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Unmasking frontlet headdresses : an iconographic study of images in Northern Northwest Coast ceremonial headdresses

University of British Columbia

This thesis is about the iconography of frontlet headdresses. These objects were part of a spectacular ritual costume worn by high-ranking people on the Northwest Coast of North America. Iconographic analysis (first developed by Panofsky) is based on identifying cultural notions and themes associated with visual images by probing the cultural contexts of objects. This is the mode of analysis used in the thesis to explore the image and the meaning of frontlet headdresses. Data used to support this inquiry were gathered from historical accounts, museum records, and ethnographies. It is established that frontlet headdresses were worn and used in precisely the same fashion by different groups of coastal people and that all of these headdresses were constructed with an invariant set of constituents. Therefore, it is suggested that these headdresses are comprised of a constellation of symbols having fans of multi-vocal referents (after Turner, 1967) and furthermore, that the spatio-temporal consistency in their use points to a shared framework of symbolic referents among neighbouring people. The ceremonial contexts in which the headdress was worn by the Tsimshian, Tlingit and Haida is explored and consistently one theme emerges: the person wearing a frontlet headdress represents an ideal synthesis by an individual of supernatural and social power. This theme, it is argued, forms a simple, yet eloquent, equation. Its very simplicity interconnects a spectrum of meanings about man's relationship to the life and death forces in the universe, about man's relationship with the supernatural and with other men, and about man's relationship to the material world. These relationships are symbolized not only in the ceremonial contexts, but in the individual constituents of the frontlet headdress. The analysis is carried a step further by outlining the parallel sets of relationships between the image of a frontlet headdress, a corpus of myths concerning supernatural wealth-bringing monsters, and the ritual presentation of the frontlet headdress. From these cogent sets of relations, it is argued that the dancer in a frontlet headdress is an individualistic image of the ideal structuring of the universe. His successful quests in the world of men and in the world of spirits are symbolized by the frontlet headdress he wears, and in this sense, he is the image of those fruitful actions. This thesis demonstrates that iconographic studies of Northwest Coast artifacts may involve the questioning, if not the discarding, of established designations for particular corpora of artifacts. It entails a rethinking of the metaphors that past ethnographers, in their act of translation, used to establish the identity of artifacts. Finally, it requires a methodical mapping of the social, ritual, and mythological contexts of the use of these objects, in order to illuminate the symbolic spectrum condensed in their image.

Text

2010-02-21

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20621

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

Graduate