Figure

Wooden sculpture, um 1875

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The wooden figure depicts a standing man. It is a typical pole sculpture, which is painted red in places. The figure is wearing a leather strip around the hips that hangs down at the sides.
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The Bari live in the marshlands of the Upper White Nile in Southern Sudan. Civil wars and drought in recent decades changed their subsistence and marginalised the Bari people, many have emigrated. The figure, rudimentarily carved from a cylindrical piece of wood, shows traces of red ochre. The anthropology of art classifies the figure as a pole sculpture. Its function is unclear. The art trade interprets such statuettes as ancestor or commemorative figures, whereas Ethnological research from the 1930s onward conjectures that they did not play a role in the religion of the Bari. Instead, it is surmised that they are a kind of early tourist art, produced for trade with Europeans in Khartoum since the mid-19th century. This rare figure dates back to a period before the Sudanese Mahdiyya (1881-1899), the uprising against Turco-Egyptian colonial rule in the middle Nile, which changed the region politically and socially. Carl Friedrich (1842-1878) or Carl Wilhelm Rosset (1851-1923) collected it and donated it to the then Ethnographic Collection of the University of Freiburg. C. F. Rosset had been working as a merchant and diplomat in Egypt (which also included the territory of today's Sudan) since 1869. In 1875, he became vice-consul of the German Empire, and in 1877 also of Great Britain in Khartoum, and was commissioned to ensure peace in the Sultanate of Darfur. He died in November 1878 barely a few months after his arrival at his new residence in Al-Fascher, either having been poisoned or as the result of an infection. Merchant, private scholar and explorer, C. W. Rosset also lived in Sudan from 1873 to 1876 and travelled up the Nile with his brother, collecting various items of ethnographica. Author: Eva Gerhards, Translation: Timothy Connell

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