Paradise Shares a Glimpse of Its Life

The wish for the simple life on a distant tropical island must be a nearly universal fantasy. Now UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History offers the opportunity to check the real thing against the daydream.

“The Art of Being Kuna: Layers of Meaning Among the Kuna of Panama” examines the intertwined life and art of this indigenous people and finds them almost as idyllic as we might imagine.

The Kuna’s visual art is focused on women’s traditional blouse, the mola. It becomes the centerpiece of the exhibition, but the whole exhibit does such an exceptional job of mixing photographs, building fragments, videotape, artifacts and wall labels that it fuses nicely into a mental picture of Kuna life. The show is a major traveling extravaganza organized by the Fowler and accompanied by an encyclopedic 350-page catalog edited by the show’s curator, Mari Lyn Salvador.

The Kuna inhabit about one-tenth of the 300 San Blas islands off Panama’s Atlantic coast. Consisting of 140 miles of rain forest, it makes for a surpassingly beautiful ambience of palms, spectacular sunsets, wandering mists and gentle dawns. The Kuna regard all this as a gift from the Great Mother and Great Father, responding with appropriate joy and reverence.

They grow bananas, coconuts and rice on the mainland and eat fish from the sea. Families tend to be large. They live on their Edenic islands in simple dwellings with thatched roofs and cane walls. Every Kuna island and mainland village has a basketball court. The guys love the sport.

The photographs in the exhibit reveal that the demeanor of Kuna men is plain. They are shown wearing simple loose shirts and trousers with a fedora or cap. They go barefoot or in sandals. Those in authority carry special carved canes. This practice was decreed by the Kuna’s mythical cultural hero, Ibeorgun, who said men would be “masters of the staff.” One particularly striking example in the exhibit has a handle fashioned like a whole house with a giant bird on the roof.

Wall texts explain that Kuna males are the keepers of the Kuna language, with its elaborate ritual dialogues and lush mythology. A Kuna who grows ill in body or spirit is tended by a shaman, a chanter of healing verse and a specialist in medicinal plants. In an epidemic, tall, spectral figures are carved from balsa wood. As many as 50 are placed around the infected area to ward off disease.

Settlements as shown in videos, tableaux and photographs all have two public buildings, one for frequent gatherings to discuss communal concerns, the other for exuberant celebrations of the coming-of-age of young women. Participants do circle dances to the music of panpipes and drink intoxicating beverages.

In contrast to the dowdy males, the women we see in this exhibit look like peacocks. The people’s whole visual aesthetic centers on them. Traditionally their hair is cut short, dramatizing striking features. When appropriate, they wear simple gold nose rings. Earrings and necklaces appear elaborate through the repetition of simple motifs like hearts and moons. Beaded bracelets adorn wrists and ankles.

These days, the women’s wrap-around skirts are often of heavily patterned factory-made fabric. Mola blouses still are hand-sewn. These trademark artworks are increasingly valued by collectors for their combination of aesthetic inventiveness and thematic eloquence.

It seems everything in the Kuna cosmology gets expressed in molas, and there isn’t much they don’t embrace. Patterns are generally symmetrical, map-like, unified by repetition and enlivened by bright colors. Designs that appear abstract can’t be trusted to stay that way. A second look often reveals an animal motif, flattened landscape or scene from a meeting house. Closely worked to maintain this double reading, their basic simplicity takes on sly sophistication.

Molas evolved from body-painting in the late 19th century, which gradually became sewn designs. Repeated, these panels form the blouse’s midriff. Curiously enough, photographs frequently show the molas hidden, tucked into skirts.

The Kuna resisted changes to their culture from the day the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s. At times they’ve been ferocious. Considering the number of attempts to suppress their ideas and convert their beliefs, it’s a wonder they’ve successfully clung to much of their way of life. The most piquant of the molas suggest a principle Kuna survival tactic: translating change into their own terms.

There are mola designs drawn from such pop culture items as beer trademarks, TV station logos and cartoon stars like Bugs Bunny, the Flintstones and Ninja Turtles. The canal-zone mola-makers depict Titan rockets, helicopters and gunboats. Political molas cover everything from local protest to world leaders like the martyred JFK. There are basketball molas--of course. For the tourist trade, the Kuna translate designs to T-shirts and hot-pad mittens.

The Kuna make the island fantasy work. For alienated big-city individualists, the life might turn out to be a bit cramped and confusingly uncomplicated. But for the Kuna themselves, it looks like a hard-won paradise.

* UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History; through April 15, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (310) 825-4361.