Carved Swahili Doors: Gateways of Status, Trade, and Transaction in East Africa
Open Access
- Author:
- Purdy, Janet
- Graduate Program:
- Art History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 03, 2020
- Committee Members:
- William Joseph Dewey, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
William Joseph Dewey, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Amara Leah Solari, Committee Member
Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Committee Member
Christopher Gallien Tounsel, Outside Member
Elizabeth C Mansfield, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Swahili
Carved doors
African arts
Zanzibar
Zanzibar doors
Nineteenth century Zanzibar
Swahili arts
Woodcarvers
Indian Ocean
Carved Swahili doors
East Africa
Architectural ornament
Protective devices
Swahili culture
Surface pattern
Art history - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the corpus of ornamentally carved wooden doors of the Swahili coast, defined here as those produced or sited within the narrow strip of Indian Ocean littoral that stretches from Mogadishu, Somalia, to northern Mozambique, including the islands and archipelagos that proliferate those East African shores. Swahili doors have long been considered iconic artifacts and revered for more than a century by locals and visitors as visual manifestations of the region’s complex roots and histories. The littoral zone where the edge of eastern Africa meets western Indian Ocean shores has been a fulcrum for cultural, artistic, and intangible social confluence for millennia. As a region it has also long remained on the edge, or even outside of, geographically and temporally divided art historical inquiries, and warrants greater scholarly focus. I focus on the late nineteenth century in Zanzibar in particular, when the diversely populated emporium flourished as a center of global trade and cultural confluence, and so did the popularity of owning a carved door. The massive and elaborately decorated extant examples in Zanzibar are primarily understood for their role as expressions of power, prestige, and wealth—their surfaces filled with diverse motifs and designs that reflect an original owner’s access to the vast streams of trade, production, and elite society that converged at his doorstep. In addition to elaborating upon their role as prestige objects, I argue that Swahili doors also function—perhaps even more significantly so—on a spiritual and intangible level as protective devices. I illuminate the way carved doors are, and have been for centuries, firmly situated within the wide-ranging material world of amulets, totems, and other apotropaic devices. The considerations and examples that follow reflect my initial investigations to support this argument, and primarily focus on the rich dimension of water-related spirits and protective belief systems elementally linked to the simultaneous life-sustaining bounty and ever present perils of the sea. Rather than studying the corpus under the long-held assignations of ethnicity-based style categories, I contend that it is more productive to examine the doors for their expression of a multivocal visual vocabulary that developed to reflect the late nineteenth-century Zanzibar ethos. In outlining that primary argument, this dissertation is also in many ways an argument for a new methodological approach for the study of arts of the Swahili culture, and a demonstration of the results in its application. This is an effort toward an alternative approach, a focus on visual analysis and artistic agency that allows us to work past, through, or around obfuscations of style categories and ethno-centric limitations in historical studies.