Moai taŋata, Stuttgart

Back to visual gallery

Diego Muñoz

This moai taŋata was probably collected by Arthur Baessler during his voyage to Tahiti in 1897.

Arthur Baessler (1857–1907) was a German traveller, scientist and anthropologist. Inspired by the works of Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, he conducted fieldwork and undertook several expeditions, for example, to New Guinea, Aotearoa New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Peru. Between 1896 and 1898 he travelled the Pacific and South America, where he collected ethnographic and anthropometric data. During his stay on Tahiti in 1897 [at that time a French colony], he visited the Rapanui settlement in Pamatai Hill (Faa'a), where he took photographs of Rapanui people but also tried to find rongorongo wooden tablets with references to the Rapanui writing system. Upon his return to Germany, in 1898, Baessler gave most of his collection of Rapanui things to the ethnographic museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Stuttgart.

According to the archival documentation stored at Linden-Museum Stuttgart this figure is a moai pa‘apa‘a. However, it has not got the characteristics of this kind of Rapanui statues; Moai pa‘apa‘a is a figure associated with female features. In most of them, we can see the breasts outlined, depicted with volume, and the hands and arms always presented flat on the body in carvings. Summarizing the characteristics of moai pa‘apa‘a, it is vital to note that the principal feature is that they are flat. The latter characteristic is surely associated with the cosmological devise, where the feminine principle is depicted as a flat surface, called ‘papa’ in many Polynesian myths. Moai taŋata, on the other hand, is always a male volumetric figure. After the evangelization of Rapanui society, we can observe a sex omission by the local artists in their carvings of moai taŋata; this could be the case for this carving.

Moai taŋata, Stuttgart

Further reading