The ancestor game

LIFE, Death and Magic is a fascinating exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia that is devoted to the art of animistic and ancestor cults.

Indonesia Effigy portrait [mejan] of a village priest from the 19th century or earlier. Picture: National Gallery of Australia.

LIFE, Death and Magic is a fascinating exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia that is devoted to the art of animistic and ancestor cults.

These cults pervaded Southeast Asia before the arrival of what we consider the more properly religious systems of Hinduism and Buddhism, with which they coexisted to a large extent, then later the less tolerant Islam and Christianity, and finally the modern states that outlawed some of their more brutal practices.

The geographical area covered by the exhibition is vast, yet the fundamental features of these nature cults are similar.

The explanation lies, as Robyn Maxwell explains in her catalogue essay, in the history of the Austronesian people, who originated around the border of China and Vietnam and in Taiwan, and migrated by land and especially by boat throughout Indochina, The Philippines, Indonesia, Timor and even farther afield.

These epic voyages remained fixed in the mythic memory of the Austronesians wherever they settled, and even in cases where they became land-bound people who had abandoned the use of sailing, the image of the boat retained a symbolic significance in their beliefs and rituals.

The most impressive image of the original ships of the migrations -- elegant craft with helmsmen and a crew wearing plumed headdresses -- is on the side of a bronze situla (a kind of bucket-like ceremonial vessel) from the Dong Son culture of North Vietnam, also represented by a magnificent bronze ceremonial drum and many smaller items.

Dong Son was a Bronze Age culture, with connections to the older Bronze Age civilisation of China; it was the earliest and the most technically advanced centre, whose products were exported throughout Southeast Asia and prized among people whose level of cultural sophistication varied widely.

The exhibition is mainly concerned with these latter people, and works from the NGA's holdings are supplemented by important loans from great museums in Europe, Asia and the US.

The loans are not only impressive in themselves but well chosen to complement each other and the gallery's own pieces: thus the NGA's remarkable bronze figure of a woman weaving and nursing an infant, possibly from Borneo, is matched with a comparable nursing figure from the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

It is an intriguing but alien world that we enter in the silence and subdued lighting of the exhibition, one that is almost as different from our contemporary cultural environment as can be imagined and that therefore throws the character of our existence and outlook into sharp relief.

We think we know why things happen in the natural world, and experience proves that we are at least partly right. We have sought rational explanations for natural phenomena since antiquity, classifying objects and formulating laws to explain regularities. The explosion of modern science in the 17th century, followed by the militant rationalism of the Enlightenment in the 18th century and the triumphs of technology and industry, have gradually undermined the claims of religion to any kind of superior knowledge.

Equally important has been the construction of an insulating physical environment that minimises our contact with the material reality of the natural world. We live in hygienic environments with water on tap, baths and toilets; we shop in brightly lit malls and antiseptic supermarkets with no natural smells where we buy meat in neat portions wrapped in plastic; the lazy, the incompetent and the squeamish can even buy their food already cooked and warm it up in a microwave.

Sex is employed ubiquitously as a marketing tool, but secret anxieties, especially about the female body, express themselves in numerous ways, at present in an obsession with epilation. Paradoxically, our eroticism is almost completely alienated from fertility and procreation except at the deepest and most unconscious level. As for birth and death, they are dealt with in hospitals, out of our home environments, and everything is disposed of as quickly as possible so that the normal life of production and consumption can resume seamlessly.

In the world brought to life by the remarkable objects in this exhibition, life and death are perennial and inextricably implicated realities; sexuality, fertility and food are ever-present concerns; and existence is constantly attended by the threat of dark and inexplicable forces.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes us is the ubiquity of sexuality: all the more remarkable because unrelated to any sense of bodily beauty, which is a much later conception. Here we see sexuality in its raw state, without romance or aesthetics. It is a simple equation: the erect phallus, the receptive vulva and the resulting infant. In most cases, the pairs of male and female figures are distinguishable only by their genitals.

This equation of human sexuality is vital not only for the continuation of the tribe but also for the fertility of the land. These people are not hunters and gatherers; they have learned to grow rice and their survival depends on a reliable and plentiful crop. Under these conditions, humans seem to infer a natural analogy between the fertility of the people and that of the earth: the polarity and balance of male and female