the form, Schuster could ask the carvers he visited 

 what they had had in mind when they fashioned a 

 figure that was half male, half female. Such figures 

 appear to have served as social diagrams: the male 



ern civilization, albeit overlain with a more restric- 

 tive meaning. Fourteenth-century German manu- 

 scripts of the Sachsenspiegel ("Mirror of the Saxons"), 

 a collection of customary laws compiled earlier, in- 

 clude a diagram of the human 

 figure that enabled the largely il- 

 literate people of the day to vi- 

 sualize the family relationships 

 relevant for disputes over inher- 

 itance. Several German astrolog- 

 ical diagrams from the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries show a 

 figure divided down its center in- 

 to male and female halves, with 

 the twelve symbols of the zodiac 

 distributed around the twelve 

 primary joints [see illustration at 

 bottom right on page 43]. 



A 



Indonesian shroud, woven by the Toraja of Sulawesi Island in 

 the nineteenth century, incorporated a pattern of repeating, 

 interconnected figures that suggest abstract human forms 

 (left). Such patterns appear to represent genealogical 

 descent and ancestry, depending on whether they are 

 read "down " or "up. " 



half represented the owner's connection with the fa- 

 ther and, by extension, the father's social group; the 

 female half represented a similar connection with 

 the owner's mother. Thus the vertical split symbol- 

 izes the division of the tribe into two halves, or moi- 

 eties, as anthropologists call them, a common tribal 

 configuration. The significance of the symbolism 

 comes from the fact that, in many tribal groups, the 

 prescribed form of marriage was between members 

 of two distinct moieties — marriage between a man 

 and woman from the same moiety, the same subdi- 

 vision, was considered incestuous. 



Schuster found that underlying that symbolism 

 was the notion of opposites united in one, as well as 

 the concept ot many within one. Such logic is alien 

 to contemporary Western thinking, which takes the 

 individual as the basic unit of society, but in the con- 

 text of tribalism, it made perfect sense: begin with 

 the whole, and then distinguish the particular. As for 

 the face or eye at the joints, they, too, symbolize the 

 tribe: the upper ones represent ancestors; the ones 

 below the navel, descendants. 



Examples of the same designs, ultimately dating 

 back to Late Paleolithic times, have appeared on all 

 inhabited continents. A few survived even in West- 



nother genealogical motif 

 Schuster documented is 

 the portrayal ot reproduction as 

 the budding off of a child from 

 a woman's (or less often, a man's) 

 limb, particularly the knee. Thus, in traditional trib- 

 al thought the expression ot genealogical descent or 

 relationship does not hinge on an understanding of 

 the biology of procreation. 



Perhaps the most important of Schuster's insights 

 concerned certain widespread graphic patterns, 

 ranging from realistic to highly stylized portrayals, 

 which could be interpreted as linked human figures 

 [see photograph above and images on opposite page]. Each 

 figure in such patterns is linked diagonally, through 

 fused limbs, to neighboring figures above and be- 

 low. Of course, continuous limbs may make no sense 

 anatomically, but in Schuster's view, they well rep- 

 resented the puzzle of procreation, which has nei- 

 ther beginning nor end. The ranks above a partic- 

 ular figure, he believed, represented that figure's an- 

 cestors, whereas the ones below represented de- 

 scendants. The device of fused limbs also reflects the 

 fiction of procreation by budding, along with the 

 implied genetic potency of the limbs. 



When read from the top down, such a genealog- 

 ical pattern illustrates descent. Read upward, the 

 same pattern makes it possible for tribal members 

 to retrace their ancestry back to the founding an- 

 cestor. Doing so, at least in the traditional way of 

 thinking, guarantees rebirth. In most tribal societies, 

 people have believed in rebirth, not resurrection. 



In Schuster's view, many simple geometric de- 

 signs — repeated chevrons, for instance — are related 

 to the linked-figure patterns. Such simple designs 

 lend themselves to being painted or even incised or 



46 



NATURAL HISTORY May 2006 



