- Collection type
- Object
- Description
- Long, narrow, tapering glass lip plug with worked fibre ring at top, worn in the lower lip [RTS 17/5/2004]
- Long description
- Lip plug made from a piece of recycled translucent light green glass (Pantone 7493C), ground down to shape, and consisting of a flat, sub-rectangular top with narrow flat sided body tapering to a point at the other end. A narrow cord of twisted and plaited plant fibre has been wound and tied off around the upper body, just below the top; this was probably added to keep the plug from slipping out when being used. There is also a transparent material visible in a thick band under the cord, possibly traces of an adhesive; at present, the cord does appear to be firmly fixed in one spot. The object is complete, except for a few small chips at either end, with a length of 65.5 mm, and a body that measures 7.7 by 5.2 mm at its widest point; the cord itself is 2 mm wide. It has a total weight of 5.8 grams [RTS 17/5/2004].
- Cultural groups
- Lango
- Person
- Field collector Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton
- Field collector Hannah Powell-Cotton
- PRM source Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton
- Date / Period
- Date made: Before 1933
- Date collected
- 16th February 1933
- Acquisition information
- Donated: 1934
- Materials and processes
- Material Glass, Material Plant Fibre, Process Recycled, Process Ground, Process Twisted, Process Plaited
- Dimensions
- Depth: max 5.2 mm body, Length 65.5 mm, Width: max 7.7 mm body, Diameter: max 9 mm including ring, Weight 5.8 g
- Object numbers
- Accession number: 1934.8.92 Other numbers: 358
- Research and responses
According to “African ethnonyms: index to art-producing peoples of Africa” by Daniel P. Biebuyck, Susan Kelliher and Linda McRae (G.K. Hall & Co.: New York, 1996), there are two different groups known as Lango, one from Sudan who speak an Eastern Nilotic language, and one from Kenya and Uganda who speak a Western Nilotic language. According to the catalogue cards, it is the Sudanese (Eastern Nilotic speaking) group which is referred to here [CW 23/3/2000]. Powell-Cotton made ethnographic films during his 1932-3 shooting expedition to southern Sudan; footage included Lango men cutting and making spear shafts, and a Lango potter at work (see the description in Mrs Powell Cotton, "Village Handicrafts in the Sudan", Man 34 (112), pp 90-91).
Driberg describes the Lango practice of wearing such ornaments: '... sometimes pierced ... as is also in a few cases the hollow between the chin and the lip, into which is put a straw or bit of shaped wood. Since the 1907 expedition a cartridge case is sometimes substituted. In the north tapering pieces of quartz or glass, about three-eighth’s of an inch in diameter at the thick end, after the Acholi fashion, are sometimes worn instead of a straw' (J.H. Driberg, 1923, The Lango, p. 62; for an illustration of the latter being worn, see plate opposite p. 154, lower left image). The term aladarra does not appear in his Lango dictionary at the back of the volume.
Compare this object with the glass Didinga lim plug, 1940.7.074, made from a reused bottle. The thickness of this example suggests that it may have had a similar origin [RTS 17/5/2004].
Search terms: Ornament, Lip Ornament, Body Art Accessory