Toy representing turtle

Of the Indians of the continent I know, the Tukúna are among the most talented in arts and crafts. They excel especially in woodcarving, an art that is not a speciality of the Amazon Indians. Everything they do in this field is striking in its smoothness and ingenuity of execution. Thus, there are beautifully made (...) sculptures - zoomorphic and anthropomorphic - this is how Boris Malkin, a collector and researcher of Latin American cultures, participated in dozens of expeditions documenting the life of 42 ethnic groups, wrote about the handicraft of Tukúna Indians. During his research, he made many friendly relationships. The Indians he befriended gave him several names, primarily related to his appearance or love of animals. The Tapirapé Indians called him Jacaré - a crocodile, among the Urubú he was known as Xupera, because of his hairy body, and the Auetí Indians, seeing the hair on Malkin's chest, called after him Macaco, meaning a monkey. Boris Malkin's work influenced the development of American ethnographic collections of many museums in the Americas and Europe, including Poland. He was a collector who gathered with outstanding reliability and competence not only material culture products but also herpetological and entomological specimens for museums and institutions of natural sciences. He collected 17,500 ethnographic objects for, among others, the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland (3520), the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada (2953) and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, USA (925). The National Museum in Szczecin has about 150 exhibits collected by Borys Malkin in the 1960s and 1970s. The presented turtle figurine is made of animal bone. According to Malkin, it was a rare children's toy.

Katarzyna Findlik-Gawron