In Sacred to the Touch, Thomas A. DuBois presents the works and stories of five traditional wood carvers who are native to, or share a heritage with, the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe. As he highlights from the start of the book, this region is home to peoples who, though they share many things in common, represent an array of religious traditions and historical forces, all of which serve to situate these artists in specific cultural circumstances. While each artist represents the forces of tradition and faith that shaped national identities in Finland, Sweden, Norway (including the Norwegian American identity), Sápmi, and Lithuania, the artists are all unified in a commitment to creating sacred objects and spaces through the medium of wood, and in shaping the future of the traditional practices and aesthetics that they have learned.
An introductory chapter grounds the reader not only in relevant sociocultural world, but also in DuBois’s own scholarly approach, combining folklore, religious studies, and art history. He seeks to connect individual interactions with tradition, religion, and aesthetics to the pasts and presents in which each artist works, and to the human communities in which these artists participate through their work and their lives. In the following five chapters, we are introduced to Eva Ryynänen of Finland, Norwegian Americans Phillip Odden and Else Bigton, Sister Lydia Mariadotter of Sweden, Lars Levi Sunna of Sápmi (the homeland of the Sámi people, situated in Sunna’s case within the state boundaries of Sweden), and Algimantas Sakalauskas of Lithuania. Selected works of the artists are described and contextualized socially, historically, and personally, including altar pieces, grave markers, a church organ, a bed, and even two chapels. A concluding chapter brings the profiled artists and their works back together through a reflection on the ways that wooden objects of sacred art provide a means for communal and individual interactions with the divine and the earthly, the past and the present, and the local, national, and even global.
What the artists have in common, in addition to masterful work in the medium of wood, is a concern for expression within variants of Christianity, which also connects overtly with culturally specific expressions of earlier faith traditions obscured or even suppressed by monumental forces, including Christianization, colonization, migration, the Reformation, and Sovietization. Each work, while grounded in current spiritual concerns and aesthetics, is also very much a reconnection to a spiritual and aesthetic past that can be hard to discern at first glance, or conversely, may even seem to obscure the current state of Christianity it represents. In taking us to the workspaces and sacred display spaces of each artist while simultaneously providing historical contexts, DuBois helps the reader to engage this tradition and its myriad forms of expression throughout the Baltic and Nordic regions.
Key to DuBois’s analysis of these artists’ processes and resultant works is how each can be conceptualized through the word “cover” and related terms based on this word. These artists, in connecting culturally specific spiritual pasts and presents, can be seen to cover the works of previous tradition bearers, to uncover religious continuities between pagan and Christian belief systems, to rediscover useful practices and aesthetics from previously common forms of Christianity, to recover important elements of a religious past that is still quietly available in the present, and to discover continuities between seemingly disparate belief systems prevalent or preferentially treated in the same community over time. This frame helps the reader to understand that, while differences certainly exist between the traditions—and the artists—represented, this common act of engaging with belief systems over time in dialog with the communities in which they find belonging, also connects the artists conceptually with one another.
DuBois’s employment of thick description helps the reader to imagine the people, objects, and places he describes, while his brief historical discussions allow for an understanding of the social forces that created the artists and their works. Though we learn much about each individual, we also learn about the communities in which these individuals live and create. Color photographs throughout the book provide clear and beautiful images of some of the works described, and also of historical works that are in dialog with the carvers and their traditions. Overall, this book is deeply engaging and informative and will be a great resource to scholars in the disciplines that DuBois engages, as well as to other museum and material culture specialists and to those, like DuBois, who engage in wood carving themselves.
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[Review length: 745 words • Review posted on October 8, 2020]