A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [164]
The grimacing face of the stool’s half-human, half-animal creature
This is a seat for a leader – for the chief of a village or a region. Taino leaders could be either male or female, and the duho embodied their social, political and religious power; it was crucial to their function in society. In at least one instance a leader was buried sitting on his duho. Dr José Oliver, an archaeologist who has been doing new work on the Taino, explains how duhos would have been used:
The duho is not a piece of furniture but rather a symbolic location of where the chief would stand. This particular object is too small for a human being to sit on it. What is interesting is that all the wooden seats that we know of in the Caribbean, including this one, tend to be male or they are marked with the male gender, and sometimes show the male genitalia under the seat. That’s because this seat is actually an anthropomorphic personage. Think of it as a human being on four legs and what you sit on is the back of this personage. You sit on top almost like you are sitting over a donkey or a horse. So the chief is mounting this object, which happens to also be a sentient being. They thought of these things as having a cemi, that is, a soul.
So the gaping, boggle-eyed figure at the front of our seat, humanoid but not human, is the link to the cemi, to the spirit or the ancestor.
One of the chief’s key roles was to access the domain of the sacred, the realm of the cemis. Seated, or perched, on the duho, he sniffed a hallucinogenic snuff made from the charred seeds of the cohoba tree. It begins to work within half an hour, and the resulting effects last for two to three hours, creating colourful patterns, strange sounds and voices, leading to full dream-like hallucinations.
One of the early Spanish recorders of the Taino culture, and probably the most sympathetic, was Bartolomé de las Casas. He arrived on Hispaniola in 1502 and described the rituals in which the duho had its role – he calls the chief a Lord:
They had the custom of convening meetings to determine arduous things, such as mobilizing for war and other things that they thought important for performing their cohoba ceremony. The first to start was the Lord, and while he was doing it the rest remained quiet and were absorbed while seated on low and well-carved benches they call duhos. Having done his cohoba (which is inhaling through the nostrils those powders), he remained for a while with his head turned sideward and with his arms resting on his knees. He would give them an account of his vision, telling them that the cemi spoke to him and certified the good or adverse times to come, or that they would have children or that they would die, or that they would have conflict or war with their neighbours.
The Taino world was run by chiefdoms – centres of power whose leaders fought, negotiated and allied among themselves. They generally lived in settlements of a few thousand people, in large circular houses, each accommodating perhaps a dozen families, clustered around a central square. The chief’s house, which would also double as the local sacred space or temple where the duho was put to work, would stand some distance away.
We don’t know who would have made these duhos, but certainly the materials were very deliberately chosen. The wood of the duho is native to the Caribbean, and it fascinated the Europeans who encountered it. They called it lignum vitae – the ‘wood of life’ – because of its remarkable qualities. Its resin was used to treat a wide range of ailments, from sore throats to syphilis. It is also one of the few woods so dense that it sinks in water. One Spaniard wrote admiringly of the duhos: ‘they