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The starting point for the Embera basket business is the weaver

The basketry business

photos by Eric Jackson

The skills of many of Panama's Embera and Wounaan basket weavers is gaining an international reputation, to the extent that some baskets have sold for $1,000 or more on the North American art markets.

The baskets are hand woven from palm fibers, some of then dyed with various plant substances. Wounaan baskets tend to stick to traditional geometric designs, pay close attention to a work's appearance from every perspective --- looking at the top of the basket, from the side, down into it or from the bottom --- and on the average are very finely, tightly and uniformly woven. Some of the Embera weavers will rival their Wounaan counterparts for the precision and quality of their work, and Embera artists are far more likely to depict birds, butterflies, flowers and other natural themes in their work.

As with the collective ownership of land, Embera communities also tend to collectively market their artwork, including not only the predominantly female weavings but also the wood and tagua nut carvings that mainly male artists do. But as more and more buyers come down here to get indigenous artwork to sell abroad, the individual identities of the better artists are assuming greater importance. The expected result of that trend will probably be that a few of the better weavers and carvers will attain international reputations for their work, which will fetch higher prices and make them relatively wealthy.

Now the tribal identity of the creator of a work of art is no longer sufficient for the market place --- buyers look first at the quality of a particular work, but they also want to know the names of the people who made each individual piece.

But what constitutes "relatively wealthy?" By asking the artists how long it took to make their various creations and noticing the prices for which they sold them, it roughly comes out to an earning of about $3 per day for those works that sell. It may be a an attractive supplemental wage for a family that lives in a Darien village whose principal economy is subsistence agriculture, but it's not enough for someone to move to the city and live a middle class lifestyle.

In the Embera-Wounaan Comarca the artists have formed a cooperative, and in individual communities the sale and tallying of artwork is both a collective and individual enterprise. There is individual haggling over price by buyers and producers, but this is a public event and the tallies of what is bought or sold, the payment for a lot of works and keeping track of any consignment records is done by representatives of the community.

The buyer and community representatives make their respective records. In this community, Peña Bijagual, some of the kids are studying business at high schools in Yaviza and elsewhere. But considering the Embera language, in which numbers only go up to five, it's a huge leap from a jungle culture to the global economy.

Carving is another source of income for Embera communities, both in tagua nuts (vegetable ivory) and tropical hardwoods like cocobolo. The range in quality of the works of Embera carvers who display their work to buyers is greater than is the case with basketry, in which certain quality standards have emerged. Embera hardwood carving is on the whole rougher than the finely sanded and buffed works of the best Wounaan sculptors. One of the items most often offered for sale is the medicine stick, or carved ceremonial wand that the spiritual healers --- jaibanas --- use in their sessions with patients.

In the community where this story was photographed and reported, artwork became more than a supplement to the local economy. "The floods washed away almost all of our work," explained carver Santiago Guaynora, "so the community met to look at means to sustain ourselves and our children, to get food and medicine."

Sculptor Santiago Guaynora at his customary workplace. His asking price for things that took him a week to make is around $30.

Guaynora, one of the few male artists who also weaves, later showed off his workshop. Understand that his is a community without electricity, and thus that he works without power tools. But not only that --- he and his fellow artist Diomede Guaynora make their own hand tools in order to be able to make their sculptures. These are primarily fashioned from broken tools --- machetes, saws and so on --- that were originally brought into the community for use in agriculture, construction or other pursuits.

The tools of the trade: In the comarca the carvers don't use wood lathes, routers or other mechanical conveniences. Here in Peña Bijagual, they in fact make their own tools from the remains of agricultural and construction implements.