The Divine Appeal of Mapuche Pipes
Designer, writer, and Tetra cofounder Eviana Hartman on the modern allure of ancient smoking objects.
I think I was high the first time I saw a Mapuche pipe, but even if I hadn’t been, I still would have been lovestruck. In 2015, I was visiting southern Chile to work on a design project for an ethical fashion label, and the house where we were staying had its own stash growing wild in the garden. When the CEO and I weren’t meeting with weavers or silversmiths, we availed ourselves of the harvest. One day, we took an inspiration trip to a craft market run by artisans from the Mapuche tribe, which has lived in Chile and Argentina since around 600 B.C.
Amid stalls teeming with what appeared to the Western eye as tourist kitsch, two small stone forms — one natural grey, the other stained a soft green — stood out for their stark, curious beauty. The grey one was shaped like a stingray; the other resembled a tugboat as imagined by Isamu Noguchi. Both balanced upright; each incorporated the requisite parts — bowl, carb, mouthpiece — in perfect scale and ergonomics for the human hand. Yet these functional details seemed an afterthought to their elegant silhouettes, at once primitive and arrestingly modern.
The history of pipes runs parallel to that of civilization itself. Styles vary by origin, but one thing that indigenous cultures from the Maya to the Xhosa have in common is a tradition of smoking as sacred ritual — and of elevating the apparatus into a canvas for art and design. Some cultures embellished their stems with beads; others adorned them with the shapes of animals, people, or plants. But I’d never seen anything quite like the Mapuche versions. Hewn from slabs of stone, stripped of the superfluous, they seemed less like smoking devices than sculptures, conductors not just for combustion but for emotion.
Mapuche shamans use herbs as medicine; to absorb their essence is to commune with the divine. Each pipe seemed crafted as a tool to honor that pursuit — asking its user to inhale and exhale deeply, to notice things we otherwise wouldn’t; to feel connected to, and concerned with, something beyond ourselves.
How did we get from there — from inhaling burning herbs as a contemplative practice worthy of the finest vessel — to the current glut of phallic glass blobs found in most head shops? To the notion that an herb pipe — or a habit of using one to relax or gain perspective — ought to be a shameful secret? Those were the questions my partners and I asked when we founded our store Tetra, which applies contemporary design to smoking accessories. After all, tobacco’s accoutrements were once a genre of modernism unto themselves, with designers like Dieter Rams, Enzo Mari, and Marianne Brandt all making iconic contributions to the category.
As for the pipes at the craft market, I bought them both for a song, and when Tetra launched, we decided to put them up for sale. They were gone within two days. The market, I later learned, burned down. I don’t know if I’ll ever find another one in the wild, but I often think of their lesson: that to light up is to tune in.
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