Female Figure
The Baule are an African people who have dwelt in Cote D'Ivoire and the surrounding region since the eighteenth century. They believe that there is an otherworld, parallel to our own, and within that world dwell spirits called blolo, who form relationships with the people in our world. A Baule person experiencing a crisis or personal conflict may be advised to have a figure made of their blolo mate, like the one shown, who is seen as the cause of their problems, and whom they can then appease with sacrificial offerings.
In this piece we see representations of scarification, a practice in which one permanently alters their body, by engraving and therefore scarring it. It seems hard to believe that anyone would opt to have such a procedure done knowing the pain it must induce. However, like many painful acts, such as tattooing and piercings, the ends seem to justify the means. With this in mind we can infer that the thought of enhancing one's beauty serves as an adequate distraction to confuse the body's neuromatrix into shifting its focus off of the pain, and therefore making the tolerable enough to go through with.
The main correlation we found between pain and pleasure in the female figures is in the aesthetic and empowering associations with the painful practice of scarification on this Baule spirit spouse. This process is one of intense pain, for the purpose of aesthetic beauty. For the Baule people of the southern Ivory Coast, and their northern Senufo neighbors, scarification is a "mark of civilization" that differentiates the cultured, socialized, and beautified human body from the natural, naked and ugly bodies of animals. We might think of the pleasure of tattoos in "Do Fish Feel Pain?" (Hamilton-Paterson, 2003). In addition, this woman-spirit embodied as a sculpture is highly physically idealized. As an image of perfection, her scarification is only associated with the pleasure of her human owner.