Pipe

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

Mothers often used long-stemmed pipes like this because they helped direct smoke away from the babies they carried on their backs. Carved by men, pipes were used by both men and women. A female maker added beaded fringe using a color scheme typical of Xhosa beadwork. The miniature apron suspended from the fringe suggests a woman’s garment, and thus ownership of this pipe. Social and leisure practices, smoking and snuffing tobacco were also associated with the ancestors and with ideas of fertility and procreation. Inherited between individuals and families, pipes have connected clans and generations and thus linked the worldly present with the ancestral past. The basic form of pipes like this one derives from examples made from clay, which the Dutch introduced at the end of the 1500s.