it into a belt and wear that,
they'll use catfish as their shoes, crabs as a watch
and they have to always wear a hat because the only part of their body that they can't disguise
is this hole at the back of their neck
so it's thought that when people, an unknown person comes to a party at night
you should ask them to take their hat off to make sure that they're not a dolphin.
Another way to make sure that a person isn't a dolphin
is to wait until they get so drunk that they throw up and if they throw up whole fish
then that means that they're a dolphin.
All of these objects are from the Igaraparaná and they were collected around the time of the Rubber Boom
which was from about 1900 to 1930
in the countries that are now Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Colombia
and even Venezuela and Ecuador.
Rubber extraction had been happening since the mid 19th century
and was the rubber was used obviously for a growing need for cars and machines in the industrial world.
The peoples in the Amazon rainforest that were made to work in rubber extraction
as well as some people who actually brought in from other places like Barbados
were effectively enslaved, that enslavement ranged from debt peonage,
to outright torture, rape and genocide.
What we're effectively looking at is the hunting down of communities
and effectively people were chained and enslaved.
One of the reasons why the dolphin necklace
I think is interesting in terms of the rubber boom story
is because this necklace and the narratives associated with the powers associated
with river dolphins would have been relatively new to the Murui-Muina
or Witoto people in 1925 when this necklace was collected.
One of the interesting aspects of the stories as they're told specifically in the Colombian Amazon
and by the visitors who came to see these necklaces recently
is that as disguised as humans, they're also disguised as white people
so they're incredibly wealthy looking, they wear perfumes, they wear suits
that's what the whole idea with that with a crab, the crab is a watch- they are Western.
Now the reason for that or one of the reasons for that, I think is
because the rubber boom not only some splintered Amazonian society
and obviously resulted in the death of indigenous peoples
there was also, one of the results was actually culture contact between the bigger rivers
and the communities that live along the bigger rivers and people who live in the smaller tributaries.
So La Chorrera where the Murui-Muina people come from is one of these smaller tributaries
and they would have been unfamiliar with both dolphins,
who don't often make it so far away from the big rivers and the stories that go with them
until the rubber boom effectively put these communities into contact.
As I understand it in different parts of the Amazon
dolphins turn into people and then all seduce you at parties,
get really drunk and then vomit whole fish
for people in La Chorrera the dolphins are
turning into people and they're actually raping and killing people
and I think that there's clearly a transference of some of the pain
associated with the rubber boom genocide
to this new or slightly slanted version of the dolphin/human story.
One things to say about the dolphin tooth necklace which I think is fascinating
is that when our visitors came from the Amazon recently
and looked at all of these tooth necklaces they would actually pick up individual teeth
and see whether or not the tooth had been scratched or damaged
and if that was the case, which is the case in all of the teeth necklaces
that they looked at, that tooth necklace was pronounced dead
and so interestingly the only tooth necklace that they identified as still having the
living power that these necklaces are made to have was the dolphin tooth necklace
and so for that reason it's very special and they advised us to take particularly good care of it.
One of the things that Oscar Jitdutjaaño said when he had spent two weeks
with about a 105, 110 objects from the collection is
“Vi las cosas de mis antiguos y me sané”
which means I saw the things of my elders and I was healed.
So yeah I think that that's a beautiful sentiment and I'm happy that that they were able to have that experience.
Thank-you very much for watching me talk about
the teeth necklaces and if you have any other questions and want to know more
about Santo Domingo centre then you can find it on our website
it's the Santa Domingo centre of excellence for Latin American research
and if you want to watch other curator's corners please do so here!