Kené & kewé.

The pots are the older argument.

Textiles travel. A cloth folds into a suitcase and arrives intact on another continent, so the world’s picture of Shipibo art is a picture of cloth. Pottery does not fly well. It got left behind in the story, and what got left behind with it is the strongest evidence anyone has that this is a thousand-year-old continuous tradition.

The Shipibo ceramic tradition is long, highly developed, and known internationally on its own terms. Pots are made for cooking, for eating, for ceremony, and sometimes simply to be looked at. Peter Roe did not come to the Shipibo through ayahuasca or through song — he came as an archaeologist working on Cumancaya, a late prehistoric jungle ceramic style, and fell for the living art while working alongside Shipibo assistants on the dig. The line from Cumancaya ware to modern Shipibo ware is recognisable. That continuity is the argument, and it is made of clay.

Then there is a detail that ought to be famous. The Shipibo are among very few peoples anywhere with a specific word of their own for a potsherd — quënquësh. They had a word for it because they used them: fragments weathered for centuries at ancestral sites are more friable than fresh pottery, so they were collected and ground down to temper new pots. New vessels were literally made with their ancestors’ work mixed into the clay. And the same word carries the danger of it — the sherds come out of the ground, and whatever belongs to the dead comes with them.

The dead themselves were once buried in great jars, flexed, and the pre-contact funerary vessels still erode out of the riverbanks. A tradition where you are shaped by a pot at the beginning of your life and held by one at the end of it does not need anyone to call it sacred geometry.

Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. xiii, 115–116; Warren M. Hern, Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, 2004.

A newborn’s face.

Traditionally the first design a Shipibo person wore was on their own face, days old. Newborns were painted with huito — the black dye from genipa — in a typical geometric Shipibo pattern. The reason given is that the design turns away the yoshin, the spirit that brings illness and death. Infant mortality was high enough that a child was not named for a month or more; a face is a small thing to guard.

Then Warren Hern, who watched this for thirty years, adds one sentence that quietly settles an argument the outside world has been having for decades about Shipibo art. The design wards off the spirit — and it also looks nice. There is, he writes, no separation between painting a person or a thing to protect it and painting it for the pleasure of it.

Hold that against everything written about sacred geometry. The split we keep trying to impose — is this decorative or is this ritual, is this craft or is this cosmology — is our split, not theirs. A design can be beautiful and be doing something, in the same stroke, without the two being different activities. That is the actual answer, and it took a doctor writing an encyclopaedia entry about infant mortality to say it plainly.

Warren M. Hern, “Shipibo,” Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, vol. 2, eds. Ember & Ember, 2004.

Where the designs turn up in writing.

The earliest detailed outside accounts of Shipibo life put design everywhere, and not only on cloth and pots. In a myth told to Peter Roe by a man named Manuel in the 1970s, a woman goes down to the lake each morning and paints her face with kené drawn in genipa juice. That is the ordinary daily version of what the market later learned to call sacred geometry: a woman making herself beautiful before the day starts. The dye is nanë, the genipa that gives the deep blue-black.

Design carried on the body identifies a person in these stories. In another, a giant eagle takes the man in the canoe who is covered in designs — the painted one is the one who is seen. And design is not only women’s finery: the racote, a plain-weave cotton cloth with painted geometric designs, worked as a shawl and as a baby carrier, and Roe noted in the late 1970s that it was still being woven and worn by older women. The skirt is the chitonte.

One correction worth keeping. The cross is the motif you see most often, and at least one writer of the period read it as a religious symbol and built a whole cosmology on it. Roe checked, and reported the opposite: not one of the artists he worked with treated the cross as religious, and he thought its prominence probably came from Christian contact. It is a caution about reading meaning into a pattern before asking the person who made it.

Peter G. Roe, The Cosmic Zygote, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 51, 70, 114, 318. An outsider’s record from another era, kept here because it is dated and specific — not because it outranks a living artist.