The Cultural Significance of a ‘bowl’
by amanda baker
On January 13th, 2018 I visited the Museum of Anthropology. This wasn’t my first time visiting, although going there with a motivation this time made me carefully explore areas in the museum I would not have not done so the first or second time. This post will focus on my experience at the “Amazonia” exhibit. When I first entered the exhibits, I was presented by multiple numeric values on the Amazon Rainforest including the number of individual trees there are, how many plant and animal species exist there, and what percentage of this species have been discovered. As I began walking deeper into the exhibit, I was exposed to objects that were a part of the Amazonia culture. One object that particularly grabbed my attention were the two ‘bowls’ under the display glass. The question that sparked my curiosity was ‘what significance does a bowl have in Amazonian culture?’
These ‘bowls’, included in the description of the exhibit, are called kené. The Shipibo use kené as a form of gaining access to the spiritual world by drinking ayahuasca from them. This immediately led me to recognize how spiritual the Shipibo are and made me inquire about other spiritual forms the Shipibo practice. Unfortunately, ‘today the ca. 36,000 Shipibo are under pressure from the neighbouring Spanish speaking mestizo population, commercial fishermen who have depleted their traditional waters of fish, turtles, and manatees destroying their subsistence base.’ Due to this exacerbating issue, the Shipibo, women in particular, must sell their ‘textiles, jewelry and pottery’ to tourists in order to survive the modern world.
This made me reflect back on my question of what significance does a bowl have in Amazonian culture?’ As simple we may think, what we consider, a ‘bowl’ is other cultures rely heavily on them for multiple purposes. In this case of the Shipibo, they utilize them for spiritual practices and selling them to tourists to earn money for food, medicine and access to Western education; essentials of surviving in the modern world.