12/19/2023 0 Comments Faceless women![]() “A lot of researchers, including me, would welcome a neutral name like: ‘female representation’ or something like that,” she says. Snijdelaar says that while these types of Stone Age depictions are well-known as Venus figurines, she hopes that the name is changed to reflect something a little less charged by outdated modes of thinking. “A woman is helping another woman to understand what’s going to happen or what is happening,” McCoid says. Archaeologists have only turned up a small number of statuettes that survived, and it's possible that greater numbers once existed and were used by women to depict the various stages of pregnancy and childbirth. ![]() McCoid and McDermott believe the figures could have been created to help women teach each other. “When you look at yourself, you’re looking down, that’s the perspective you see,” she says. Given that mirrors hadn’t been invented yet, a woman carving her own shape would be looking down at her own body, resulting in the perspective of exaggerated breasts and bellies and narrower lower legs. While male anthropologists of the past two centuries may have assumed these figures were made by men looking at women, McCoid says the shape of many of the figurines suggests they were likely self-portraits of the women that carved them. “They were hunter-gatherers, they lived in a communal sharing society. “Those people were living in truly egalitarian societies,” McCoid says. So just because Europeans lived in a more chauvinistic society in the not-so-distant past doesn’t automatically mean that was the case in the Stone Age. But anthropology has changed a lot, particularly in the past couple of decades. “We live in a society that has been male-dominated for so long,” McCoid says. This work was released as a new wave of feminist ideas began to emerge, and this influenced anthropological interpretation. By the 1990s, McCoid and her colleague LeRoy McDermott, also now retired, coauthored a seminal paper titled “Toward Decolonizing Gender” that examined these figurines from a female point of view. Bringing Women Back Into the PictureĮventually, the times began to change and anthropological interpretation caught up. “ interpretation is very racist,” Snijdelaar says. Some scholars went so far as to say that the portly Venus figurines represented non-European women, while the thin figurines represented European women. Other early interpretations were outright discriminatory. “When they wanted to be civil, they said it was cultic,” says Snijdelaar, adding that she doesn’t agree with these interpretations. A number of theories posited that the carvings might be fertility charms or even the world’s oldest porn. This assumption colored the various interpretations about what these figurines might symbolize for the men believed to have carved them. “There was this automatic assumption that were made by men,” said Catherine McCoid, a retired anthropologist who has studied the figurines. The French name of the first figurine ever discovered, the Venus impudique, translates to “immodest Venus.” In other words, the figure was named to intentionally contrast a style of Roman statues known as Venus pudique, which depicts a nude goddess of love covering her genitals with her hands. Like many professions, the field of anthropology was dominated almost entirely by white males, and many interpretations about ancient cultures reflect this bias. ![]() Times were very different in the late 19th and early 20th century when the first of these figurines were discovered. “We projected our ways of thinking back into the Paleolithic,” says Tosca Snijdelaar, a Dutch historian who has been studying the figurines for the past dozen years. In some ways, the interpretations reflect the thinking of the period more than they do the thinking of the Stone Age people who first created them. But many of these interpretations have now been discredited for the inherent sexism or racism they carry. Some experts believe they represent everything from self-depictions of women to ancient pornography. Given that they were created before the advent of writing and are often found with little else in the way of cultural context, the interpretations of the figurines have varied wildly throughout history. (Credit: Laténium Neuchâtel / CC BY-SA 4.0 / via Wikimedia Commons) ![]()
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