Birdmen, cemís and duhos: material studies and AMS C dating of Pre-Hispanic Caribbean wood sculptures in the British Museum

This paper presents 19 AMS radiocarbon dates from nine pre-Hispanic Caribbean (Taíno/Lucayan) wooden sculptures in the British Museum collections, provenanced to Jamaica, Hispaniola and the Bahamas. Together with strontium isotope results and wood and resin identifications, these data build a material and chronological context for some of the most recognised examples of Taíno art – from duhos (ceremonial seats) and cemís (free standing depictions of deities, ancestors and spirits) to canopied stands used to hold hallucinogenic drugs during the cohoba ceremony. Each sculpture widens our understanding of Caribbean carving traditions, stylistic variation, chronologies and material resource utilisation. A group of three sculptures recovered from Carpenters Mountains, Jamaica, carved by AD 1300 and brought together as a ceremonial ‘set’, each appear to have had their inlays renewed over a century later, suggesting long-term use. Three key examples of the main Caribbean duho categories (high-back, low-back and extended), provide insights into the diversity of styles present in the region post-AD 1100. The British Museum's corpus enables an exploration of regional styles, and potentially the work of individual artists.     

The corporeal,the social and space/place: exploring intersections from a midwifery perspective in New Zealand

This article explores the interrelations between the corporeal, the social and the spatial as they operate to shape the discursive and material realities of childbirth in the obstetric hospital setting. It draws on interviews conducted with midwives throughout New Zealand and embodies key insights derived from the work of Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz. The obstetric hospital is theorised as a product of particular socio-political relations that privilege biomedical constructions of the body and childbirth. Midwives, however, proffer an alternative construction of childbirth and the space/place it is enacted. It is one that requires a woman to actively engage with a variety of birth spaces and take up a range of subject positions that enable her to be a more active agent in the process of parturition. The limited and limiting spatial and discursive arrangements of the obstetric hospital, it is argued, shape the behaviour, subjectivity and corporeality of the maternal body confined within it and therefore the practises of midwives. Unfortunately, and as this article demonstrates, the opportunity to take up such an alternative is limited in the obstetric hospital despite some recent cosmetic attempts to render it more welcoming.