The Concept of Beauty among Makonde sculptors: an ethnomathematical research by ANDREA V. ROHRER

1. The Concept of Beauty among Makonde
sculptors: an ethnomathematical research
ANDREA V. ROHRER
University of Bielefeld — Germany
andrea.rohrer@gmail.com
in women, men and children, separately. Durer ¨
1. A short history of the Makonde people was convinced that the concept of human beauty
was subject to change in time, but this change
The Makonde people have arrived and set- should be an oscillation about a midpoint, the
tled at the Makonde plateau, located in the golden section.
north of Mozambique and south of Tanzania, Robert Ricketts (1920-2003) was an American
about 300 years ago. According to oral tra- specialist in aesthetic and orthodontic surgery,
dition, they were escaping the drought and who had called and patented his studies as the
tribal wars in the south of the Niassa lake. golden divider. One of these studies consisted
in measuring different distances about the face of
models: from the trichion to the menton (T − M ),
from the trichion to the alar rim (T − AL) and from
Figure 3: Some types of Makonde sculptures the alar rim to the menton (AL − M ). The results
Ricketts had obtained for the ratio of these values
Wood carving is taught orally within the Makonde
approached very well to the golden section.
people. Apprentices learn one type of sculpture
from elder relatives and then are left to develop
their own techniques and “sculpture specializa- 5. Results
tions.” This teaching process is based on oral tra-
dition, and it consists of a one to one relationship A pattern matching between the modulor
Figure 1: Map of Makonde plateau between the learner and the “teacher,” also called and the sculptures was produced with Au-
master. The most common method for learning is toCad®. The sample size was 16.
The Makonde people have a cultural concept based on symmetric copies.
of nationality, not a blood concept. A person
who carries the Makonde culture is Makonde.
3. Research questions
Makonde women used to be tattooed (scar-
ification) and pierced in the faces: this not
The aim of this research was to answer the fol-
only represented magical virtues but also made
lowing questions:
their ethnic roots visible to other peoples.
1. What is the concept of beauty of the Makonde
people?
2. Is this concept comparable to the Western Figure 5: To fit the modulor to the sculptures, the
idealized human proportions given by the golden navel was used as the first reference point.
section?
It was not possible to find or determine a “stan-
dardized” pattern used among the Makonde
4. Theoretical framework scultptors to compute the human proportions.
This suggests that, on the one hand, their cal-
The golden section has been used since Ancient culations are based on empiric observations and,
Greece to idealize the proportions of the human on the other hand, that they do not intend to ide-
body. This idealized concept of beauty has been alize the human bodies.
Figure 2: Two Makonde women able to survive through ages in the history of the For the case of the facial features, the same pro-
Western culture. Le Corbusier, Albrecht Durer ¨ cedure as Ricketts’ was employed. In order to
Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975. and Robert Ricketts, among others, have stud- determine some pattern matching, the statistical
However, and until ca. 1913, the Portuguese ied and/or applied this idealization of beauty. test t-test was applied to the final averages, con-
colonies were mainly concentrated in the coastal sidering the “null hypothesis” to be the golden
area. During this time, the Makonde people of section. The sample size was, in this case, 32.
Mozambique remained isolated. Most probably,
the missionaries were the first to arrive at the
Makonde plateau.
2. The Makonde sculptors Figure 4: From left to right: The modulor by
Le Corbusier, the human proportions by Albrecht
Durer and the golden divider by Robert Ricketts.
¨
According to some legends, the first mother of the Figure 6: The calculation of the distances pro-
Makonde people had originated from wood. To Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was a Swiss architect ceeded following the red lines, which determine
Makonde people, carving is a male occupation, who, after WWII, was offered to design a large- the position of the trichion, the alar rim, the men-
but their sculptures consist mainly of representa- ´
scale residential complex, the unite d’habitation. ton and the chilion.
tions of female figures. All dimensions used to construct these buildings
In the case of the ratio between T − AL and
were determined by the modulor. The modulor
The first sculptures to be carved by the Makonde AL − M , the average yelded the value 1, 616, and
consists of a person, with her/his arms raised,
men have been masks and, as stated above, fe- a significance level higher than 99, 95%: the “null
inscribed in a golden rectangle. Based on this
male figures. The first were used for their tradi- hypothesis” cannot be excluded. This suggests a
rectangle, Le Corbusier constructed two series,
tional rituals, such as the puberty rituals. Some “standardized” pattern in the case of this specific
the red and the blue series, that determined the
families would keep sculptures of persons in their ratio.
heights of step treads, chairs, etc and up to the
houses to worship their ancestors. Furthermore, and based on Makonde traditions,
ceiling. These series are particular cases of the
Around the 1930s, sculptures started to be Makonde sculptors tend to idealize women’s face
Fibonacci series.
commercialized. Missionaries and Portuguese to honor their first mother, and that they have
Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was a German
¨
soldiers would start ordering some religious standardized one feature that has existed since
painter and a printmaker who had aimed to deter-
and political “eminences.” Nowadays, we the first sculptures ever carved by them.
mine the “beauty” of humankind empirically, and
find several types of sculptures: some belong On the other hand, a cross-cultural transmission
by using the means of mathematics. In the first
to the Makonde culture and tradition, others may have affected how they had previously com-
two books of his posthumous work “Hierin sind
have been taken from other ethnic groups. puted such proportions.
begriffen vier Bucher von menschlicher Propor-
¨
tion,” he had studied and analyzed 13 body types