Anthropomorphic ritual bowl - Culture Igbo

Anthropomorphic ceramics with the function of ritual bowl used by the Izzi in agricultural ceremonies related to yam cultivation. Each one of the bowls represents a verry schematised masculine face, in which the eyes and nose are marked by means of straight lines, placed vertically and horizontally respectively, which are detached from the surface of the piece. While one of them is decorated from the surface of the piece. While one of them is decorated by incisions in the form of arrowheads and points, the other is completely smooth. This type of terracotas is in general little studied. The first time that an object of this typology became known, it was erroneously classified as Tiv; although subsequient studies by the Frech coumple, the Lebas, definitively assign their use as being among the Izzi clans, of the Igbo culture, who inhabit the north-west of Nigeria. They appear to be related to agricultural cults, in particular the cultivation of the yam, and they rarely exceed, as in this case, twenty centimetres. Their chronology is unknown since although they were in use up to the middle of the height of the nineteeth century. Their presence in the spheres of African art is recent, so that one of the first times this class of objects was in a monographic exhibition organised in Paris in 1999. Since then their incorporation in various collections has been constant -one of the latest and most important being that of the Barbier-Mueller Museum of Geneva.